For generations, Jews across the globe have embraced a common, master narrative of Jewish migration in modern times that traces its origins to widespread acts of anti-Jewish violence, often referred to as pogroms, that propelled millions of Jews from the dark hinterlands of Eastern Europe into the warm, supportive embrace of their current, “Western” societies, ranging from the United States to Israel to Australia. In North America, Israel, and other new (or at the very least renewed) Jewish communities, definitive bastions of Jewish memory, society, and culture – like The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and Beit Hatfutsot: The Museum of the Jewish People on Tel Aviv University's campus – tell and retell a widely-accepted narrative of Jewish migration in which Jews who flee violence and oppression in Eastern Europe are rescued, if not saved, by the very act of migration. In these, and innumerable other cases, Jewish migration in the modern era is repeatedly presented as a willful act of secular self-salvation. Mirroring and at times even bolstering the story of the biblical Exodus from ancient Egypt, these modern, secular versions of traditional Jewish accounts of slavery, flight, and redemption repeatedly serve as fundamental components of contemporary Jewish society, culture, and self.
In response to the prevailing influence of these and related myths of Jewish crisis, flight, and rescue, scholars as definitive as Salo Baron have long argued that the predominance of the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history ultimately warps popular and academic conceptions of both the Jewish past and present. As Baron noted in a retrospective essay first published in 1963: “[ … ] an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution and, at the same time, badly served a generation which had become impatient with the nightmare of endless persecutions and massacres.”1 Despite these and related attempts to revise the lachrymose conception of Jewish history as well as the large-scale social, political, and economic changes that have changed the very face of Jewish society over the past century and a half, the traditional historical paradigm of persecution, flight, and refuge continues to shape popular and even scholarly accounts of Jewish migration and history in modern times.2 The continued salience of this master narrative touches upon several key methodological questions in the study of Jewish migration and history. The first issue that the prominent place of anti-Jewish persecution and violence raises is the problematic, long-debated place of antisemitism as both a defining characteristic and driving force in the long course of Jewish history.3 A second issue related to the prominent place of anti-Jewish violence in popular and academic interpretations of Jewish history, in particular, and of European history, in general, is a parallel tendency to view the vast terrain of Eastern Europe as an area pre-destined to, if not defined by, inter-ethnic tensions, hatred, and violence.4 Lastly, the persecution, flight, and rescue narrative of Jewish migration and history very often ends up bolstering triumphalist views of the Jewish present, whether they be embraced and touted in New York, Tel Aviv, or Toronto.
