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The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in ReliefPolicies and Human Rights Debates, 1945–1950Gerard Daniel Cohen aa Rice University, Department of History , Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005, USA E-mail:Published online: 24 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Gerard Daniel Cohen (2006) The Politics of Recognition: Jewish Refugees in Relief Policies and HumanRights Debates, 1945–1950, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 24:2, 125-143,DOI: 10.1080/02619280600863572

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The Politics of Recognition:Jewish Refugees in Relief Policiesand Human Rights Debates,1945–1950Gerard Daniel Cohen

This essay analyses the place of Jewish survivors in the refugee system

established by the West in the aftermath of the Second World War. Departingfrom the literature of trauma and mourning, this article addresses Holocaust

survivors as migrant refugees subjected to international categorisations, reliefpolicies and human rights debates. Between 1945 and 1950, Jewish refugees

were recognised as an ideal-type community of victims by westernhumanitarianism. Recognition entailed symbolic and material entitlements,

and eventually rewarded Holocaust survivors with historical, political andterritorial vindication. As opposed to other refugee groups who entered the

market of international compassion in the 1940s, Jewish refugees were grantedfull status of political victims.Keywords: Jews; refugees; displaced persons; relief policies; human rights;

Holocaust

For a long time viewed as the last chapter of the Holocaust and the firstchapter of Israeli history, Jewish displaced persons (DPs) have in the last 15

years finally emerged as autonomous objects of historical research.Although Jewish life in Germany between 1945 and 1950 was transitory, it

ISSN 0261-9288 (print)/ISSN 1744-0521 (online) q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/02619280600863572

Gerard Daniel Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Rice University. His

research interests are in the field of political migration in twentieth-century Europe.

Correspondence to: Gerard Daniel Cohen, Department of History, Rice University, Houston

77005, TX, USA; E-mail: gdcohen@rice.edu

Immigrants & Minorities

Vol. 24, No. 2, July 2006, pp. 125–143

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amounted to more than a suffocating ‘waiting room’. As is clear from theabundant literature recently dedicated to this topic, the Jewish DP

experience is no longer reducible to idle anticipations of ‘redemption’ inIsrael or new beginnings overseas. Through a reversal of perspective, the

‘human dust’ depicted in numerous post-war accounts has been revisitedthrough the lens of historical agency. To be sure, this historiographical

construction of a dynamic – even if deeply traumatised – She’erithHapleitah (The Surviving Remnant) was prompted by conflicting

motivations. Historians of the Brichah – the flight and rescue of Jewsthrough illegal immigration to Palestine – have traditionally framed thema’apilim (illegal immigrants) as the heroic avant-garde of an otherwise

downtrodden DP community. This approach was challenged by moreinclusive studies of ‘Life Reborn’, the formidable drive (political, religious,

educational) towards Jewish regeneration and normalisation on the‘blood-soaked soil’ of Germany. In particular, Zeev Mankowitz’s

meticulous analysis of prayer books, rituals of public remembrance andthe writings of prominent leaders of the She’erith Hapleitah amply

confirms what a DP song named Es bengt zich nuch a hajm (One Longs forHome) defiantly announced: ‘Now one must live because the time hascome!’1 Furthermore, scholars have recently focused on demography,

sexuality and motherhood in order to argue that the post-Holocaustexperience, usually associated with trauma and mourning, was also an

instance of empowerment and reaffirmation of life.2

Common to all these approaches, however, is a view of Jewish DPs

predominantly defined as a community of survivors. That the Holocaustwas the common experience shared by the 50,000–60,000 Jewish

concentration camp inmates liberated by the Allies in the spring of 1945goes of course without saying. Similarly, ‘Holocaust survivor’ has referred,

albeit indirectly, to the subsequent 200,000–250,000 Jewish ‘infiltrees’ intothe American zone, composed of a minority of former Partisans and a largenumber of ‘Asians’, namely, Polish Jews exiled by the Soviet Union during

the war and repatriated in 1945–46. Undeniably, the scars of the past lefton body and soul shaped the survivor identity ascribed to as well as

claimed by the She’erith Hapleitah. Such a definition, noted Israelihistorian Dalia Ofer, ‘not only reflected the Zionist understanding of what

constituted a survivor, but was also used by the survivors themselves intheir writings, public declarations, and private correspondence’.3 It is

therefore only adequate to frame the Jewish DPs as a ‘Surviving Remnant’:it was the Holocaust which prompted their unexpected settlement onGerman soil, spurred their ‘rise from the ashes’ and elicited their definitive

divorce from the European continent.

