The Constitution of the United States
During the great migration from Europe, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and ending one hundred years later, almost thirty million Europeans came to the United States. Three million of those immigrants were Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, who were fleeing pogroms and poverty. Citizenship was a major step in the process of their becoming fully American. Many immigrants attended night classes after work in order to learn English. J. D. Eisenstein wrote in the preface to his 1891 translation of the Constitution of the United States into Hebrew and Yiddish, that his aim was “to Americanize Jewish residents of the lower part of the city of New York and of which the writer of these lines is a member.”
During the great migration from Europe, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and ending one hundred years later, almost thirty million Europeans came to the United States. Three million of those immigrants were Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, who were fleeing pogroms and poverty. Citizenship was a major step in the process of their becoming fully American. Many immigrants attended night classes after work in order to learn English. J. D. Eisenstein wrote in the preface to his 1891 translation of the Constitution of the United States into Hebrew and Yiddish, that his aim was “to Americanize Jewish residents of the lower part of the city of New York and of which the writer of these lines is a member.”