Abstract: En cette fin de XXe, début de XXIe siècles, l'Europe a connu de multiples bouleversements sociaux, dont la chute du bloc soviétique. Une approche anthropologique des juifs d'ex-RDA aujourd'hui constituait dans ce cadre un sujet d'analyse fort intéressant. Considérées dans les pratiques effectives de ses acteurs, les Gemeinden juives de Saxe et de Berlin, communautés institutionnelles allemandes, nous ont permis d'appréhender le mécanisme spécifique de construction d'une identité. La judéité se meut actuellement au travers de la négociation de plusieurs variables différentes, telles que la religiosité, l'ethnicité ou la mémoire. Une analyse transversale, s'appuyant sur le mécanisme d'assignation interne et externe concomitants,permet de mettre en exergue, dans leurs formulations actuelles d'une part et dans leurs incohérences ou inadaptations d'autre part, les différents outils conceptuels à disposition dans ce mécanisme d'élaboraton. Ainsi, peut-on évoquer un retour à la religion pour les juifs immigrés de l'ex-Union soviétique aujourd'hui en ex-RDA ? La notion de communauté est-elle pertinente dans la désignation des juifs d'ex-RDA ? Comment comprendre la gestion du passé historique de l'Allemagne, après 50 ans de communisme, pour les juifs qui y résident actuellement ? Autant de questions trames de cette thèse, auxquelles nous tentons de répondre ici, par une analyse la plus fine possible de la réalité sociale juive existante aujourd'hui en ex-RDA.
Abstract: This article analyzes the attitudes of 25 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, now living in Germany, toward Jews, the Holocaust, Israel, and the Middle East conflict. It reveals both anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments among many of the respondents, as well as a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, and a wide range of attitudes between individual participants. Some of the factors influencing attitudes include everyday knowledge in the countries of origin, Arab nationalism, as well as specific religious and ethnic identities. The findings are discussed in relation to other recent studies, and against the backdrop of German media discourse, current debates about an “imported” antisemitism among refugees and migrants, and the relationship between experiences of racial discrimination and anti-Jewish attitudes.
Abstract: In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
Abstract: This response puts Tzuberi's analysis into a broader comparative context. First, the post-1990 attempt to create Jews in the image of the liberal-secular German nation-state met considerable resistance by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. In addition, the majority of post-Soviet Jews showed no interest in liberal Jewish theology or the fantasy of reviving the German-Jewish past. Second, the milieu of Judaizing Germans (core architects of German-Jewish revivalism) shows a strong resemblance to other attempts of escaping colonial whiteness, including patterns of what has been called »ethnic fraud.« Third, in comparison to other cases of minority repatriation, the German practice of expiatory demographic engineering was relatively cost-intensive, but contributed considerably to the country's »nation re-branding« after reunification. Fourth, the German politics of reforestation vis-à-vis its Jewish community points to the rise of a post-migratory »gardening state,« heavily invested in regulating its diverse population through a policy mix of migration, education and surveillance.
Abstract: In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.
Abstract: Jewish emigration from Israel of the recent decades brought the creation of the communities of Israeli passport holders in the various countries of the world, including Russia and other post-Soviet states. Although this fact is commonly accepted as a totally new phenomenon, the returned migration of Russian and other Jews, who first immigrated to their historical Homeland - the Land of Israel/Palestine, and in a period of time came back to Russia has centuries-long history. In the 17th - 19th centuries this trend included Jerusalem and other Palestine Jewish communities' envoys, educators and fundraisers, who visited Russian and East European Jewish communities and sometimes stayed there for years, as well as Russian Jewish pilgrims to the Holy Land, who on returning were often respected as «representatives» of the Land of Israel and its Jewry. Some members of First, Second and Third Zionist Aliyot (waves of Jewish ideological repatriation) to the Land of Israel/Palestine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries created another substantial group of «Israeli Returnees» to Russia and the USSR. The article shows that typical patterns of immigrants from the Palestine to Russia and the early USSR are very close to, or even similar with «ideological re-immigrants», envoys, labor migrants, «economic refugees», and other relevant subgroups among current Israeli diaspora in Russia and the CIS.