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Yet a sole focus on ‘survivors’ and ‘survival’ obscures a crucialdimension of the Jewish DP experience, that of displacement and

migration. Holocaust survivors, it is often forgotten, were part and parcelof a larger population of Eastern European ‘displaced persons’ screened

and administered by refugee agencies supervised by the United Nations(UN). Jews were a significant component of the post-war European

refugee camp system which stretched from Bremerhaven to the outskirtsof Rome. Regrouped in specific Jewish DP camps, survivors shared little

with the rest of the refugee world; but like their Polish, Baltic orUkrainian displaced counterparts, they stood at the receiving end ofrationalised population management techniques. As an expert in refugee

affairs summarised,

The great majority of refugees lived for years in camps where a paternaladministration drew up the menu, fixed meals and curfew times, chosethe cinema films, allocated accommodation, repaired footwear, washedlinen and provided toothpaste, cigarettes and chocolate according tocarefully worked out scales.4

The arrival of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) on the

scene of refugee management (1947–52) further reinforced the perceptionof Jewish survivors as transnational migrants.5 Endowed by the United

Nations with the task of swiftly carrying out the ‘resettlement’ of refugeesoutside Germany, the IRO facilitated the emigration of survivors at adramatic juncture of Jewish migration history: 1948 not only marked the

start of mass emigration to Israel but is also the year of the DP-Act passedby the Truman administration, a shift in US immigration policy which

eventually (once its many restrictions were lifted) paved the way forwidespead Jewish emigration to the ‘goldene medina’. The IRO was also

instrumental on another level: a modern-type organization with strongexperience in fieldwork, the ‘largest travel agency in history’ served as a

testing ground for the contemporary governance of political asylum in theWest.6 For instance, the identification of true ‘political’ refugees and false‘economic’ migrants, still a core screening principle today, was first

implemented by the IRO in the extraterritorial refugee universe of post-war Germany. In this context, Jewish survivors were recognized as

exceptional in their victimisation yet also perceived as migrants motivatedby traditional ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. The following quote from Jacques

Vernant’s semi-official survey of refugees in the post-war world (publishedas a book in 1953 but initially commissioned by the United Nations in

1951) is revealing of the dual identity of survivors and migrants ascribed toJews by post-war international migration discourse:

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It is especially difficult to distinguish between the refugee and thesimple migrant in the case of the Jews. Many of the Jews pleadedpersecution, and with good reason, but economic reasons (...)contributed doubtless to the motives for their departure. Moreover, asmost of the Jews from the eastern countries are self-employed(craftsmen, shopkeepers, etc) and follow trades which are liable todisappear as a result of the measures applied there, their aversion for theregime is prompted by both political and economic considerations.7

For the most part, this quote is misleading: Jewish survivors did not leave

the ashes of eastern Europe for economic reasons. Yet it shows thatalthough protected as victims in the regenerative environment provided by

Jewish DP camps, survivors were nonetheless approached as normalparticipants in East-West regulated migration.

This essay will consider Holocaust survivors as migrant refugeessubjected to international categorisations, relief policies and human rightsdebates. This shift of perspective requires an investigation of the place of

JewishDPs in the internationalmanagement of the ‘refugee problem’, whichinitially involved a search for pragmatic relief solutions (engaged in 1943

with the creation of the United Nations Relief and RehabilitationAdministration (UNRRA)) before turning, under the aegis of the IRO, to

political arguments about human rights and refugee protection. Thisnormalisation of survivors into migrants warrants therefore a comparative

dimension: how did Jewish refugees fare in the international governance ofdisplacement, compared to other Eastern European DPs or to their 1948nemesis, the Palestinian refugees who almost simultaneously entered the

market of international compassion? The purpose of this article is not toestablish a pointless hierarchy of victimisation, but rather, to suggest that

Holocaust survivors, constructed as a displaced and migrant population,have been forcefully recognized as a community of victims deserving of

material and symbolic entitlements. Recognitionwas first amatter of status:JewishDPs inGermanywere eventually framed, even if for a short period, as

‘ideal-types’ of asylum seekers in international refugee policies. Recognitionwas also historical: as opposed to other post-war refugee groups in Europe

or theMiddle East, Jewswere notmerely perceived as ‘war victims’deservingof humanitarian relief but also as unique targets of racial and politicalpersecution warranting historical recognition. Contrary to post-war

national environments in which, especially in western and eastern Europe,survivors were diluted into the abstract family of ‘victims of fascism’, Jewish

refugees were acknowledged as paradigmatic victims entitled to specificmigratory and ‘resettlement’ claims. Finally, recognitionwas political: it was

as displaced refugees that Jews were ultimately ‘nationalised’ as a people

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entitled to self-determination. As Dan Diner pointed out in relation toJewish DP camps in Bavaria, ‘it is arguable that the immediate founding of

the State of Israel had its beginnings in southern Germany’.8 Observed fromthis angle, the international administration of JewishDPs between 1945 and

