The first stream of Russo-Hebrew immigrants started flowing in 1882 in consequence of the reactionary policy of Alexander III. It contained many students and members of scholarly families, who stimulated intellectual activity among their fellows here and were leaders in radical thought. These idealists established newspapers in the Jewish-German Jargon and thus made Yiddish (_Jüdisch_) a literary language. The second stream reached us after 1890 and brought immigrants who were not steeped in modern ideas but held to Talmudic traditions and the learning of the rabbis. The more recent flow taps lower social strata and is prompted by economic motives. These later arrivals lack both the idealism of the first stream and the religious culture of the second. Besides the Russian Jews we are receiving large numbers from Galicia, Hungary, and Roumania. The last are said to be of a high type, whereas the Galician Jews are the lowest. It is these whom Joseph Pennell, the illustrator, found to be "people who, despite their poverty, never work with their hands; whose town ... is but a hideous nightmare of dirt, disease and poverty" and its misery and ugliness "the outcome of their own habits and way of life and not, as is usually supposed, forced upon them by Christian persecutors." OCCUPATIONS The Hebrew immigrants rarely lay hand to basic production. In tilling the soil, in food growing, in extracting minerals, in building, construction and transportation they have little part. Sometimes they direct these operations, often they finance them, but even in direst poverty they contrive to avoid hard muscular labor. Under pressure the Jew takes to the pack as the Italian to the pick. In the '80's numerous rural colonies of Hebrews were planted, but, despite much help from outside, all except the colonies near Vineland, New Jersey, utterly failed. In New York and New England there are more than a thousand Hebrew farmers, but most of them speculate in real estate, keep summer boarders, or depend on some side enterprise--peddling, cattle trading or junk buying--for a material part of their income. The Hebrew farmers, said to number in all 6000, maintain a federation and are provided with a farmers' journal. New colonies are launched at brief intervals, and Jewish city boys are being trained for country life. Still, not over one Hebrew family in a hundred is on the land and the rural trend is but a trickle compared with the huge inflow. Perhaps two-fifths of the Hebrew immigrants gain their living from garment-making. Naturally the greater part of the clothing and dry goods trade, the country over, is in their hands. They make eighty-five per cent. of the cigars and most of the domestic cigarettes. They purchase all but an insignificant part of the leaf tobacco from the farmers and sell it to the manufacturers. They are prominent in the retailing of spirits, and the Jewish distiller is almost as typical as the German brewer.