Jewish Exodus Research Articles

From narratives to history: new perspectives on mass emigration of Jews from Islamic countries in the early 1950s

ABSTRACT Contested narratives of the mass Jewish immigration from Arab countries to the young state of Israel emphasize Israel’s central role in this episode, positively and negatively. However, new studies reveal that Israel was only one actor in the Jewish exodus, with other key roles filled by Arab states, the British Empire in the Middle East, the French Empire in North Africa, the United States, and international Jewish organizations, particularly the Jewish-American Joint Distribution Committee. This complexity is particularly evident in the case of three countries from which nearly the entire Jewish population emigrated to Israel during its early statehood: Yemen, Iraq, and Libya. This article proposes a comprehensive synthesis of research perspectives on the phenomenon of Jewish migration, with a focus on the cases of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq. I address what is common and what is unique to the migrations of these three communities, examine the entities involved in organizing their departure and those involved in their transit, and, drawing on this unique story, I propose a new historiographic interpretation of the phenomenon as a whole.

The Causes and Impacts of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus and Jewish Exodus from Arab Countries, and the Connections of the Two Exoduses to Each Other

The Causes and Impacts of the 1948 Palestinian Exodus and Jewish Exodus from Arab Countries, and the Connections of the Two Exoduses to Each Other

Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.

“When Israel Was in Egypt’s Land.” Jewish Emigration from the USSR, 1968–1991

In the wake of World War II, against the backdrop of the Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, and at times intensely hostile discrimination against the Jewish population of the Soviet Union, the desire grew among Soviet Jews to emigrate to Palestine or Israel. Approximately 8,300 Soviet Jews emigrated between 1945 and 1968. In the détente era of the early 1970s, that number rose to nearly 35,000 a year, before declining again due to new conflicts and restrictions. Following the end of the Cold War in 1990, emigration again reached a new peak. In total, about 500,000 Jews left the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1990. Most of them traveled through Austria on the way to their new homes. Several broad overviews have been published on the situation of the Jewish population in the USSR, the Jewish exodus from the USSR, and various aspects of their transit. Nevertheless, a synthesis of these findings is still lacking, and a number of questions remain open with regard to both the Austrian and Soviet perspective of Austria’s role as a transit country. On the basis of material from Austrian and Soviet archives, this article attempts to address some of these research gaps.

A Study of the Framing on the Exodus of Egyptian Jewry in Translation into Arabic: A Case Study of the Arabic Translation of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

This study attempts to examine the role of framing in re-narration. It applies Mona Baker’s narrative theory of translation to study the narrative of the second Jewish exodus from Egypt during Nasser’s reign in translation. To reach this end, it investigates the Arabic translation of Lucette Lagnado’s memoir The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit in order to trace the framing techniques employed by the translators. Since the narrative of the second Jewish exodus has always been controversial, especially in Egypt, the study mainly focuses on the role of framing in the circulation of competing narratives in the source and target texts through tracing the textual and paratextual framing techniques that subtly alter the underlying narrative of the source text in translation. It has become evident upon investigation that the target text employs textual and paratextual framing in order to challenge the main narrative perpetuated in the source text. This study aims primarily at investigating the presence, effectiveness and results of framing in the re-narration of a controversial narrative.