1950 can be seen as an oft-overlooked yet important ‘judaeophile moment’in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Jews in post-war refugee definitions

The well-known Harrison report of August 1945, a scathing indictment ofthe mistreatment of Jews by the US military following the liberation of

concentration camps, is generally considered as a turning point in therehabilitation of survivors found by the Allies on German soil. From beinghandled by American authorities ‘just like Nazis treated Jews, except that

we do not exterminate them’ (to quote Earl Harrison), Jews graduallyevolved into a protected and distinctive refugee population, accommo-

dated in specific Jewish camps. As Leonard Dinerstein pointed out, theHarrison report played the role of the ‘progenitor of almost every

controversy and policy suggestion of how the Western powers shoulddisperse DPs and minimize their woes while so doing’.9 International

categorisations of displaced Jews, however, pre-dated the Harrison reportand the general outrage it provoked. Jews were initially absorbed into the

military locution ‘displaced persons’. The acronym DP lumped together allthe displaced civilians ‘outside the boundaries of [their] countries’ likely tobe encountered in Germany by advancing armies. The specific case of Jews,

however, resisted all-encompassing definitions. Should survivors be treatedas displaced nationals or stateless individuals? Should they be returned to

their home country, like the millions of Europeans swiftly repatriated inthe summer and fall of 1945, or left in Germany with uncertain status? Two

bodies, one military (the displaced persons branch of the SupremeHeadquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) and one civilian (UNRRA),

grappled with these questions in the winter of 1944.10 Both recognisedthe supranational nature of Jewish persecution by categorising survivorsas ‘United Nations nationals’ entitled to ‘preferential treatment’. The

automatic integration of Jews into the United Nations family was highlysymbolic: it pertained primarily to Eastern European Jewish survivors,

now ‘westernised’ through the formal protection ties uniting them toWestern Powers.

This unequivocal association of Jews with the victors – the GrandAlliance until 1945, theWesternAllies afterwards – collectively transformed

Jewish DPs into a group understood to be exclusively formed of authentic

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victims. This approach seems today self-evident, especially in light of thecentrality of genocide in post-1960s memories of the Second World War in

theWest. In the context of occupied Germany, however, it meant in practiceisolating Jewish victimisation apart from other recognition claims, by

placing Holocaust survivors beyond the pale of suspicion. Theadministration of displaced persons in Germany not only entailed material

assistance and rehabilitation, but also the systematic screening of the refugeepopulation, from which ‘traitors’, ‘collaborators’ and occasionally ethnic

Germanswere to be rigorously expunged. Fieldworkers underUNRRA, andmore so under the IRO, constantly feared that waves of unaccountedintruders had illegally found their way into the protected DP universe. One

official voiced this concern: ‘How many managed to slip into our campswithout being entitled to do so? And how many sought a shelter in DP

camps, merely to hide and escape retribution at home?’11 A pervasive‘atmosphere of perpetual screening’, repeatedly decried by Eastern European

DPs and their advocates, reigned in refugee camps. Applicants to DP statuswere required to provide awide range of testimonials and documents about

their identity andwartime history. ‘Such screenings’, lamented an Americanpamphlet, ‘bring real terror to displaced persons.’ Lithuanians protestedagainst the harshness of what they dubbed an ‘American-Gestapo farce’;

similarly, Ukrainians feared that the real purpose of screenings was to carryout forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. ‘Each and every question sets a

trap’, noted an observer of the DP selection process.12 As such, the screeningof displaced persons paved the way for the institutional mistrust of asylum

seekers and refugees in the second half of the twentieth century.13

Yet the basic query raised by post-war eligibility guidelines – ‘Who is a

genuine, bona fide and deserving refugee?’ – was quickly answered in thecase of Holocaust survivors. ‘Things began to run smoothly’, recalled a

refugee camp director, (...) because an order was issued from above, I thinkfrom Washington, that every Jew for the very reason that he is a Jew, iseligible for UNRRA assistance.’14 This policy was further reinforced by the

IRO: once it was ascertained that a refugee was of Jewish origin, eligibilityofficers no longer looked for further proof of wartime persecution. This

special track, rationalised an IRO official, derived from their legitimate‘right to reparation’. Jewish DPs, who often filled in the blanks of IRO

questionnaires by writing ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘Theresienstadt’ as their ‘place offormer residence’ unambiguously stood as paradigmatic victims in

eligibility guidelines. ‘As it is obvious that subject has suffered in variousKZ’, usually stated the eligibility officer, ‘I recommend DP status.’15 Eventhe handful of German and Austrian Jews who returned to their countries

of origin (all reintegrated as citizens after 1945) could obtain IRO refugee

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status, a privilege denied to non-Jewish German victims of the Nazi regimewilling to emigrate overseas. In fact, the only screening imposed on Jewish

