European Jewish Refugees Research Articles

Global Transit, Imperial Performativity, and Survival: European Jewish Refugees in the Philippines Under US Tutelage and Japanese Occupation, 1937–1946

Abstract By late 1941, some 1,300 Jews had escaped from National Socialist-controlled Europe to the Philippines. This essay problematizes the existing historiography on this rescue by going beyond examinations of its mechanisms and the politics of memory. Instead, it introduces a rereading of the refugees’ struggles by focusing on their continued being-in-transit and mandated imperial performativity, which allows for analysing transnational spaces shaped by their seemingly mundane everyday practices, from walking to cooking. During the early years, American, Filipino, and Jewish community leaders expected the performance of imperial norms and policed interactions between the refugees and native Filipinos. Some of the refugees succeeded. Some even managed to open shops. Others failed or rebelled and soon found themselves in peril. The late 1941 invasion by Japanese forces subjected Philippine society to new racial hierarchies. Jewish refugees, suspected of collaborating with the enemy, had to engage in different imperial performances in order to survive. By late 1946, many Jewish survivors had managed to leave, mostly to the United States, where they encountered new challenging power asymmetries of a different kind.

Chongqing Transit: Central European Jewish Refugees in China’s Wartime Capital and Interior*

While most central European Jewish refugees who transited through China during the Second World War lived in Shanghai, some found refuge in other Chinese cities. This article is a microhistory of two German-speaking refugee families, the Karfunkels and the Gottliebs, who spent the war in China’s interior—in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing, amongst other locales. During the war, the relocation of the Nationalist seat of government to Chongqing and the arrival of Allied military missions in inner China led to great demographic upheaval in the city. On the margins of both foreign and Chinese society, the Karfunkels and the Gottliebs found themselves caught up in a significant population shift and a number of social changes. As Japan’s assault on China worsened, the families’ medical, mechanical, and technical expertise was increasingly in demand, elevating their position in Chongqing society. This article investigates the ways that the progression of the Second World War changed Jewish refugee individuals’ circumstances in China’s interior.

Ferramonti, not Palestine: The Failed Aliyah bet of the “Benghazi Group,” 1939–1943

Abstract This article focuses on the journey of “the Benghazi group,” three hundred European Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, who, for several months in 1940, were stranded in Benghazi, then part of the Italian colonial empire. They organized and attempted to sail from Italy to Palestine in an Aliyah bet voyage, but were eventually forcibly returned to Italy and interned in the Ferramonti camp in the south of the country. Even though the British liberated Ferramonti in 1943, in 1941 and 1942 many Jews had already been transferred to internment locations further north. When Germany occupied Italy in fall 1943, many members of the Benghazi group thus fell victim to the Holocaust. This article examines the possibilities and limitations for self-help and agency among Jewish refugees in Fascist Italy. It describes their experiences in the context of Fascist Italy’s antisemitic policies and the history of Aliyah bet operations, which did not treat Jews in Italy as a high priority for rescue. At the core of this article lies the story of an encounter between central European Jews and the North African Jews of Benghazi. Having spent their last remaining financial means on the journey to Palestine, the members of the Benghazi group became dependent on the extraordinary hospitality of the Libyan Jews, making Benghazi a temporary sanctuary for European Jewish refugees.

Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View

Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View

Hospitality in Shanghai: The Russian Jewish Community as Hosts and Polish Jewish Refugees as Guests during WW2

This article is an exploration of three exile memoirs penned by Eastern European Jewish refugees who documented a notable world history event: during WW2, when 6 million European Jews perished in Nazis concentration and death camps, Shanghai was the city where more than 20,000 Jews were saved. Through a conceptual framework inspired by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, this article interprets instances of hospitality in these memoirs.

Japanese and Jews in Shanghai

Abstract The actions of the Japanese government and military before and during the Holocaust saved tens of thousands of Jews in Shanghai from murder by Japan’s Nazi allies. Because the Japanese were brutal aggressors in East Asia, because their treatment of the Chinese population was genocidal, because the details and organization of Japanese sexual abuse of Korean women are still matters of international dispute, approaches to the Japanese treatment of European Jewish refugees begin from a negative standpoint. Japanese authorities have not investigated or revealed these actions, and Japanese academics have only just begun to consider this issue worthy of study. Discussion of Japanese policy in Shanghai is often dominated by evidence of antisemitism in Japan, the creation of the Designated Area in 1943 to confine Jewish refugees, and the brutally officious behavior of Kanoh Ghoya. The issuance of life-saving visas by Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, is treated as exceptional humanitarianism. This study focuses on the decisions and behavior of Japanese authorities toward European Jewish refugees in Japan and in Shanghai which allowed them to survive.

