The trickle of Jewish emigration from Germany, however, became a stream from lands farther east as roughly two hundred thousand Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States during the 1880s. They were culturally and economically quite distinct from German Jews, who greeted the newcomers with considerable ambivalence. Ultimately German Jews, alarmed by rising anti-Semitism, aided the emigrants, but they also insisted that, as the Jewish Messenger put it, “they must be Americanized in spite of themselves in the mode to be prescribed by their friends and benefactors.”