DPs was of chronological nature, when the ‘ceiling order’ of 2 April 1947refused access to DP camps located in the American zone to Jewish

‘infiltrees’ who arrived after that date. Yet this order ‘did not specify thatfurther infiltration must stop, but only that the US army would no longer

provide care and maintenance’.16 This task was assigned to the ‘Joint’ andother Jewish welfare agencies, who by 1946 provided Jewish DPs with food

rations far superior to those given to other refugees and more so, to theGerman population at large.

The special institutional status granted to Jewish DPs in Germany also

reflected the unique place of Jews in international negotiations onDisplaced Persons after 1945. In one of the first significant instances of cold

war antagonism, Soviet-bloc countries andWestern Powers bitterly clashedover refugee protection and the notion of political persecution.17 During

the negotiations held under the auspices of the UN Economic and SocialCouncil at Lake Success in June 1946, Communist delegates supported the

idea that only those persons who wanted to return to their countriesshould be assisted by an international organization. The rest were ‘enemiesand traitors, not only of their own country, but of all the United Nations’18

who should be returned home without further ado. Conversely, WesternPowers pledged to protect displaced persons who refused to go home, even

if their idea of who could be considered a ‘true’ refugee still leaned, in 1946,towards ‘anti-fascism’ more than ‘anti-communism’. Both sides, however,

agreed that special consideration should be given to survivors. ‘How couldwe forget’, asked the French delegate Leon Jouhaux, ‘that there are 200,000

Jews among the refugees? That it is the duty of the Nations to help themforget the cruel physical and moral suffering to which they were subjected

by the Germans?’19 The Soviet position was equally supportive, even ifobviously prompted by strategic considerations. An American negotiatordescribed the Russian line as sympathetic to the plight of Jewish DPs as

well as ‘careful to avoid involvement with any controversy over Zionism’.20

Moreover, the Soviet delegate admitted that Polish Jews could not be

expected to return to Poland where anti-Semitism was on the rise; andobediently, but not without pragmatism, the communist Polish delegation

pleaded for the ‘unrepatriability’ of Jews on behalf of their extremepersecution, past and present.21

Underlying this unanimity was a radical departure from a tendency,initiated in the inter-war period by the League of Nations, to depoliticizerefugee definitions and to void humanitarianism from any political

content. The case of Armenian victims of genocide provides here the basis

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for useful comparison. Although all Armenians, by virtue of the League ofNations’ ethno-national and collective definitions of refugees, were

entitled, like Jewish survivors after 1945, to international assistance andemigration, their protection was awarded on humanitarian more than

political grounds. As recent research has shown, the internationalcommunity of the early 1920s defined Armenians primarily as victims of

the First World War, even if, as Samantha Power demonstrated, knowledgeof the unique political nature of Turkish horrors and mass murder was

widespread. The specificity of Kemalist violence was therefore dissolvedinto a ‘single globalizing cause, masking the political and ideologicalnature of victimization processes, their significance and their consequences

in the long run’. 22 In short, for reasons related to inter-war realpolitik, theNansen refugee system shied away from establishing a causal link, at least

until the mid-1930s, between the documented human rights violations of apersecutor state and the plight of a victim group. The Nansen passport,

rightly heralded as a milestone in the protection of refugees, also entailed adenial of historical and political recognition. In the vocabulary of the

League of Nations, Armenian refugees were cautiously defined as ‘anyperson of Armenian origin (...) who does not enjoy the protection of theGovernment of the Turkish Republic’.23 From this point of view, the

delayed symbolic vindication of Armenian survivors of genocide cannotonly be explained by the revisionist narrative propagated by modern

Turkey nor by the low visibility of Armenians among post-1945 victims inthe West: it is also rooted in the careful downplaying of political causality

in the early phase of humanitarian idealism.Arguably, the invisibility of perpetrator and refugee-producing states in

the language of international law is still a pillar of refugee protection today,as a careful reading of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees would

reveal. This is precisely why the place of Jewish DPs in the post-war refugeesystem can be seen as an unprecedented breach in international neutralism.To be sure, it was of course much easier, after Hitler’s defeat, for the Allies

to single out Nazi extermination policies as a justification for the‘preferential treatment’ awarded to Holocaust survivors. Contextually,

however, this differentialist approach should not be discarded as merelip service: nowhere in Europe in 1945 did national states go as far as

international bodies in acknowledging the Final Solution as a centralcomponent of the Second World War. Unexpectedly, it is in post-war

