German Jews in America

American immigration restrictions following the 1924 immigration act were limited by nationality, not ethnicity or religion.

Germany in the 1920s and 1930s sent a number of people to the United States that was well below the German quota, and had the United States not amended the laws specifically to keep out German Jews, Germany's Jews could have legally come to the United States.

What if the US just stuck with the original law and all of Germany's Jews made it to America?
 
There were ~550 thousand Jews in Germany in 1933. That would be a lot for the US to swallow politically but it wouldn't be very noticeable other ways. There were roughly 4.4 million German immigrants between 1850 and 1900 and another 1 million between 1900 and 1939.

If 1930's Germany made a point of trying to open the path for emigration through diplomatic solutions I think it's very feasible. Especially since not all of them would want to go to the US. Canada, England, France, and Palestine would all be popular destinations. The US might get 300k at most over a decade.

If Germany makes a point of exiling the Jews we'd definitely see a very different Zionist movement, possibly a German supported one that's opposed by the British.
 
With the bulk of German Jews emigrating to the USA -- which already had a sizable Ashkenazi population from the late 19th century -- would more Central and East European Jews follow? Is there a realistic series of events that sees 30s and 40s America replacing Poland as the unofficial Jewish homeland?
 
New York or Arizona? To drag up some cliches.

I'd imagine a huge influx of Jews in the 30s would have the same ripple effect on the existing immigrant population as the 1880s did: Jewish citizens, wanting to differentiate themselves from the "greenhorns," would disseminate into gentile populations nationwide, maybe even become more secular. I could see NYC staying as a population center, but having a bigger distribution of Jews around the country.
 
I'd imagine a huge influx of Jews in the 30s would have the same ripple effect on the existing immigrant population as the 1880s did: Jewish citizens, wanting to differentiate themselves from the "greenhorns," would disseminate into gentile populations nationwide, maybe even become more secular. I could see NYC staying as a population center, but having a bigger distribution of Jews around the country.

American Jews pre-1880 were largely from Germany and Britain (and before Britain, Iberia) and these sorts of Jews tended to look down on folks from the pale who they considered comparably hickish, even if they did care for their overall well-being.

I don't think American Jews in the 1930s would really look down on an influx of German Jews, who tended to be very urban, professional, educated, and middle-class on the whole.

If anything, I'd imagine the German Jews would be the ones who'd be more secular and willing to assimilate than the American ones considering how assimilated German Jews tended to be in Germany.
 
Guess it is too early for them to end up in Florida.

At least in the winter?;)

I am not sure if the US would take in so many, but all that could be let in is that much less that dies in the ovens. :teary:
 
With the bulk of German Jews emigrating to the USA -- which already had a sizable Ashkenazi population from the late 19th century -- would more Central and East European Jews follow? Is there a realistic series of events that sees 30s and 40s America replacing Poland as the unofficial Jewish homeland?
They would not be allowed as Eastern Europeans to immigrate en masse.
 
US immigration quotas were by nationality. The Jews of Germany are managing to get in to the US due to the German quota being high enough. Maybe it could extend to include Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, but I don't think Jews from eastern Europe would be able to come to America.

The fate of eastern Jewry will be as unfortunate as it was historically.
 
Political blow-back seems very possible. 300,000 additional immigrants over the course of six years is 60,000 per year, at a time when the US was averaging something like 70,000 per year. And all non-Christian? This is also assuming it's evenly distributed and not back-loaded after things start to get worse.

Roosevelt choosing to fight this battle likely means giving in on some other point. The one that springs first to my mind is rearmament efforts. The anti-immigrant faction basically overlapped with the isolationist faction IOTL. The reason efforts to save lives before the war failed was because anti-immigrant politicians were given free rein on the issue in exchange for an open mind on rearmament. Reverse-engineering that, this faction would likely oppose rearmament.
 
On the other hand, these are not exactly the "eastern European hordes"-German and upper-class Bohemian/Moravian/Austrians would be largely well-off, educated professionals and assimiliated. So they could well be more politically acceptable.
 
I did some research on the internet and found a chart showing the quotas for 1925-1927. Assuming that these numbers remained the same in the 1930's, the Germany and Austrian combined quote was 52,012. Were the quotas reduced in the 1930's?

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On the other hand, these are not exactly the "eastern European hordes"-German and upper-class Bohemian/Moravian/Austrians would be largely well-off, educated professionals and assimiliated. So they could well be more politically acceptable.

One would hope! And we don't really have any historical examples of a largely well-off, educated ethnic group making its way to the US, so who knows? (Maybe the Parsis of London are the closest example, but then were they arriving in similar numbers?)

