Quotes from David N. Myers

As a result, by the early twentieth century, large Jewish concentrations could be found in cities across the globe, including Baghdad (one-third of the population), Salonika (50 percent), Warsaw, ?ód?, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Buenos Aires. Indeed, 25 percent of the world's Jewish population lived in a mere fourteen

fashion, the pace of conversion from Judaism to Christianity picked up in Europe during the nineteenth century. The German poet Heinrich Heine, himself a Jew who converted to Christianity, declared that baptism was the Jew's "ticket of admission" to European society. More than 200,000 Jews followed Heine's path, principally in central and western Europe, over the course of the nineteenth century; they were a small, but clearly identifiable, stream within the

The early-twentieth-century historian Simon Dubnow, one of the three towering Jewish historians of the modern age (along with Heinrich Graetz and Salo W. Baron), wrote of the "secret of the existence" of the Jews. Despite his own abandonment of religious belief as an adolescent, he echoed the explanation of traditionalists for whom Jewish survival was a supernatural miracle.

But Jewish history is far more than the static tale of antisemitism. It is also a story of constant motion that kept Jews lithe