Germany – and its extraterritorial enclaves – that Jews first experiencedhistorical vindication: through the International Tribunal at Nuremberg(and the subsequent military tribunals operating until 1949), arguably

the first distinctive efforts ‘outside of Jewish circles to grasp the awful

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significance of the murder of European Jews’;24 and through theinternational protection of refugees in which survivors stood for a few

years as ideal-types of victims, before being dethroned by anti-communistdissidents after 1948.25

Many negative aspects of the Jewish DP experience could evidently leadto a more sobering appraisal: the occasional harassment of DPs by military

authorities, especially British; the stigmatisation of Jews as delinquentblack marketers; the anti-Semitism of ‘recruiting missions’ dispatched by

industrialised countries in search of ‘suitable’ immigrants, that is, non-Jewish, in the DP camps;26 and the persistence of racist bias in Germanperceptions of Jewish DPs. But constituted as a refugee population under

an international administration which acknowledged the traumatic andideological nature of their victimisation, Holocaust survivors transcended

the general categorisation of ‘war victims’ merely deserving ofhumanitarian relief. Framed as refugees and migrants, they were also

transformed into an ethnic group on the brink of ‘becoming national’.

The Nationalisation of Jewish Refugees

In a seminal article written shortly before the creation of the State of Israelbut significantly published in 1948, Nathan Feinberg, a renowned

international jurist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, asserted that theJewish people now constituted a ‘state-forming entity’ recognized in

international law.27 To make his case, Feinberg enumerated a wide range oflegal arguments mostly revolving on the ‘juridical validity’ of the Balfour

Declaration, on the decisive nationalising impact of the ‘minoritiesquestion’ in the aftermath of the First World War, and on the legal status of

the Jewish Agency for Palestine as a national body. Feinberg, however,started his expose with an historical overview of humanitarian actionscarried out on behalf of Jews from the eighteenth century to 1919. He

stated that:

It was felt necessary to offer this cursory survey (...) because it is only inthe light of these interventions that the fundamental, if not indeedrevolutionary, change in the approach of the Jewish question during theFirst World War can be adequately appreciated. Thereafter the Jewishquestion was raised to the level of a question involving a nation as awhole, an entity entitled to separate national existence and to theorganization of its life within the framework of the State (emphasisadded).28

The crucial role played by international humanitarianism in fixating Jews

as a nation, to which Feinberg alludes in his article, has been traditionally

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downplayed in the historiography of Jewish nationalism. In early and mid-century Zionist narratives of nationhood in particular (the writings of

Ben-Zion Dinur provides here a good illustration), ‘contingency’ carriedless historical weight than ‘destiny’.29 In other words, international

contributions to the rise of Jewish nationhood, decisive as they may havebeen, have generally taken the back seat to historical subjectivity, allegedly

the real engine of Jewish self-determination and national redemption. Thisexplains why, for David Ben-Gurion touring Germany in 1945, Jewish

survivors were not yet part of the national collective but remained ‘a moband human dust without language and education, without roots andwithout being absorbed in the nation’s vision and traditions’.30

In a thought-provoking essay on Jewish DPs, Dan Diner has challengedthe subservience of international factors to national will in Jewish

historiography. By focusing on the ‘subjectification’ of Jewish DPs in thepost-war international arena, Diner elevates contingency to the rank of

equal partner to destiny in the emergence of Jewish nationhood. Threecontextual factors contributed, according to Diner, to subjectify Jews as a

national entity: the 1945 Harrison Report, which defined Jews as a separatecollective; the 1946 Anglo-American Inquiry Committee on Palestine(calling for 100,000 emigration certificates to be issued to Holocaust

survivors), which sought territorial solutions for this newly-recognizeddisplaced national entity; and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Eastern

