 The residents of Little Germany, in what is now the East Village, dispersed to more affluent neighborhoods and were replaced by growing numbers of poor immigrants on the Lower East Side.In 1850 about a third of the 50,000 American Jews lived in New York; they spoke German (not Yiddish), were active in Reform congregations, and took major leadership roles in the city's banking financial, merchandising, and clothing industries.An entirely different group of 1.4 million poor Yiddish-speaking Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe fled pogroms and anti-Semitism between 1880 and 1914.