All tagged Jewish refugees
This post uses Helmut Newton’s provocative memoir, Autobiography, to explore how the ocean-going liner, as a mode of transportation, informed Jewish refugees’ experiences between 1938 and 1940. What did they do during their journey onboard Shanghai-bound ships? By joining Newton on the ship, this post draws connections between Holocaust Studies and Refugee Studies to reveal the significance of these vessels as a ‘space of possibilities’ for Jewish refugee passengers.
There has been a recent global turn within Holocaust Studies: a growing body of scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees and the Holocaust in contexts that had been previously ignored, and highlights how those experiencing the war in Europe did so in different ways to those living through the conflict in other parts of the world. This post focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.
In her book Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, Becky Taylor carefully explores the reception, experiences and significance of refugees in Britain across the twentieth century. Time and time again, she demonstrates how closely bound up the refugees’ lives have been with the British public’s own experiences of changing political and social factors, whether these two groups come face to face or not, and however much of a gulf the media may lead people to believe exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Making sense of a huge range and diversity of sources, the book beautifully demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of British society, and the many ways refugees encountered these complexities.
Two weeks into 1947, Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council) president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote to Mandate Palestine’s high commissioner, Alan Cunningham, after receiving news from Peshawar and Bombay regarding an allegedly large number of Afghan Jewish refugees in India. A delegation of Palestine’s Jewish citizens originally from Afghanistan had recently warned Ben-Zvi that between 300 and 400 Afghan Jews – clustered in temporary housing in India and cared for by the charity of others – faced immediate danger as they waited on immigration certificates for Palestine.
This seems a good moment to remember Britain’s well-established tradition of repelling refugees from its shores.
As the persecution of Jews and dissidents in Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria intensified in the summer of 1938, and as the liberal democracies which surrounded its territories imposed more and tougher visa restrictions and hardened their borders against refugees, those seeking refuge started to look for other means to enter safe countries. Those who had reached France, but feared that the country might soon be in line for invasion, or who already had relatives in Britain, started to enter the country illegally.
