The Last Ships From Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and The Race To Save Russia's Jews on the Eve of World War I, Ujifusa - B

                     "Between 1881 and 1914, over ten million people crossed the Atlantic from Europe to America. Over 2.5 Million of them were Jews." Russia was forcing people out, and America's door was open. Three men, Albert Ballin, Jacob Schiff, and J.P. Morgan helped make this exodus a reality.

                     Ballin was born in Hamburg in 1857. As a child, he helped his father with his struggling migrant ticketing business, which he took over at the age of 17 after his father's death. He allied with the Carr Line to begin sending passengers to the New World. As emigration from Germany and Great Britain slowed, it grew dramatically from Russia. Czar Alexander III rejected the liberalism of his assassinated father, and began to harass all of the empire's minorities, particularly its Jews. The pogroms that began in 1881 were "ferocious and terrifying." America was the preferred destination, and Ballin would figure out how to transport Russia's Jews to the New World. In America, a successful Wall Street banker, Jakob Schiff, was committed to Judaism and the plight of those in Russia. He organized the city's charities and contributed his wealth to pave the way in America for the millions who would need help assimilating. Meanwhile, the Hamburg-American Line (HAPAG) was in need of  a rejuvenation and it turned to the upstart Jewish entrepreneur. "As the new manager of HAPAG's passenger division, the young Albert Ballin had engineered an improbable backdoor takeover of one of Hamburg's most prestigious companies." He upgraded the fleet and soon Hamburg was flooded with thousands of impoverished Jews seeking to escape. A cholera epidemic caused Ballin to alter his business model. He partnered with North German Lloyd (NDL) in Bremen, and assumed responsibility for processing immigrants at the border with Russia and quarantining them from the general Hamburg population. However, the increasing tides of immigration were stoking nativist policies in America.

                    Boston Brahmin Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge began the fight to bar entry to the US. The Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston and targeted Jews and Italians. Congress passed a literacy test bill, but Grover Cleveland vetoed it. In New York, Schiff worked tirelessly to bridge the gap between Midtown's German Jews and the Russians on the Lower East Side. He coerced, organized and managed a massive volume of charitable giving. In 1903, Congress passed, and Teddy Roosevelt signed, the Anarchist Exclusion Act. At the same time, JP Morgan began to think about arranging for control of the North Atlantic's shipping lines. He put together a deal whereby he purchased the White Star Line from its English owner, and made an affiliation deal with Ballin. Both entities would ratchet up the volume of immigration.

                    The changing politics of Russia also increased the number of refugees seeking to depart Russia. The 1903 Kishinev pogrom ramped up demand, as did the Russo-Japanese War. Russia blamed its failure at war on the Jews, thus accelerating their departure. More and more of the empire's Jews poured into America, where nativist sentiment was becoming mainstream. An even greater threat to the transatlantic trade was the possibility of war in Europe. Ballin continued to build ships for the trade, ironically launching the world's largest passenger ship in June, 1914. War ended the migration from Europe, left over half a million Jews in "refugee limbo,"destroyed HAPAG and eventually, Albert Ballin.  Ballin committed suicide the day the Kaiser abdicated. Jacob Schiff died in 1920 and did not live to see the  law strictly limiting immigration to Northern Europeans.  This is an interesting and compelling story, but one that doesn't seem to merit 325 pages. It felt like the telling of a much broader story, with a lot of background on peripheral themes added in order to lengthen the story.