Growing up in Interwar Iraq: The Memoirs of Naim Kattan and Heskel Haddad

Growing up in Interwar Iraq: The Memoirs of Naim Kattan and Heskel Haddad Nadia Malinovich (bio) In recent years, the historical Jewish presence in Arab lands has become a contested site of memory, with contemporary disagreements over the merits of the Zionist project, the continuing Arab–Israeli conflict, and the legacy of European colonialism informing the ways in which different groups reconstruct their collective past. Among the Jews of Arab lands, Iraqi Jews were distinguished both by their high level of cultural integration into Iraqi society, as well as the abrupt and traumatic nature of their departure from the country after 1948. These dramatic extremes have made Iraqi-Jewish history particularly subject to politicized narratives. Some point to the history of Muslim anti-Judaism and relegation of Jews to second-class dhimmi status as paving the way for the rise of an Iraqi nationalism that was both sympathetic to Nazi Germany and virulently anti-Zionist. For others, both European colonialists and Zionists share much of the blame for the Jewish exodus, as they created rifts between Jews and Muslims who had traditionally enjoyed harmonious relations. Memoir literature written by the last generation of Iraqi Jews enables us to flesh out our understanding of how the social fabric of Jewish life in Iraq actually functioned in the interwar years. In so doing, these memoirs can also play an important role in mitigating contemporary polemics around the telling of the Iraqi-Jewish past. After a brief overview of the history of the Jews of Iraq and the historiographical issues that surround it, this article will focus on two memoirs—those of Naim Kattan and Heskel Haddad—both of which provide nuanced evidence of the multifaceted identity of the last generation of Iraqi Jews. Born only two years apart, both Kattan and Haddad grew up in Baghdad in the 1930s and 1940s and, unlike the vast majority of Iraqi Jews who lived in Israel after 1951, had resettled in North America by the early 1950s. As we shall see, despite the many differences in the sensibilities, career paths, and political orientations of Kattan and Haddad, there are a number of similarities in their memoirs that testify to the rupture with traditional modes of identification and ways of relating to the surrounding society that were taking place in Iraq of their day. These memoirs convey the painful reality of Iraqi Jews coming of age in the interwar years, who were [End Page 19] both fully embedded in Arab Iraqi society, and increasingly faced with the impossibility of carving out a future for themselves within it. The Distinctive History of the Jews of Iraq In order to understand the particularities of the Jews of Iraq, we must turn briefly to the larger social, political, and cultural context in which that community evolved in the modern era. Whereas patterns of acculturation differed widely across class and geographic boundaries, for most Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in the colonial era, modernization became synonymous with Westernization. The Jews of Iraq offer a notable exception: although a part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century, the Turkish administration had little influence over the region until the Tanzimat reforms. Intended to modernize the empire along Western lines, these mid-nineteenth-century reforms strengthened the powers of Turkish administrators and guaranteed all religious communities equal protection under the law.1 These changes paved the way for the entry of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU or Alliance) into Iraq, providing educational opportunities to Jews that, as elsewhere in the Arab world, gave them an advantage over their Muslim brethren in terms of the acquisition of European languages and familiarity with European cultural mores.2 By the late nineteenth century, a number of Jews had obtained positions in the Ottoman administration, and increasing British influence in the region brought opportunities for Jews to become major players in the burgeoning world of banking and commerce.3 Importantly, however, for the Jews of Iraq, these economic and political changes were not accompanied by the kind of cultural transformation that we saw elsewhere in the Arab world. While distinguished from non-Jews by their dialect, their dress, their religious observance...

Uphill political struggle: Joseph Trumpeldor in Japan and Manchuria, 1904‒1906

Russian-Jewish army officer Joseph Trumpeldor (1880–1920) was arguably the most celebrated Jewish military hero of the first half of the twentieth century. He lost his left arm during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and endured a year-long Japanese imprisonment. In 1905–1906, en route back to European Russia, Trumpeldor visited the Manchurian city of Harbin and attempted to impart Zionism to the local Russian-Jewish population, albeit with very limited success. Trumpeldor’s personal commitment to Zionism received its fullest expression in 1912 when he emigrated to Kibbutz Degania in Ottoman Palestine and subsequently died in defence of the Tel Hai farming community. His career inspired the Zionist movement named after him, Brit Trumpeldor. Abbreviated BETAR, it influenced leaders of the Jewish exodus from China in 1948–1949 and energised the Herut/Likud parties in Israel. Viewing Trumpeldor as only partially successful in his political efforts in Japan and Manchuria may somewhat tarnish the myth of the one-armed soldier and pioneering farmer. The inclusion of the Japanese and Manchurian dimensions of Trumpeldor’s uphill political struggle situates this hero within a far more realistic, and less Eurocentric, context.

“Between the straits”: Jewish immigration to the United States and Palestine, 1915–1925

ABSTRACTFrom 1919 to 1925, some 400,000 Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to the United States and Palestine. The central thesis of this article is that the profile of the Jewish exodus before World War I differed from the postwar flow. Above all, Jews who had escaped the carnage of the Ukrainian Civil War (1918–1920) were more akin to refugees than immigrants. The first of this article’s three parts revolves around Jewish emigration during World War I via Siberia to Vladivostok or to the Chinese town of Harbin, whereupon they continued to the port of Yokohama and sailed to the US Pacific coast. The second part focuses on new immigration policies that were rolled out by the authorities in the United States and Palestine between 1921 and 1924. Lastly, the third part delves into comparative and demographic aspects of Jewish migration during the 1920s.