Abstract: Israelis form a unique case in the field of diaspora studies. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948 it was seen as the longed-for end to the wandering and oppression which had characterized the Jewish diaspora over the centuries. For various reasons, however, about ten percent of the Israeli population chooses to live abroad despite the condemnation of those who see emigration as a threat to the ideological, demographic, and moral viability of Israel itself. The rejection of emigration from Israel is a central assumption in all forms of Zionism as a corollary of the «negotiation of diaspora» which was a central tenet of Israeli Zionist education. During the recent years many educated young people, relatively recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, have emigrated to the West, and also emigration (which could not be described as returning migration) to Russia is now fairly widespread. The employment market in Russia is flexible, and free market policies lead to competition for talented young graduates who enjoy breathtaking opportunities and high salaries, in comparison to Israel. These migration waves create a new phenomenon - the Russian-speaking transnational post-Israeli diaspora. These people feel free to choose, on purely instrumental grounds, their target society - Israel, when conditions seem favorable, Russia, if it seems to offer more, and for the same reasons, the United States or other Western countries. The Russian-speaking post-Israeli immigrants do not aspire to «get home», but rather to reach a place where they can «build a home». The problem of emigration from Israel is far more serious than suggested by previously published data, which concentrated on the extent of emigration, the countries chosen, and the motivation for leaving. Emigrants are not a representative sample of the population. The proportion of well educated individuals among emigrants is significantly greater than this proportion in the overall population. The emigration of the most talented citizens and the slump in immigration is a problem in itself, but it must also be understood as a symptom of a general failure by the State of Israel to create a society capable of attracting and keeping the best and brightest of the Jewish people.
Abstract: В статье рассматриваются некоторые понятия и термины, связанные с такими явлениями, как миграции, диаспора, постсоветские диаспоры, транснациональные сообщества. Опираясь на различные социологические исследования, автор доказывает, что современные российские евреи не являются классической диаспорой, а также так называемой «новой еврейской диаспорой». В настоящее время они представляют часть русскоязычного транснационального сообщества, базирующегося на системе различных связей. В то же время автор подчеркивает, что такое сообщество имеет временный характер, поскольку иммигранты во втором и третьем поколении все более полно интегрируются в принимающих обществах, в том числе в израильском.
Abstract: Several exhibitions in recent years – in the ‘Deutsches Auswandererhaus’ Bremerhaven and other museums in Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States – have used suitcases (and ‘the suitcase’) as a central symbol and metaphor for the migration process. Based on a variety of examples, the article discusses the idea and the use of memory containers – and their function as archives – in the context of emigration, transmigration, and immigration. Suitcases are the most obvious material objects relating to these processes and the connected cultural practices. They are concrete objects, but beyond that they have been used as symbols and metaphors for the experience of travel and of dislocation. Suitcases often contained, and therefore are connected to, other items of memory storage: photographs and personal documents (letters, diaries about the migration experience – documents that have been termed, in a different context, ‘Schreibakte auf der Schwelle’ – acts of writing on the threshold); manuscripts, farewell letters (written on the boat, in border stations, in port cities), memorial and yizkor books, songs and poems, self-drawn maps which show the stations of the journey. An analysis of such ‘things’ – material objects which often carried an emotional value – and their representation in museums and exhibitions opens up a wide and rich field of research for the ethnography of migration.
Abstract: Immigration et mise en œuvre du processus d’extermination nazi ont forgé le destin commun de nombre de familles juives en France. Leur patrimoine photographique est à l’image de ces événements, fait de ruptures et de traces en pointillées. Ces photos surprennent bien des fois, émeuvent et surtout instruisent. De ce déracinement à la fois géographique et culturel, plusieurs d’entre elles en ont conservé la trace. C’est à partir de l’étude croisée de visuels représentant le costume traditionnel dans l’aire maghrébine, choisie pour exemple et, par corollaire, de l’analyse onomastique de ceux qui en sont revêtus, qu’il est possible de distinguer les différentes facettes du processus de mutation et, ainsi, mieux apprécier les étapes de ce qu’il est convenu de qualifier de marche à la modernité, une modernité où acculturation et sécularisation sont largement imbriquées.
