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Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way

Online ISBN:
9780300210194
Print ISBN:
9780300178647
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way

Hasia R. Diner
Hasia R. Diner
New York University
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Published online:
21 May 2015
Published in print:
13 January 2015
Online ISBN:
9780300210194
Print ISBN:
9780300178647
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world's Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by the intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book tells the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. This book tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

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