But it's hard to lose betting on discrimination prevailing in the past, unfortunately, and the non-Christian factor is hard to ignore, no matter how well-off they are. I think a lot would depend on settlement patterns and rates as they relate to specific events. Like if the Germans have rolled out a worse version of their prewar behavior before the Olympics? That could increase support for taking them in.

To me it's more interesting to think about how it might affect local demographics where they chose to settle. We'd likely just get marginally higher Jewish populations in areas of already significant settlement, especially since we have evidence of a lot of retained family ties IOTL between American and European Jews through the 1940s. From this view it seems like 300,000 is pretty easy for the country to swallow. If they all settled in the Mid-Atlantic, they'd barely add 1% to the population. If all of them lived in NYC they'd up the foreign-born population by about 15%; significant but not a deluge.

Of course if they all tried to settle in just the Jewish neighborhoods of NYC, that could be a problem (I don't know exactly which neighborhoods we're talking about in the 1930s). Could be an interesting facet of a quasi-New Deal public works program: new dense high-rise neighborhoods for the recent arrivals. The Jewish Projects?
 
Of course if they all tried to settle in just the Jewish neighborhoods of NYC, that could be a problem (I don't know exactly which neighborhoods we're talking about in the 1930s). Could be an interesting facet of a quasi-New Deal public works program: new dense high-rise neighborhoods for the recent arrivals. The Jewish Projects?

I believe those neighborhoods were predominately Eastern European (Russian, Polish, Lithuanian) Jewish. Not for Yekkes, who were less religious and more assimilated -- well, they had been assimilated.

There had been a German Jewish emigration after 1848, but many of them had been assimilated, and many had left Judaism.
 
I believe those neighborhoods were predominately Eastern European (Russian, Polish, Lithuanian) Jewish. Not for Yekkes, who were less religious and more assimilated -- well, they had been assimilated.

There had been a German Jewish emigration after 1848, but many of them had been assimilated, and many had left Judaism.

So there could, in fact be some mutual distaste for the two populations to live together. Enough to keep them out of the same city entirely? Do they just seek neighborhoods of their own or do they seek cities of their own? Because if it's different neighborhoods, we can probably look at where new ethnic enclaves formed IOTL in in New York in say, the mid-1940s or maybe early 1950s and almost predict where they would settle. (Or New Jersey, or Chicago, etc.) And you could still have grounds for some sort of public works/manufactured neighborhood story.

If it's new cities they're moving to, that seems harder to predict. The West Coast seems like a good candidate. Several prominent, wealthy, assimilation-minded Jewish citizens out there to maybe grease the wheels with local politicians.
 

manav95

Banned
American immigration restrictions following the 1924 immigration act were limited by nationality, not ethnicity or religion.

Germany in the 1920s and 1930s sent a number of people to the United States that was well below the German quota, and had the United States not amended the laws specifically to keep out German Jews, Germany's Jews could have legally come to the United States.

What if the US just stuck with the original law and all of Germany's Jews made it to America?

I'm confused. Why would it curtail immigration of German Jews when Germany had the largest quota of any country under the 1924 law? I thought it was the Eastern European Jews that got shafted the most bc there were more of them yet far fewer quota spots(only 6000 for all of Poland and many many Poles wanted to come to the US).
 
Of course if they all tried to settle in just the Jewish neighborhoods of NYC, that could be a problem (I don't know exactly which neighborhoods we're talking about in the 1930s). Could be an interesting facet of a quasi-New Deal public works program: new dense high-rise neighborhoods for the recent arrivals. The Jewish Projects?

In NYC, the first stop for Jewish immigrants was the Lower East Side or Alphabet City. By the influx of Jews in the 1880s, the previous generation had started assimilating and you'd see them all over, especially the Upper West Side, which was the "historic" home for Sepharim (from the early "New Amsterdam" days) and the more-assimilated Jews from Western Europe. That transition from Lower East Side to Upper West Side was kind of the "American immigrant" story in a nutshell: Arrive as a greenhorn peddler, make your way, learn the customs, send your kids to school, become a success, assimilate, move away from the other immigrants, become an official American.
 
I'm confused. Why would it curtail immigration of German Jews when Germany had the largest quota of any country under the 1924 law? I thought it was the Eastern European Jews that got shafted the most bc there were more of them yet far fewer quota spots(only 6000 for all of Poland and many many Poles wanted to come to the US).

The US changed the law to keep out the Jews from Germany during the depression.
 
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