About 1 in 4 of these trans-migrants were Jews, destined via Liverpool for New York or Buenos Aires, as well as for the Cape, and also British towns. An expanding young population of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim was leaving Russia's Pale of Settlement; there, work restrictions, special taxes, and the forced conscription and conversion of boys were fuelling emigration. Murderous anti-Semitic pogroms (riots) after 1881, much publicized even in Hull, and &lt;a href="Russian%20famine%20of%201891%E2%80%9392"&gt;famine in 1891/2&lt;/a&gt;, further escalated numbers leaving the Russian Empire into the new century.