Integration against all odds?

How did the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fare? And why? These are two of the questions the project intends to answer.

The project is tracing the lives up to adulthood of all the 600 or so children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian tsarist empire, most of them from Russian Poland, who lived in Sweden in 1880.

Those immigrants were not viewed kindly, and experienced a great deal of 
prejudice, some of it even from established Swedish Jews. They faced obstacles of various kinds, and although immigration was unrestricted and limited in Sweden, which had seen high levels of emigration, they suffered discrimination, for example when they applied for citizenship.

Researcher Carl Henrik Carlsson will be studying how these children overcame these hardships, managing to integrate in Swedish society, including the Swedish–Jewish community.

Some of the questions to be addressed are: To what extent did these children undergo a class journey? Which sectors of society did they work in? To what extent did they seek out those of the same faith in their professional lives? Did they stay in Sweden or did they, like so many others, emigrate to the U.S.? To what extent did they change their family names for integration purposes or convert to Christianity? What were their patterns of marriage?