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

Much debate surrounds whether American Jews constitute a religious, racial, ethnic, or cultural group. Lila Corwin Berman's Metropolitan Jews posits urbanism as another key component of American Jewish identity. Berman is not the first historian to write about Jewish connections to city life, but her monograph of postwar Detroit offers a distinctive perspective on what she defines as “metropolitan urbanism” (p. 5). Metropolitan Jews assesses Jewish residential patterns, political advocacy, and economic pursuits in the greater Detroit region from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. In recounting the Jewish exodus from Detroit in the 1960s, Berman tells a familiar story of white flight, but she also notices a resilient urbanism. Detroit Jews fled Detroit neighborhoods at rates similar to those of other white ethnic groups, but their “metropolitan consciousness” kept them anchored in urban institutions and political life (p. 7). Unlike other ethnic groups, Jews never fully divested from the city that offered them unprecedented freedom, protection, and access to power. A metropolitan identity enabled Jews to expand the scope of the city and redefine their place in it. Berman shows how Jewish urbanism became a way to stem the tide of suburbanization, secularization, and middle-class consumerism. As Jews moved out of Detroit in the late 1950s and mid-1960s their ingrained urbanism transformed from local advocacy to broader city, state, and national causes. Maintaining a connection to the city became a way of asserting a Jewish identity grounded in cosmopolitan and liberal values.

The 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots: the Jewish exodus of Thrace through the lens of nationalism and collective violence

This article analyses the causes and the dynamic process of production of the 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots. The article, based on the US State Department Records, British Documents on Foreign Affairs and the Turkish Republic’s Prime Ministry Republican Archives as well as Turkish, US and British newspapers, argues that the 1934 anti-Jewish Thrace riots were not spontaneous occurrences caused by over-excited masses, but instead planned actions by some local state elite and Republican People’s Party (RPP) local officials as well as anti-Semitic Turkish ultra-nationalists. The article argues that it was not popular anti-Semitism, but the Turkish state establishment’s security concerns vis-à-vis the perceived Italian and Bulgarian threat that resulted in the riots. The local state elite and RPP local officials, who were uneasy about the economically well-off Jews, acted as ethno-nationalist entrepreneurs by allowing the ultra-nationalists to operate in the riot-prone Thrace, while the rioters mainly participated in the collective violence to receive economic gains as a result of the expulsion of the Jews.

President Truman and the Jewish DPs, 1945–46: The Untold Story

President Truman and the Jewish DPs, 1945–46: The Untold Story Mel Schiff (bio) Accounts of how the administration of President Harry S. Truman treated Jewish displaced persons (DPs) at the close of World War II allude to “operational support” of the clandestine Jewish exodus from Europe to British Mandate Palestine. While the recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 is a well-known legacy of Truman’s, did he participate in the formation years of modern Israel prior to that time? And, particularly, did he support what became known as the 20th-century Jewish exodus from Europe to British Mandate Palestine? If so, why has this not been part of the American history dialogue of the post-World War II and Holocaust eras? For decades, Americans have heard their presidents, and even presidential candidates, support the State of Israel with ubiquitous phrases such as calling Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “America’s ally” and noting that Israel’s population has turned deserts into farmland and developed high tech industries. Regardless of international and domestic setbacks, the expected phrases pour forth consistently from the major political parties. Is this phenomenon simply a quest for political advantage, or is there a historic, raison d’etre underlying the American connection to Israel? When he was a presidential candidate in 1960, John F. Kennedy stated that “Israel was not created in order for it to disappear—Israel will endure and flourish.”1 Twenty-two years later, President Ronald Reagan remarked, “Back in 1948, when Israel was founded, pundits claimed the new country could never survive.”2 Rather than refer to Truman’s “recognition of the State of Israel in 1948,” which is usually the touchstone of American support for Israel, they utilized the words “created” and “founded,” which naturally preceded Truman’s historic recognition. Truman’s behind-the-scene role is still not yet part of the American recollection of mid-20th-century history because Truman wanted it to be [End Page 327] kept secret for many years, as this paper notes, and all of the participating entities, governmental and civilian, cooperated in that effort. Soon after Truman became president, his humanitarian concern for the people who had suffered most under the Nazi regime led him to become not only a primary motivator and facilitator in the major rehabilitation programs for Jewish displaced persons, but also, most significantly, a moving force in the clandestine exodus of thousands of Jews from Europe to British Mandate Palestine during several years prior to 1948. Search and Uncover: “The Untold Story” Revealed Truman’s actions regarding the Jewish DPs has remained a truly untold story, primarily because of a cryptic statement that appears in both of Truman’s memoirs: “For reasons of national security and out of consideration for some people still alive, I have omitted certain material. Some of this material cannot be made available for many years, perhaps for many generations.”3 Documents now available shed light on Truman’s actions and their rationale. The implementation of Truman’s policy supported Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the American Zone of Austria, in cooperating with refugee aid organizations. Those organizations included the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint, or the JDC); the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA); and agents of the clandestine Mossad LeAliyah Bet, defined as “the Committee for Illegal Immigration.”4 While all participated to improve the lives of thousands of Jewish DPs encamped in Austria’s American Zone, they also partnered with the United States in underground operations to facilitate the transit of Jews through Austria in their quest to reach British Palestine. [End Page 328] The Jewish Non-repatriables Millions of refugees were spread throughout Europe when, on May 5, 1945, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower directed all DPs to remain in place and await orders.5 The U.S. military then commenced a massive program to repatriate those who wished to return to their native countries, if those nations approved. Eisenhower had been newly designated the Combined Displaced Persons Executive in the wake of the July 14, 1945 termination of the Supreme Headquarters American Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). He realized by September of that...

