The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany by Jannis Panagiotidis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany by Jannis Panagiotidis Joseph Cronin Jannis Panagiotidis . The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany . Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2019 . 363 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000598 The front cover of The Unchosen Ones shows a family of smiling Moroccan Jews upon their arrival in Israel in 1954, about to complete their Aliyah. However, as Jannis Panagiotidis shows in this stimulating book, many of their compatriots were prevented from doing the same, on grounds dressed up in bureaucratic complexity, but which derived essentially from their origin in a North African state. In short, the Israeli authorities considered them "backward," "primitive," "violent," and "lazy" (110), compared to the "desirable" Jewish migrants from Europe and North America. Yet Israel is not the only case of "co-ethnic" migration discussed in this book. The other standout example—and Panagiotidis fully acknowledges the irony—is Germany, or at least the Federal Republic of Germany, which initiated a long-running scheme to integrate "ethnic Germans" ( Aussiedler ) scattered across communist Eastern Europe over a time period almost exactly coterminous [End Page 196] with its Israeli counterpart. Panagiotidis takes full advantage of the potential for comparison, delving into the minutiae of legislation, political disputes, and individual case studies. His conclusions are as insightful as they are startling. Co-ethnic migration is based on the notion of shared ethnicity—that one has the right to live in a particular nation-state based on one's ethnic "belonging" to it. Yet Israel's and Germany's claims to be open to all their co-ethnics were frequently tested. After all, how does one define who is a German and who is a Jew? It fell to politicians, lawmakers, and civil servants to do the sifting, with mixed results. Unlike Israel, Germany did not have a religious definition to fall back on, and its politicians were also anxious to avoid the racial classifications the Nazis had used. So, they formulated a new concept—"people-belonging" ( Volkszugehörigkeit ). This had overtones of the old völkisch terminology, but was presented as an exclusively cultural category. One therefore had to "affirm" that one belonged to the German people through one's actions. In practical terms, this meant language (how well one spoke German), along with cultural habits, even the names one gave one's children. Inevitably, though, this cultural definition of "Germanness" was extremely fuzzy around the edges and open to interpretation by the "gatekeepers" as well as by applicants themselves. Former Nazi collaborators—SS volunteers from places like Yugoslavia—were often treated preferentially to those who had fought against the Nazi occupiers: after all, they had enthusiastically affirmed their "people-belonging" in the most dramatic of circumstances. Jewish applicants, by contrast, often found themselves in a difficult situation. Although West Germany's Federal Expellee Law stipulated that being Jewish did not preclude one's belonging to the German people, as it was careful to define Jewishness as a purely religious category, in reality, Jewish applicants were often suspected of dual loyalties. A prior attempt to migrate to Israel, for example, or indeed anywhere based on one's persecution as a Jew , was enough to thwart one's prospects of being let into the Federal Republic. Why? Because in doing so you had affirmed your Jewish "people-belonging," and you could only belong, following the logic, to one people. Panagiotidis scrutinizes a handful of rejected applications to both Germany and Israel —the eponymous "unchosen ones"—and argues that it was these exceptions or outliers that exposed "the limits of each country's co-ethnic commitment" (4). It is a bold claim for such a small sample, which by its very nature can hardly be described as representative. But because these cases were so often borderline, they forced the "gatekeepers," politicians and lawmakers, to define precisely what they meant when they spoke of the Jewish or German people. Where did the boundaries lie? Sometimes they jagged around one particular applicant. Brother Daniel is probably the most famous example: a Polish Jew (born Oswald Rufeisen) who converted to Catholicism—and then became a monk—to facilitate his hiding in...