Science Quote by Martin Lewis Perl

A scientist’s plainspoken clause can carry an entire century’s pressure wave. Perl’s line isn’t dressed up as memoir or politics; it’s a brisk attribution of cause, the kind you’d expect from someone trained to name forces and outcomes. That restraint is the point. By pairing “poverty” and “antisemitism” with the same grammatical weight, he refuses the comforting myth that migration is just an economic choice. Survival has more than one axis, and for Jewish families leaving the Russian Empire and its aftermath, money and menace were often braided together.

The phrasing “As Jews” does double duty. It’s an identifier, but also a reminder that ethnicity can be treated as destiny when states and mobs decide it is. He doesn’t say “because they were persecuted,” which would invite abstraction; he names the mechanism: antisemitism. In the Russian context, that word gestures toward legal exclusion, quotas, periodic violence, and the social permission structure that made scapegoating ordinary. “Left Russia” compresses a long, risky process into two words, mirroring how immigration stories get flattened in family lore: one sentence standing in for generations of fear, paperwork, ships, and reinvention.

There’s also a quiet corrective embedded here. Coming from a prominent American physicist, it pushes back against the sanitized origin story of immigrant success by foregrounding what made departure necessary. It’s not a triumphant “they came for opportunity.” It’s a sober acknowledgment that many “opportunities” begin as exits.