The reinvention of the Promised Land: utopian space and time in Soviet Jewish exodus literature

The Jewish underground movement in the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s produced literature that became a part of the counterculture of Soviet dissent. For the first time in decades, Russian Jews identified, to a significant degree, as people of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). The battle for the return to Israel and the new Jewish renaissance in the intellectual sphere of the unofficial led to the emergence of new topographical concepts, which were inspired primarily by the Jewish cultural tradition. In fact, the exodus texts written in the 1960s–1980s represented a new, late Soviet shaping of Zionist prose. They relate to the symbol of the Promised Land as a fundamental projection of aspirations. Late Soviet Zionist texts share the traditional Jewish vision of Israel as an imagined topos of the original homeland that is both retrospective (with reference to the biblical promise of the land and the seizure of Canaan) and prospective (return and redemption). The Exodus story contained in Sefer Shemot becomes a leading poetic, philosophical and at times religiously charged metaphor of liberation and reunification. The re-strengthened collective memory of tradition required biblical symbols to be imbued with new semiotic power.This paper will show that the historical dimension of the events dealt with in the literature often has strong mystical and mythological traits and displays messianic-apocalyptic hopes of salvation. However, alternative literary space and time models represented in the aliyah literature hereby betray their rootedness in the teleology of the communist regime. The powerful Israel utopia reflects both the eschatological time of the Soviet empire and its phantasms of paradise on earth. Late Soviet Zionism and totalitarian discourse are shown to be two space-time utopias.

The E180splice mutation in the GHR gene causing Laron syndrome: Witness of a Sephardic Jewish exodus from the Iberian Peninsula to the New World?

Laron syndrome (LS) is a genetic disorder caused by mutations in the growth hormone receptor (GHR) gene. The most frequent GHR mutation is E180splice (rs121909360), which was initially found in an inbred population of Spanish descent in Ecuador and subsequently in Israel, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. The aim of the present study is to determine if the E180splice mutation arose from a common origin. We studied 22 patients with LS from Ecuador, Israel (of Moroccan origin), Brazil, Chile, and the United States (of Mexican origin) who were homozygous for the E180splice mutation and compared them to control individuals for markers surrounding the GHR, intragenic polymorphisms, and Y-chromosome STR. An identical haplotype was found in all but one of the subjects carrying the E180splice mutation: D5S665: 150/150; D5S2082: 192/192; D5S2087: 246/246; rs6179 G/G; and rs6180 C/C. One patient differed from the others only at D5S2082 (168/192). This haplotype is rare (~1%) in control individuals and confirmed that the E180splice-associated haplotype was not derived from independent origins but represented recombination from a common ancestor. The analysis of paternal lineage markers showed that 50% belong to haplogroup R1b (found in Portugal and Spain) and 40% to haplogroups J and E (typical in the Middle East and in Eastern European Jews). The germline E180Splice mutation appears to have originated from a single common ancestor. The presence of Y-chromosome markers associated with Sephardic populations in persons harboring the E180splice mutation provides genetic evidence in support of the historical tracking of the exodus of this specific population.

