Between 1875 and 1914 an estimated 120,000 Eastern European Jews settled in Britain, quintupling the Anglo-Jewish community and decisively shifting the centre of gravity of the provincial Jewish population to the industrial and commercial centres of the North West, the North East, the Midlands, Scotland and South Wales. Liverpool's main role in this 'mass-migration' was that of a major port of transmigration on the chief route of migration by road, rail and sea stretching from Western Russia, through Berlin, Hamburg, Hull and Liverpool to the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The relatively low cost, the volume and the efficiency of transport by sea from Liverpool gave it the edge over alternative continental ports and hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans passed through on their way westwards, as often as not with the aid of Liverpool Jewry's communal funds and facilities.
But Liverpool was also one major centre of Eastern European Jewish settlement in Britain, if on a smaller scale than London, or nearby Manchester and Leeds. While Manchester's Jewish population expanded from perhaps 7,000 in 1875 to nearly 30,000 in 1914, Liverpool's grew in the same period from around 3,000 to an estimated 11,000 on the eve of the First World War. The absence of large-scale furniture-making and garment making industries to which immigrant experience would have been suited and a serious glut in the local labour market during the 1890s were amongst the factors which made Liverpool a less attractive target than Manchester, Leeds or the United States.
The tide of transmigration was slowed by the Aliens Act of 1905, which barred certain categories of immigrant, but it did not fully subside until the outbreak of war in 1914 severed the continental and cross-channel routes.
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