Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience

Abstract

In the years 1904-14, about 35,000 immigrants reached Palestine and, according to the historians, initiated a new period in the history ofJewish settlement in the land of Israel known as the Second Aliyah. In fact, the immigrants who landed on the shores of Jaffa in those years were part of a general wave of immigration that engulfed the Jews of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires from 1904 onward. This upsurge, the third great wave of immigration since the 1880s, was the product of rapid demographic growth, economic difficulties, the struggle for a livelihood and means of subsistence, and pogroms and persecutions by the authorities. The main billow of this wave reached the shores of the United States, but ripples also reached England, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and Palestine. This historical context of the migration of more than two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe to various countries overseas was the immediate backdrop to the Second Aliyah. The historiography of the newJewish Yishuv, or settlement in Palestine, and of the history of immigration to the country usually places emphasis on the difference and special character of theJewish immigration to Palestine, and it stresses the importance of the Zionist ideology as the main motivation for the immigration. This view is based on the idea of quality versus quantity; the small number of immigrants who preferred Palestine to America is understood to mean that it represented a