Where Have All the Craftsmen Gone?: The Internationalization of the Yemeni Economy and the Economic Impact of the Jewish Exodus From Yemen (1949–1951)

For well over a century, Yemen was forcibly politically and economically isolated from the modernizing Middle East region surrounding it. The large-scale and hurried exodus of the Jewish population of craftsmen in 1949 inadvertently provided the impetus and the means to internationalize the consumer economy in Yemen. According to trade data from the British colony of Aden, in the years immediately following the Jewish exodus, there was a significant increase in the imports of goods normally associated with the community of Jewish craftsmen. Funded by a concurrent increase in purchasing power acquired from the property of the departing Jews, Yemeni Arabs were able to replace the lost Jewish craftsmanship monopoly with imported alternatives, finally drawing Yemen into the global economy, albeit several decades behind the rest of the region.

Apollonius Rhodius, Cyzicus, and the Near East

The article explores some ritual nuances in Books 1 and 4 of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. We argue that the experience of the Argonauts at Cyzicus in Book 1 recalls initiation rites in mystery cults, most prominently that of Cybele. Furthermore, Apollonius seems to have been familiar with Jewish cultic traditions and has overlaid his narration with patterns derived from the Jewish Exodus. In particular, the notion of reclaiming one’s fatherland, constantly reiterated in Exodus, is utilised by Apollonius in Book 4 in relation to Cyrene, which will, as Euphemus relates, eventually be restored to the Ptolemies (lines 1730-54). Awareness of the rich nexus of cultures and cults that characterises the Argonautica is crucial to explaining the peculiar customs described by Apollonius in Book 1 and to appreciating the historical context of the work and its purposes, which are highlighted in Book 4.

Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)

In her article "Forgács's Film and Installation Dunai exodus (Danube Exodus)" Zsófia Bán analyzes film maker and video artist Péter Forgács's film The Danube Exodus (1998) and compares it with the installation Dunai exodus. A folyó beszédes áramlatai (Rippling: Currents of the River) (2002). Combined with additional materials, the two works are based on footage by ship captain Nándor Andrásovits documenting two successive journeys of forced displacement aboard his vessel, the Queen Elizabeth. Bán's analysis includes the 1939 event of the Jewish exodus from Slovakia to the Black Sea with the eventual goal of reaching Palestine followed by repatriating Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich, who were relocated in occupied Poland on land of evicted Polish families. Bán investigates the medium specific differences of the film versus the installation and the different ways in which the two works offer access to the experience of history turning the journeys of dislocation into an exploration and discovery of the two filmmakers, as well as the protagonists' and the viewers' individual and collective memories.

Review: The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977-1985

Review: The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977-1985

The Ethiopian Jewish exodus: narratives of the migration journey to Israel, 1977-1985

The Ethiopian Jewish exodus: narratives of the migration journey to Israel, 1977-1985

The Jewish Exodus from the New South Africa: Realities and Implications

In the 1990s, the Jewish population of South Africa declined at an unprecedented rate in marked contrast to Jewish populations in other English‐speaking countries.Possible explanations include fear of political instability and political violence, deteriorating economic conditions and prospects, fear of directly discriminatory government policies, rising violent crime rates, and more permissive immigration policies in desirable destination countries.All but the last of these factors appear to have played some role. However, only changes in violent crime rates provide an explanation for the unprecedented surge in net emigration, persisting even after a successful political and economic transition to majority black rule under moderate African National Congress governments.Changes in crime rates also provide the most satisfactory explanation for related changes in internal migration patterns.

Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed

Across the country, white ethnics have fled cities for suburbs. But many stayed in their old neighbourhoods. When the busing crisis erupted in Boston in the 1970s, Catholics were in the forefront of resistance. Jews, 70,000 of whom has lived in Roxbury and Dorchester in the early 1950s, were invisible during the crisis. They were silent because they departed the city more quickly and more thoroughly than Boston's Catholics. Only scattered Jews remained in Dorchester and Roxbury by the mid-1970s. In telling the story of why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed in 1970s Boston, Gerald Gamm places neighbourhood institutions - churches, synagogues, community centres, schools - at its centre. He challenges the assumption that bankers an real estate agents were responsible for the rapid Jewish exodus. Rather, basic institutional rules explain the strength of Catholic attachments to neighbourhood and the weakness of Jewish attachments. Gamm argues that the transformation of urban neighbourhoods began not in the 1950s or 1960s but in the 1920s.