Europe, which finalised the divorce of Jews from their former country ofcitizenship and drove survivors to the nationalising environment of the US

occupation zone. Diner offers therefore an alternative reading ofregeneration: not only an internal process of ‘Life Reborn’, the focus of

current DP historiography, but also a conjunction of external yetempowering factors. He also shows that seemingly innocuous refugee

policies, such as the accommodation of Jewish survivors in specific camps,were in fact important ‘qualitative innovations’: the ultimate territor-ialization of Jewish history after 1948, argues Diner, owes much to the DP-

moment and its international ramifications.For all these reasons, Diner’s argument provides an invaluable basis for a

discussion on the post-war politics of Jewish recognition. His framework,however, can be both amended and refined. First, and very briefly, it must

be recalled that beyond the particular case of Jews, other refugee groupsended up identified as a nation after 1945: Ukrainian DPs, for instance,

started the post-war period as Soviet citizens prior to their recognition bythe West as a national entity deserving of protection.31 Second, post-wardisplacement generally reaffirmed the primacy of the nation-state, as

repatriation policies redefined the bonds of citizenship in liberated Europe,

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East and West. Third, the grouping of all DPs along national lines (‘inorder to maintain peace and cut down the number of fist fights, the IRO

tries to arrange matters so that each camp houses only one religion ornationality’)32 triggered a form of peaceful and administrative ‘ethnic

cleansing’ which paralleled the more violent exclusion of ethnic outsiderseast of the Elbe. A bishop of Polish DPs in Germany described the welcome

homogenisation of the Polish refugee population resulting from nationalisolation: ‘Now that the other groups who owned Polish citizenship were

removed (Jews, a few Ukrainians and Byelorussians) Polish DPs constitutea very cohesive group from a national and religious point of view.’33 Therefugee camp system facilitated therefore the rise of various ‘nations-in-

exile’, both Slavic and Jewish; but the nationalisation of Jewish survivors, tofollow Diner’s lead, was by far the most historically significant – and so

were its consequences.Chronologically too, Diner’s assertion that the Harrison Report

triggered special Jewish refugee policies ought to be placed in propercontext. Jews were already recognised de facto as stateless in the

preparatory phase of the Allies’ relief policies before 1945. As previouslymentioned, UNRRA formally recognized Jews as United Nations’nationals. This acknowledgement of loss of citizenship – the basis for

preferential treatment – was certainly not the result of unanimoussympathy. As Hannah Arendt cautiously observed in April 1945, the fact

that UNRRA

was allowed to care for Jews formerly of enemy nationality was only acompromise between the benevolent attitude of the governmentsrepresented on UNRRA and the unaltered principle that stateless Jewsare still citizens of the countries from which they had been banished.34

Written after the Holocaust, the Harrison report certainly was a decisivefactor in the international perception of survivors as stateless, thereby

calling for a national remedy. But the detailed genealogy of Jewishstatelessness during and after the war reveals the catalyst role played by

Jews in the advent of new and more political definitions of refugees in thepost-war era.

First, turning survivors into stateless persons ran against the militarycategorisation of refugees in 1945: ‘civilians outside their country by reasonof the war and desirous but unable to return home’.35 Almost synonymousto DP, this definition made displacement (both internal and external) theprimary feature of refugees, in keeping with the chaotic spectacle ofGerman roads bulging with displaced civilians following VE Day. Thisemphasis on displacement was also prevalent in formerly occupiedcountries. In post-1945 France and the Low Countries, various associations

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lobbied for the material compensation of ‘refugees’, understood in this caseas the displaced civilians forced out of their home by the exodus ofMay and

June of 1940. Here too, international denominations strongly contrastedwith the linguistic fate of ‘refugees’ in a national context.

The acknowledgement of Jewish statelessness in relief policies alsochallenged the apolitical refugee categorisations of the inter-war period,

which (at least until the 1936 Conference on the Legal Status of Refugeescoming from Germany) predominantly emphasized the loss of formal

citizenship (‘any person who does not enjoy in law or in fact the protectionof his own Government’) rather than the root-causes of refugeemovements. Consequently, Jewish survivors constituted a juridical

anomaly since they did not experience formal denationalisation after thewar. Polish Jews who decided to remain in communist Poland, for instance,

were all reintegrated as full citizens (the Polish citizenship of Holocaustsurvivors is now being retroactively reclaimed by some of their Israeli

offspring eager to obtain a European Union passport). A radical departurefrom the past, the statelessness awarded to Jews after 1945 was justified by

the elevation of persecution to a key component of refugee definitions.Indeed, the survivors’ refugee status derived from their wartime and post-war victimization (exemplified by the 1946 Kielce Pogrom), and not from

their loss of passport, if they ever had one. With persecution now turnedinto the pillar of refugee eligibility, the glaring obsolescence of inter-war

definitions was difficult to ignore: ‘The Refugee Convention is no longeradequate to the changed conditions’, concluded a refugee expert in 1944.36

As paradigmatic ‘persecutees’, Jewish DPs ultimately served as a matrix forpost-war human rights and international law. More precisely, it can be

argued that contemporary political asylum – the still-effective 1951Geneva Convention solidified in law the displaced persons experience –

owes its unique recognition of ‘fear of persecution’ to the precedent set bythe recognition of Jewish survivors in international refugee law.

