Thomas Brechenmacher

• The article describes the history of Jews in Europe from the end of the Middle Ages until the aftermath of the Second World War as a sequence of migrational processes. It thereby demonstrates how the migration paradigm can contribute to a comprehensive understanding of European Jewish history during the given period by better explaining the various types of settlement, as well as other central phenomena of Jewish existence, such as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/acculturation, and anti-Semitism. The article tries to assess the significance of the "religious factor" within the complex interdependencies between so-called "push" and "pull" factors that determined the individual migrations. In most cases, religious motives played only a minor role, while economic factors tended to dominate, particularly in regard to the functions Jews, as members of a minority, were permitted to carry out in the context of non-Jewish majority societies.