"Structural Unemployment" And Russian Jews

For a small number of Jews, the economic upheaval in the Russian Empire int her late 19^th Century proved a gold mine: they created banks, railroads and great industries—and grew fabulously rich. Others triumphed in the professions and even in the arts.

But for the vast majority of Jews, the turmoil generated a calamity. By constraint, Jews had been the middlemen, mediating between country and town:

[T]hey were affected by Russia’s late-nineteenth-century modernization in ways that were more direct, profound, and fundamental than most other Russian communities, because their very existence as a specialized caste was at stake. The emancipation of serfs, the demise of the manorial economy, and the expansion of the economic role of the state rendered the role of the traditional [Jewish] mediator between the countryside and the town economically irrelevant, legally precarious, and increasingly dangerous. The state took over tax collection, liquor sales, and some parts of foreign trade; the landlord had less land to lease turned into a favored competitor (by doing much of the selling himself); the Christian industrialist turned into an even more favored—and more competent—competitor; the train ruined the peddler and the wagon driver; the bank bankrupted the moneylender; and all these things taken together forced more and more Jews into artisanal work (near the bottom of the Jewish social prestige hierarchy), and more and more Jewish artisans into cottage-industry production or wage labor (in craft shops and increasingly factories). And the more Jews migrated to new urban areas, the more frequent and massive was violence against them.

Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century--116-17

These facts alone (setting aside the brutality and bloodshed of the pogroms) was enough to drive millions of them out of the shtetl and into the great cities of Europe and America, and beyond.

Cautionary Note: Taken as a whole, Slezkine’s book can be recommended only with great qualification. I’ll try to take some time to say a bit more about it later.