The Wandering Jew is not the Jew of legend, but the Jewish people
of history. The dislocation of large Jewish bodies, which was
characteristic of the Middle Ages, has been kept up during the
nineteenth century; and this dislocation has, as in former times,
profoundly modified Judaism in the various countries. From the
fifteenth century on to the nineteenth, hostile legislation on the
part of Western Europe had been continually driving the Jews to
the East. The expulsion from Spain and Portugal, at the end of the
fifteenth century, forced several hundred thousand into Turkey; while
the hardships which they had to suffer in the smaller German states
and in Austria caused large numbers to seek a refuge in Poland and
Russia. The tide commenced to turn westward about the middle of
the eighteenth century, though bands of Jews from Poland had been
driven into Germany, Italy, and Holland in the terrible years of the
Chmelnicki persecutions (1648–1651). The readmission of Jews into
England, the relative kindness of Frederick William of Prussia and of
Frederick the Great, aided a certain slow but continuous infiltration
from Poland, so that at the end of the eighteenth or the first half
of the nineteenth century these Polish Jews were to be found in all
parts of Germany, Holland, and England. This slow migration back again
to Western Europe took on, however, much larger proportions in the
latter part of the nineteenth century; but before this could happen a
strong movement still farther westward had already taken place. Jews
were among the earliest settlers on the American continent. They were
in nearly every case of Spanish or Portuguese descent, having come
from Holland and England to the possessions which these powers held on
the new continent. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the
tide of immigration from Germany was at its height, a large number of
Jews from the southern states and the Rhine region found their way to
these shores. The Russian atrocities of 1882 and the following years
caused a greater shifting of the Jewish population westward than can be
paralleled at any previous time. It has been estimated that between the
years 1882 and 1900 fully one million Russian Jews left their homes
in the pale of settlement, finding new dwelling-places in England,
Germany, and France. The largest number (probably half a million) came
to the United States and Canada. Untoward economic conditions existing
in Galicia, and the frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism there, forced
out during the 90’s a large number of Galician Jews; and in 1899 and
1900 the hostility of the Roumanian government has made it impossible
for thousands of Jews to remain in a country in which most of them had
been born; and, under circumstances the like of which has hardly ever
before been seen, bands of the Roumanian Jews have been wandering over
Europe, seeking the means by which to come to the American continent
in order there to establish themselves anew. There are between ten and
eleven million Jews to-day in the world: of these, about nine million
live in Europe; one million in the United States and Canada; three
hundred and fifty thousand in Africa; three hundred and fifty thousand
in Asia; and sixteen thousand in Australasia.