The Jewish Diaspora After 1945

For Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel was a transformational period—in both the build-up to it and its aftermath. Using this momentous event as its focal point, this book takes the reader on a journey to remote destinations in the 20th century Jewish experience, examining aspects of Jewish history that have hardly ever been discussed in one place and in such an intriguing combination. Jews have played an integral role in the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and North Africa for millennia. Their lives were intertwined with those of the majority non-Jewish communities among whom they dwelt: their mass expulsion and emigration after World War II ended the existence of a vital part of nearly all the societies in the region.

These, combined with the memory of Nazi genocide, the persistence of antisemitism, the development of Israel, and the Middle East conflicts, shaped the history of European Jewry in the second half of the twentieth century.

The emergence of the state of Israel has fundamentally changed the conditions of Jewish existence. The issues now facing Jews everywhere are totally different to those that confronted them only fifty years ago. This book provides the only thoroughly worldwide modern history of the Jews of the Diaspora. Robert Wistrich has drawn together an outstanding collection of authors from the United States, Europe and Israel in order to analyse the immense changes that have taken place since 1945 in a comprehensive, yet original, manner. Cultural, religious, domestic, political, economic and occupational transformations in Jewry are addressed in up-to-date studies. Terms of Survivalreframes the nature of the debate by highlighting continuity and change in the position of the Jews throughout the world.

For as long as historians have contemplated the Jewish past, they have engaged with the idea of diaspora. Dedicated to the study of transnational peoples and the linkages these people forged among themselves over the course of their wanderings and in the multiple places to which they went, the term "diaspora" reflects the increasing interest in migrations, trauma, globalism, and community formations. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora acts as a comprehensive collection of scholarship that reflects the multifaceted nature of diaspora studies. Persecuted and exiled throughout their history, the Jewish people have also left familiar places to find better opportunities in new ones. But their history has consistently been defined by their permanent lack of belonging. This Oxford Handbook explores the complicated nature of diasporic Jewish life as something both destructive and generative. Contributors explore subjects as diverse as biblical and medieval representations of diaspora, the various diaspora communities that emerged across the globe, the contradictory relationship the diaspora bears to Israel, and how the diaspora is celebrated and debated within modern Jewish thought. What these essays share is a commitment to untangling the legacy of the diaspora on Jewish life and culture. This volume portrays the Jewish diaspora not as a simple, unified front, but as a population characterized by conflicting impulses and ideas. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora captures the complexity of the Jewish diaspora by acknowledging the tensions inherent in a group of people defined by trauma and exile as well as by voluntary migrations to places with greater opportunity.

Historical work on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that as nation-states were solidifying throughout Western Europe, exiled groups tended to develop rival national identities—an occurrence that had been fairly uncommon in the two preceding centuries. Diaspora Identities draws on eight case studies, ranging from the early modern period through the twentieth century, to explore the interconnectedness of exile, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism as concepts, ideals, attitudes, and strategies among diasporic groups. Die hier versammelten Studien eröffnen neue Perspektiven auf Nationalismus und Kosmopolitismus. Sie machen deutlich, dass schon vor dem »nationalen « 19. Jahrhundert im Kontext von Diaspora, Exil und Migration Identitäten und Verhaltensweisen entstanden, die zugleich kosmopolitisch und nationalistisch waren.

Explores Jewish emigration from Palestine and Israel during the critical period between 1945 and the late 1950s by weaving together the perspectives of governments, aid organizations, Jewish communities and the personal stories of individual migrants.

Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas explores how the 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco developed a sense of kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Hispanophone world that was unlike anything experienced elsewhere. The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, as this group is often called by its scholars and its community leaders, also became one of the most mobile and globally dispersed North African groups in the twentieth century, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, and the US, among others. Drawing on an array of communal sources from across this diaspora, Aviad Moreno explores how narratives of ancestry in Spain, Israel, Morocco, and several Latin American countries interconnected the diaspora, empowering its hubs across the globe throughout the twentieth century and beyond. By investigating these mechanisms of diaspora formation in a small community that once shared the same space in Morocco,Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas challenges national accounts of the broader Jewish diasporas and adds complexity to the annals of multilayered ethnic communities on the move.

After Representation? explores one of the major issues in Holocaust studiesùthe intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature. As experts in the study of literature and culture, the scholars in this collection examine the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveal how writersùwhether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from the Nazi genocideùarticulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, and between the condition of life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence. What imaginative literature brings to the study of the Holocaust is an ability to test the limits of language and its conventions. After Representation? moves beyond the suspicion of representation and explores the changing meaning of the Holocaust for different generations, audiences, and contexts.