Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910: Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914Joseph, Samuel
History
Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910: Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Vol. LIX, No. 4, 1914
Joseph, Samuel
Jews -- Europe; Jews -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
"The political disabilities of the Jews in Roumania, their exclusion
from the public service and the learned professions, the limitations
of their civil rights and the imposition upon them of exceptional
taxes, involving as they do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of
liberal modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present
purpose as the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a
breadwinner in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are
prohibited from owning land, or even from cultivating it as common
laborers. They are debarred from residing in the rural districts. Many
branches of petty trade and manual production are closed to them in
the overcrowded cities where they are forced to dwell and engage,
against fearful odds, in the desperate struggle for existence. Even as
ordinary artisans or hired laborers they may only find employment in
proportion of one "unprotected alien" to two "Roumanians" under any
one employer. In short, by the cumulative effect of successive
restrictions, the Jews of Roumania have become reduced to a state of
wretched misery. Shut out from nearly every avenue of self-support
which is open to the poor of other lands, and ground down by poverty
as the natural result of their discriminatory treatment, they are
rendered incapable of lifting themselves from the enforced degradation
they endure. Even were the fields of education, of civil employment
and of commerce open to them as to "Roumanian citizens," their penury
would prevent their rising by individual effort. Human beings so
circumstanced have virtually no alternatives but submissive suffering
or flight to some land less unfavorable to them. Removal under such
conditions is not and cannot be the healthy, intelligent emigration of
a free and self-reliant being. It must be, in most cases, the mere
transplantation of an artificially produced diseased growth to a new
place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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