livelihood at the will of the government. Nonetheless, Gartner notes that political oppression, more than economic privation, caused emigration from Romania.
Russian pogroms were a symbol of the determination of the Russian regime to degrade Jews and to use them as scapegoats for the regime's own problems. Such pogroms reached a climax beginning with the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. Jews who fled the pogrom were followed by tens of thousands of Jewish military reservists who feared the prospect of military service in Siberia. Even then, the 1905 Russian revolution was followed by the greatest wave of pogroms to date. Consequently, when Russia fell into an economic depression in 1907, many Jews were unlikely to wait for any sort of emancipation.
Despite the restrictions on economic opportunities and residence, many Jewish officials warned against Jewish emigration. Such officials feared that emigration would loosen Jewish people's ties to their community, ethnicity and religion. The warnings tended to emphasize that an immigrant would be unable to earn a living or maintain his Judaism, and would encounter an anti-Semitic atmosphere. For example, R. Israel Meir Kahan wrote Nidhey Yisrael ("Dispersed of Israel") in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1897 as an immigrant guide to pious observance. In the book, Kahan cautioned immigrants to maintain a life of rigorous religious observance. He also warned against personal habits that would loosen a Jew's ties to his ethnicity. For instance, he warned against eating forbidden foods, neglecting one's children, and shaving beards. He also emphasized the need to keep one's value of Judaism over the value of making money.
Despite all the warnings against it however, the period from 1904 until the start of World War I in 1914 was the greatest period of migration in Jewish history. A total of 1,195,000 Jews entered the United States, incl...