Jonathan Dekel-Chen

East European Jewish migration: inside and outside

This introductory article provides an overview of modern Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. It engages the foundational historiography of the field and explores intersections of Jewish migration with general migration theory. In addition to framing the six articles in this special collection, this essay presents longue durée factors linking todays post-Soviet diaspora communities on three continents with social and political trends beginning in the late nineteenth century and during the interwar period and postwar periods.

Crimea 2008: a lesson about uses and misuses of history

This essay considers a new, troubling development in the former Soviet Union. It calls for historians to be attentive and thereby perhaps to forestall or minimise potential damage to Jews and Jewish interests in the former Soviet Union which might result from the use and misuse of history. The essay assesses recent statements from a former minister in Russia regarding Jewish agricultural settlement in Crimea during the interwar period. These statements echo monstrous antisemitic fabrications from the High Stalinist years and suggest that Jews in the former Soviet Union may still be vulnerable to the effects of old Soviet‐style habits of historical manipulation.

Activism as Engine: Jewish Internationalism, 1880s–1980s

This essay proposes what may seem to some an outlandish idea, namely that the emergence of modern Jewish internationalism had little to do with conceptions of nationhood or even Judaism. It was not a religious movement in the conventional sense, nor was it a relatively abstract, imagined community of the type described by Benedict Anderson.1 Rather, the spread of transnational ties across class, ethnic and denominational lines was a product of the practice of philanthropy and advocacy begun in the mid-nineteenth century. This internationalism can be defined as a sort of peoplehood (umah in Hebrew), reflected and forged by increasing circles of activism for one’s coreligionists, strikingly similar to the Islamic umma examined by Francis Robinson and Amira Bennison elsewhere in this volume. To borrow a term from Robinson, Jewish internationalism is a community of opinion; to refine it further, it is a community of action informed by a vague communal and traditional religious consciousness.

Transnational intervention and its limits: the case of interwar Poland

ABSTRACT This article reassesses the efforts by western Jews to rescue their imperilled European brethren in the years before and during the Second World War. It goes beyond the conventional question, “Could more have been done to rescue European Jewry?” Rather, the article explores what Jewish leaders learned about the global practice of philanthropic relief during the decades before the rise of European fascism and hyper-nationalism. It then asks how this accumulated knowledge may have informed their decisions once they understood the dangers faced by Jews in Germany, Poland, and Romania. This holistic analysis of actions taken by transnational leaders accounts for operational precedents, geo-politics, migration regimes, diaspora networks, organizational history, intra-communal relations, and economics and contemporary orientations toward aid. All these create a realistic reckoning of the strengths and limitations of Jewish transnationalism at the time, allowing us to transcend value-based judgements of this painful chapter in Jewish history.