A Place in the Empire: Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica and the British Imperial Order, 1940–1947

ABSTRACT In July 1940 the British Government erected a camp in Jamaica to house thousands of civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Only about 1,500 Gibraltarians ended up there – mostly women, children, and elderly. The available space that remained served to intern a few hundred European Jewish refugees, as well as Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War. About two hundred Jamaicans were employed in the camp, including the Camp Commandant. The little-known Gibraltar Camp created a rather odd encounter between people who occupied different positions within the British imperial global order, and outside of it. My main purpose in this article is to learn about the ways in which people engaged with imperial classifications as they were simultaneously placed and displaced by them. Drawing on official and non-official documents from several archives, and on newspapers, recordings of interviews, and self-published autobiographies, I argue that while the intention of the authorities in sending groups of people to Gibraltar Camp was to ‘put aside’ those who were deemed a disturbance, the constant negotiations about labels indicate that the physical placement of people in a camp did not work to wholly exclude them from the prevailing order of things.

‘A welcoming refuge?’ The experiences of European Jewish refugees in the Dutch East Indies, set against other Asian destinations, 1933-1965

ABSTRACT Historians have often studied European Jews in connection with the Second World War. However, their experiences as refugees in Asian colonies are less examined. In this article I examine European Jewish refugees in the Dutch East Indies, with British India, Singapore and Shanghai as counterpoints. The focus is on the way European Jewish refugees were received and how that impacted their identity, as well as the role of international organisations. By using ego documents and articles from local newspapers I assess the meaning of the Dutch East Indies as a place of refuge for European Jewish refugees among other Asian destinations.

Refugees, Narratives, or How To Do Bad Things with Words

This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine some of this election’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric, reserved for Syrian (and other) refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. To that end, I problematize the representations and treatment of refugees within the United States from three distinct groups: European Jewish refugees of the Second World War; the Eastern Bloc refugees of the mid- and late twentieth century; and the current Syrian, largely Muslim refugees. I begin by defining the concepts of homelessness and moral luck. Second, I examine the three varying histories of refugee policies in the context of these two notions. Finally, I conclude with a combination of despair and hope: First, I offer a few observations about the role of language in the recent presidential election; second, I propose alternatives to the resulting linguistic and political violence by extending Hilde Lindemann’s notion of “holding” into sociopolitical contexts.

American Consuls and the Politics of Rescue in Marseille, 1936–1941

An extensive literature portrays Harry Bingham, who served as American vice consul in Marseille, France between 1936 and 1941, as the single American diplomat who defied the Department of State’s restrictive policy toward European Jewish refugees. However, empirical evidence does not always support what many now assume about Bingham’s efforts. Examining Bingham’s personnel file and his career at the Department of State, this article improves our understanding of what Bingham did for Jewish and intellectual refugees.

Exile in Mauritius: colonial violence and Indian Ocean archives

On 26 December 1940, 1 580 central European Jewish refugees were imprisoned on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius by the British colonial government after attempting to enter Palestine illegally. Unable to be repatriated to Nazi occupied Europe, and because no other country would grant them safe harbour, the British colonial government used these refugees as a symbolic deterrent against illegal immigration to Palestine by imprisoning them at Beau Bassin prison for the duration of the Second World War. Intersecting with a number of different disciplines and modalities, we examine the Beau Bassin story as a way to reposition histories of WWII from a southern Hemispheric and Indian Ocean perspective. Both ‘traditional’ and ‘ephemeral’ in its make-up, the Beau Bassin prison archive consists of records from the National Archives in London and Mauritius, official colonial records of correspondence, parliamentary debates, records from the South African Jewish Board of Deputies’ special committee on Mauritius 1940–1945, letters, memoirs, literary representations, art works, commemorative museum panels, life writing, interviews, and newspaper articles. In this article, we conceive of archives not simply as accounts of actions or records of what people thought happened, but rather as ‘records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing imperial world’ (Stoler 2010: 4). Approaching this story from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective we locate the Beau Bassin story at the entangled apex of a confluence of narratives, from the history of the Indian Ocean region, Mauritian history, the history of the Second World War, to colonial studies, the history of penal colonies, Jewish Studies and the history of Palestine.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. x+185. $74.00

<i>Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II</i>. By Gao Bei.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. x+185. $74.00

Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy Toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II

Gao Bei, <i>Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy Toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II</i>

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II by Gao Bei (review)

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II by Gao Bei (review)

Bei Gao. Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.

