Introduction

In 1864, at the age of forty-three, Mordechai Schwartzman moved with his wife, Sara, their four children, and one of his daughters-in-law to Malmo, Sweden. Their hometown, Nayshtot, was a small town on the border between Eastern Prussia and the Lithuanian part of Imperial Russia.2 Located by the river, the town was multilingual, with German and Lithuanian sides; above all, it was very Jewish, and the majority spoke Yiddish.

Shortly after his arrival, Schwartzman, the son of a merchant, opened a shop and changed his first name to the Swedish-sounding Markus. Over the years, several of his relatives—along with other Jews from the same region—also moved to Sweden and from there to other Nordic countries.

We begin this chapter by looking at Markus and Sara Schwartzman and the choices the family made. We then compare and contrast our findings with other examples of Eastern European Jewish migrants in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Our approach shows how family migration seems to have continued within the region.

Using Schwartzman, his relatives, and their descendants as a focal point for this story, we aim to analyse the shift from being members of a very Jewish community in Eastern Europe to becoming members of a small ethnic and religious community in a predominately Lutheran, Northern European society. More specifically, we examine how the Jewish migrants turned their previous experiences in Eastern Europe into tools for making the transition to their life in their new country as smooth as possible.

Ever since scholarly interest in Jewish history in the Nordic countries emerged in the 1980s, studies have been influenced by the rise of migration and ethnic history (Hoffmann 2016, 203–222). The literature has, among other things, aimed to remind the contemporary readership of the ethnic diversity of the past and the fact that the Nordic countries have been a region of immigration as well as emigration. Moreover, it has been thought that the experience of Jewish migrants could provide a historical perspective to present debates on the integration of minorities.

While the Nordic countries seem similar from the outside, their stories concerning Jewish migrants are very different: the history of Jewish settlement and local legislation has varied considerably, not to mention the different historical fates of the communities as members of the different nation states during World War II (on examples of the variety within the Nordic countries, see Broberg, Runbom, and Tyden 1988; Hoffmann 2016, 203–222; Ekholm, Muir, and Silvennoinen 2016). While the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden had strict bans on Jews in the early modern period, Danish and Swedish Jews had full civil rights by 1880 (Bredefeldt 2008, 158; Thing 2008, 31). Many of these families had Western European roots and were on the verge of assimilation when the Jewish migration from Eastern Europe began in the 1860s.

By contrast, Jews were not allowed to settle in Norway until 1851. However, they gained full civil rights as non-Lutherans almost immediately. Until the arrival of Eastern European Jews from the 1890s onwards, there were hardly any Jews in the country. The case in Finland was different again; the situation was more akin to Eastern Europe when it comes to nineteenth-century Jewish history.

With such contextual differences, the history of Jews in the Nordic countries has understandably been written from a national perspective. This choice has also followed an integrationist paradigm; the literature has aimed to show how Jews in the Nordic countries became Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish Jews.

With due respect to such contextual differences, this chapter instead focuses on themes that unite the history of Jewish migrants and thus challenge a methodologically nationalist approach. In all the Nordic countries, Eastern European Jews did as Markus Schwartzman did when he settled in Malmo: they started careers as peddlers or established small stores or factories. There were local and individual differences, as we will show, but in general, Jews from Eastern Europe took rather similar paths in all the Nordic countries.

Nevertheless, the story of the Nordic Jews cannot be analysed in a solely Nordic context. They were part of a wave of emigration that included some 2.4 million Jews between the 1880s and 1914 (Kupovetsky 2010). While the United States was the ‘Land of Opportunity’ for many, there were significant waves of emigration to growing cities like St Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London. Others found opportunities in South America and the British colonies (Lederhendler 2014).

This Jewish mass migration has been a boundless source of inspiration for scholars ever since, and the ability and willingness of these Jews to integrate into their new countries—plus their rapid social mobility both within and between generations—have been examined and analysed.

In his account on Jewish immigrants to the US, Eli Lederhendler (2009, 41) questions the geographical transfer of knowledge outlined above. He argues that coming from a relatively backward part of Russia—namely the Pale of Settlement4—was in fact a disadvantage. Few possessed modern industrial skills or vocational training, nor had they any successful commercial experience. The few individuals that actually had such expertise could not use it in their new country because the skills were based on a very limited ethnic market. Hence, he claims that being a new immigrant was difficult, regardless of previous experience.

However, there are other ways of integrating besides earning a living. The gender historian Paula Hyman has shown how the bourgeois values of the new homeland were important for the integration strategies chosen by Jewish immigrants. She argues that middle-class values, such as the upbringing of children, religious learning, and the ideal of female domesticity, were decisive in how Eastern European Jews integrated after arriving in the United States (Hyman 1995).

Furthermore, both contemporaries and later scholars have been astonished by the rapid social mobility of the Jewish migrants (Kuznets 1961; Kahan 1986; Godley 2001; Mendelsohn 2015). When trying to explain this, some scholars find endogenous factors, such as religion and culture, to be decisive.

Further, some interpret Jewish social mobility through entrepreneurship as a strategy to avoid anti-Semitism at work. Self-employment also made it possible to keep the rules of the Sabbath and Jewish culture and traditions in general. Others have gone to extremes and claimed that anti-Semitism accounts for Jewish success: it made the Jews a ‘nation of overachievers’. According to this latter opinion, exogenous factors were the most important, while endogenous factors played little part in creating the paradigm of success. Yet another group considers the Jews’ social mobility a result of emancipation and diminishing anti-Semitism. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all these opinions or is rather a combination of them. Ultimately, it is an empirical question as to where and when Jews are studied.

We will apply—and challenge—these aspects in our study of the transfer of values and knowledge among Nordic Jews. Because of the regional character of our analysis, we use the experiences of the Schwartzman family and relatives from Nayshtot as our point of departure. We use a family chronicle published in 1946, covering several generations of the Schwartzman family, the related Lapidus and Nissalowitz families, and their Nordic offspring (Koritzinsky 1946). In addition, we have used city directories, national censuses, applications for citizenship, and accounts from Jewish-owned companies as our main sources.

As the chronicle shows dates and places of births and deaths, years of emigration, and marriages—and in some cases occupational titles and degrees awarded—we can discuss the role of endogenous factors such as religion and culture on these families.

Focusing on the emigration of a typical Jewish family from a typical shtetl such as Nayshtot and the choices of their offspring that happened to settle within the Scandinavian core will enable us to discuss how selected values and knowledge were transferred between generations and across borders in a relatively ethnically, religiously, and culturally homogenous area with a predominantly Lutheran society and a strong presence of the state. However, we fully acknowledge that it is difficult to determine what is ‘Jewish’ and what derives from the experience of this particular family or geographical context. We therefore contrast our findings with other examples from other Jewish families and individuals.

The majority of Eastern European Jews who migrated to the Nordic countries had settled by the end of World War I. World War II was a profound change for all Europeans, but for the Jews and their communities, the Holocaust meant near total annihilation and destruction. The Norwegian Jewish population diminished severely during the German occupation, and the foundations of Jewish life had to be rebuilt in post-war Europe. Hence, we end our study in 1940. Nevertheless, the span of our study—from the 1860s until 1940—allows for a thorough analysis over time and generations.

We will first discuss the reasons for emigration from places like Nayshtot. Next, we will continue by analysing how values evolved upon arriving and settling in the Nordic countries. As marriage patterns provide material for studying the maintenance of values brought from Eastern Europe, we will pay particular attention to how they developed in the Nordic Jewish communities and among individuals. Finally, we will discuss the role of entrepreneurship and work. Following Hyman, we will pay particular attention to gender differences.