Wandering Jews: Peddlers, Immigrants, and the Discovery of “New Worlds”

In the great century of Jewish migration, from the end of the eighteenth century into the 1920s, when over four million Jews left central and eastern Europe and headed for new lands, the humble, ubiquitous and despised occupation of peddling served as the vehicle which propelled them outward. Jews had peddled for centuries in Europe, as well as in the Muslim lands of the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa and it had a deep and complicated history as a pillar of Jewish economic life in these pre-migration settings. But its very nature played a crucial role in the ways in which Jews experienced their migration, encounter, and eventual settlement in the places to which they went. This paper looks at the connection between Jewish peddling and the great migration of the long nineteenth century when the locus of Jewish life shifted to the “new world,” the world opened up through European colonization and settlement.