From Political Victims to Political Nation

Replaced in its mid-1940s context, the identification of Jewish DPs as a

nation also involved another form of empowerment: the granting byrefugee administrations of a right to self-rule in the conduct of Jewish

affairs. Self-government was not in itself a Jewish privilege. As part of itspedagogical mission, the IRO advocated the creation of ‘DP-Munici-

palities’ supposed to facilitate refugee participation in the management ofDP camps.37 Jewish self-rule, however, was primarily political in nature.

Many contemporary observers acknowledged that the Central Committee

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of Liberated Jews, recognized as an official body by American occupationauthorities in 1946, aimed towards ‘Jewish emigration and resettlement,

primarily to Palestine, and to this end contributed to the politicalprogramme of the Zionist Jews’.38 The Zentral Komitet, as Zeev Mankowitz

recently reminded us, was a ‘democratically elected (...) Zionist body thatwas bound to take care of one and all’.39 The literature on survivors in

Germany rightly argued that through their embrace of Zionism Jewish DPsre-entered politics after the Holocaust. Much less discussed is the equally

important international perception of Jewish refugees as a democraticpolitical entity. The construction of Jewish DPs as ‘democratic’ was agradual process: under the combined administration of the US army and

UNRRA (1945–1947), it was Jewish criminality which mostly madeheadlines ‘with arrests for black market activities and not infrequent

violent confrontations with local Germans and American GIs’.40 Later on,however, IRO field workers found themselves impressed with the vibrancy

of Jewish politics. Found in the IRO archives, an annotated photographicrecord of elections held in a Jewish camp exemplifies this admiration: it

documents the campaigning process, the wide display of political opinions,the bitter arguments among political actors, but also a commitment to fairelections despite emotions running high: ‘arbitration and compromise’, the

survey concludes, ‘is the order of the day’.41 Significantly, it must be added,this visual source is simply entitled ‘Democracy at Work’, with no textual

indication that the pictures are about survivors in a Jewish camp. Instead,this record pertains to IRO refugees in general, often visually advertised as

attractive manpower for potential recruiting countries but presented hereas mature democratic elements; and not randomly in my mind, it is Jews

who serve in this document as the flag-bearers of western democraticvalues.

The democratic capital ascribed to Jews should of course not beoverstated, nor should be its uniqueness: virtually all Eastern EuropeanDPs (including those with a dubious collaborationist past) were branded

as democratic freedom-lovers as the cold war intensified, especially in theUnited States. But the acknowledgement of ‘democratic Jews’ was another

contributory factor to the IRO’s sympathetic response to Jewish migratorydemands. It is often forgotten that the mass emigration of Jewish refugees

to Israel after 1948 (more than 300,000 Holocaust survivors, not all ofthem DPs, were absorbed into the new state by 1952) was legitimised,

facilitated and even partially financed by the post-war ‘refugee regime’.Having started its operations in 1947, the IRO played a significant role infostering Jewish emigration. Following the Partition Plan of November

1947, it granted governmental status to the Jewish Agency for Palestine

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officially mandated to carry out ‘resettlement’. Later on, the IRO signed anofficial agreement with the State of Israel formalising their full

collaboration in emigration matters.42 And after lengthy internal debates,it also reimbursed the Jewish Agency for the transportation costs incurred

by the emigration to Israel of 50,000 Jewish DPs since May 1948.43

But the IRO’s main contribution was its legitimation of migratory

movements to Israel. It did so precisely when, as an ‘International RefugeeOrganization’ mandated by the UN to care for all stateless people, it

simultaneously addressed the peculiar case of a new actor in worlddisplacement: the Palestinian refugees of 1948 whose legal status and rightsto assistance were gradually being discussed in the international arena.

This simultaneous gaze – a bifocal appraisal of the respective merits ofJewish and Palestinian refugees by international bodies – has been widely

ignored in historical and refugee scholarship since then. Although one ofthe most tragic encounters of the twentieth century, Jewish and Palestinian

‘displaced persons’ have rarely met in scholarly writing. And when they didin a national context, as in Hannah Yablonka’s study on the social

integration of survivors in Israeli society, their point of contact was brieflyreduced to factual background: ‘1949 brought with it increased activity inthe abandoned villages, involving first and foremost the housing of

immigrant Holocaust survivors.’44 And no study, to my knowledge, hasbeen devoted to the contrapuntal (to use one of Edward Said’s favourite

musical metaphor for simultaneity) aspect of international debates onJewish and Arab refugees in 1948.45 Such an approach could however

provide a good testing-ground for one of Said’s last propositions: ‘NeitherPalestinian nor Israeli history at this point is a thing in itself, without the

other.’46

The international display of comparative arguments and value-

judgements on Jewish and Arab refugees is a good case in point. At theUN Security Council in August 1948, Abba Eban – the long-time icon ofIsraeli foreign policy – hinted at a qualitative hierarchy when he pleaded

the case of Jewish DPs: ‘International agencies are appropriately forced tomeasure the plight of these new refugees [namely, Arabs] against those

who have endured refugee conditions, not for months, but for years’.47

Comparative appraisals also permeated the July 1948 report of the UN

Mediator Folke Bernadotte, who advocated equity:

