Hi there friend, So what you’re asking here is really two questions: (1) when did Jewish persecution in Europe start and (2) when did large numbers of Jews flee Europe (and I assume you mean here the great exodus to the New World in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

On the first question, I imagine there are longer answers in the FAQ, but for our purposes and the sake of brevity I can tell you that the persecution started more or less the moment Jews arrived in Europe. Much of Jewish culture up until the late Middle Ages was found throughout the Middle East, North Africa, parts of mediterranean Europe, and Muslim Spain, but there were Jewish settlements in France, Germany, England, and some other spots earlier. I won’t launch into a fully detailed summary of all anti-Jewish violence in Europe, but you asked when it started so I’ll give you some early ones.

During the First Crusade, Christian crusaders were making their way down to the Holy Land to fight some “heretics” (Muslims) but realized that there were “heretics” along their way in the Jewish communities that dotted the landscapes. Jews were thought to have killed God, after all. Guibert of Nogent reported the sentiment at the time:

After traversing great distances, we desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. That’s doing our work backwards.

During the Second Crusade, we encounter more of the same. The Benedictine abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny wrote to King Louis VII of France,

Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far and distant lands while vile blasphemers far worse than any Muslims, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity?

In other episodes, Jews were blamed for the Black Death; they were falsely rumoured to be murdering young boys and using their blood for Passover (look up the case of William of Norwich); they were rumoured to steal the eucharist from the local church and stab it.

Moving towards Eastern Europe, which had become a massive centre of Jewish Culture in the early modern period (and I imagine might be where your family came from), the 1648 Chmielnitsky Uprising resulted in the deaths of 40k-100k Jewish deaths. The massacres were so devastating that there was a ban on merrymaking in the Jewish community for several years in its wake, including a ban on dancing and singing, and restrictions on weddings.

Two centuries later, anti-Jewish violence was quite common in the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish world, resulting in further pogroms (mass riots with racist/religious overtones; for reference, the famous 1921 Tulsa Massacre is considered a pogrom against the black community of Tulsa). Now we’re getting into the critical years, when I imagine your family escaped: in his book The Magnitude of Genocide, Colin Tatz writes that, between 1881 and 1920, there were 1,326 individual pogrom-style attacks in the Ukraine alone, causing 70k-250k Jewish deaths and leaving half a million Jews homeless.

Jews had been migrating to the Americas since the very beginning of colonization. For the most part in those early years, it was wealthy Sephardic Jewish merchants. In the early-to-mid 19th century, though, wealthy German Jews started coming to the United States for economic opportunity. It was only around 1880 until 1910 that the massive exodus of Easter European Jews made their way to the Americas, not for economic opportunity but to escape violence.

These Jewish folk, some two million arriving in New York during those years, were extremely poor and were actually looked down upon by the wealthy German Jews who had been there already and developed vibrant communities.

Tens of thousands came to Canada (including my family) in that era, and many went to South America. The situation in New York got so packed that philanthropists started trying to find other places for escaping Jews to live, including colonizing the West of both the United States and Canada, as well as building agricultural colonies in Argentina, South Africa, and of course Palestine.

This was actually the huge exodus that resulted in the North American Jewish community that we see today; it happened long before the Holocaust. The years leading up to the Holocaust were actually marked by closed borders. In Canada, virtually no Jews were allowed into the country between 1933 and 1945, obviously critical years. You can look up the MS St Louis for an individual story related to that.

I hope this shed some light on your family history! I’ve been having fun learning about my own.

Sources:

Diner, Hasia R. New Promised Land, A: A History of Jews in America. Oxford University Press USA, 2003.

Dollinger, Marc editor, Gary Phillip Zola, and Project Muse. American Jewish History: a Primary Source Reader. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014.

Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New Yorks Jews 1870-1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Tulchinsky, Gerald J. J. Canada’s Jews a People’s Journey. Toronto [Ont.] ; Buffalo [N.Y.], Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Lipinsky, Jack. “Immigration Opportunity or Organizational Oxymoron? The Canadian Jewish Farm School and the Department of Immigration, 1925-1946.” Canadian Jewish Studies / Études Juives Canadiennes 21 (2013).