Bei Gao. Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 204 pp. $74.00

<i>Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II.</i> By Gao Bei (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012) 204 pp. $74.00

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei. pp. 185. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013.

Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II. By Gao Bei. pp. 185. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013.

The Chinese Nationalist Government’s Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II

In early 1939, Sun Ke, president of the Legislative Yuan, formulated a plan to settle European Jewish refugees in southwest China. At the same time, the German Jewish businessman Jakob Berglas and the politically active American Jewish dentist Maurice William presented plans to both the Nationalist and U.S. governments to transplant European Jews to China. The Nationalists have been harshly criticized for not confronting the invading Japanese with enough determination. However, their Jewish policy demonstrates that the Chinese Nationalists were determined not only to fight the war but also to use every possible tool, domestic and international, to win. It also illuminates how the “Jewish issue” complicated the relationships between China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War II.

The Mindanao Plan: Political Obstacles to Jewish Refugee Settlement

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was established in the waning hours of the failed 1938 Evian Conference. Its purpose was to con- tact various governments to explore their willingness to accept European Jewish refugees for settlement. The Philippine Islands, a United States Commonwealth, responded to the committee's inquiry with a proposal to allow ten thousand Jewish refugees to immigrate as agricultural settlers. Negotiations to settle Jewish refugees on the large island of progressed over the next three years, but the Mindanao ultimately failed because its architects underestimated the extent of local opposition and the complexity of land acquisition in the Philippines. The United States' entry into the war in December 1941 ended all further efforts on the settlement project. This article examines Philippine President Manuel Quezon's key role in this process, as well as the often skeptical positions of U.S. State Department officials and the surprisingly supportive stance of Paul McNutt, the U.S. High Commissioner for the Philippines. In the months that followed the Evian Conference, the Philippine Islands, an American Commonwealth at the time, submitted a proposal to accept Jewish refugees as agricultural settlers on Island in the Philippine Archipelago. The story of this proposal, which represented the earliest evidence that the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany and Austria had been taken seriously by a government outside the Western Hemisphere, has come to light only recently. Materials related to the Jewish refugee settlement in the Philippines and the Plan were found at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the National Archives, where they had been little used for nearly sixty years. 3

“Home Afar”: The Life of Central European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War II

Since its opening to the West in 1843, Shanghai had served as destination for four waves of Jewish immigration. The first Jews to settle in China were Sephardim from Baghdad, who migrated eastward in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Sassoons, Kadoories, Hardoons, Ezras, and Abrahams became wealthy merchants, and soon acquired British citizenship. The second group consisted of Russian Ashkenazim who escaped the pogroms and the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution. They were considered as the 'middle class' of the Jewish community in Shanghai. The third group of German and Austrian (and in smaller numbers Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Romanian) Jews, numbering over 15,000, barely escaped the Nazi terror in the late 1930s. The fourth group consisted of about 1000 Polish Jews, including the only complete European Jewish religious school to be saved from Nazi destruction, the Mirrer Yeshiva. The International Settlement of Shanghai seemed a viable option for the desperate refugees; this in spite of the fact that the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, and the Japanese, allies of Nazi Germany, occupied parts of the city. Nevertheless, in contrast to the German plan of Entjudung, the Japanese wanted to make use of alleged Jewish wealth and influence for the benefit of Japan's New Order. The official Japanese policy towards Jews stated that although Japan should avoid actively embracing Jews who had been expelled by her allies denying Jews entry would not be in the spirit of the empire's long-standing advocacy of racial equality. As a result of this policy, between the fall of 1938 and the winter of 1941, about 20,000 refugees travelled to Shanghai, their temporary home afar. During the three-year period between 1938 and December 1941 most newcomers managed more or less to integrate into Shanghai's economy, despite the fact that they had come to Shanghai out of political necessity, and not for the economic prospects. Following the outbreak of the War in the Pacific and the Japanese occupation of all sections of Shanghai, the economic situation of the refugees significantly worsened. Furthermore, as stability in Shanghai was the most important priority for the Japanese, on February 18, 1943 the military authorities issued a proclamation about the establishment of a restricted area - or ghetto, as the refugees used to call it - for stateless refugees in Hongkou, where they were confined until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. The end of the war opened up the possibility for the refugees of leaving Shanghai. However, when they were informed about the Holocaust in Europe, most did not want to return to their homeland. Many of them left for the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America, and after 1948, thousands of Jews went to live in the newly established State of Israel.