It would be an offence against all principles of elemental justice if theseinnocent victims [that is, Palestinians] of the conflict were denied theright to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow intoPalestine and offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arabsrefugees.48

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Arab representatives, for their part, sought to reverse the terms of thecomparison: for them, Jewish DPs no longer qualified as refugees, since

Nazism had been stamped out; they also challenged the statelessness grantedto Jews by alleging that survivors identified themselveswith Eastern European

communism: ‘many agreed’, maintained a Lebanese delegate at the UNGeneral Assembly in 1949, ‘with the views of the governments of their

countries of origin’.49 And a Syrian representative further denied the refugeedimension of Zionism when he claimed that Jewish DPs already ‘had a

nationality’ and could therefore not be considered ‘Palestinians’. These fewexamples point to the interdependent roots of thePalestinian–Israeli conflict:not only a face-to-face history of hostility, but also an internationally

mediated scramble over the recognition of antagonistic refugee identities.The IRO played an important part in this process, even if the length of its

dual appraisal was short: by 1950, a newly created agency the UnitedNations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was specifically catering to

Palestinian refugees, relieving the IRO, who ceased its European-centredoperations in 1952, from any involvement in theMiddle East. It nonetheless

paved the ground for important qualitative differences in internationalperceptions of Jewish and Arab refugees. Because the IROwas sponsored byboth pro and anti-Zionist contributors (the United States and the United

Kingdom) its official line had to reconcile conflicting positions. In late1948, the American delegate to the IROmaintained that former Jewish DPs

in Israel only worked ‘in cooperatives and in areas where the Arabs have notlived’.50 Against him and in keeping with British pro-Arab overtures after

1948, the UK representative argued that IRO-sponsored emigration ofJewish survivors was far from neutral: ‘Who could say that none of those

actual persons helped in that way would not occupy a refugee’s house orland or join a strategic colony?’51 Compromise was easily reached, since

most national delegations at the IRO, such as the French, harbouredsympathy for Jewish survivors without overlooking the material plight ofthe Palestinian displaced. On one hand, stated the IRO Director General

Donald Kingsley, Jewish refugees were ‘one of the principal group for whoseresettlement the Organization was established’; on the other hand, the IRO

did not want ‘to become a contributor to the intensification of the Arabrefugee problem, or to the preemption of the return of the Arabs to their

home’.52 It therefore legitimised migration to Israel on technical‘resettlement’ grounds: the absorption and assimilation capacities of the

new country provided sufficient guarantees for ‘firm-reestablishment’.More importantly perhaps, the IRO was the first international body to

assess the role of persecution in the respective status of Jewish andPalestinian

refugees. In 1949, the IRO ‘Legal Division’ was asked to study the place of

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Palestinians in the international system of refugee protection. ‘It was felt’,stated a report, that ‘Arab refugees were the result of war operations and did

not fall within the wording ‘persecution or fear based on reasonable groundof persecution’ (the criteria used by the IRO to evaluate the claims of

European DPs). Faithful to its compromising line, the IRO was not entirelyone-sided. A legal expert acknowledged that Palestinians indeed differed

from European (and Jewish) DPs in that they were ‘willing’ to return home.He added however that they were ‘unable’ to do so. This incapacity, he

suggested, could play the role of ‘persecution’53 in the future definition oftheir status. Yet it was ultimately agreed that therewas no urgent need for theextension of legal protection (involving political judgments) to Palestinians:

‘the need for material assistance is much greater’.54

The IRO, therefore, through its reliance on European definitions of

refugees, revived the old dichotomy between ‘war victims’ and ‘politicalvictims’. It had good contextual reasons to do so since the significance of

the events of 1948 was precisely hidden by the fog of war. But it nonethelessforged a perception of Palestinian refugees as mere targets of relief and

resettlement abroad. One of its successors, the United Nations Relief andWorks Agency further reinforced this apolitical dimension. It defined aPalestinian refugee as ‘an individual in need who has lost his house and

means of existence following the war in Palestine’.55 This new refugeewas also uniquely apolitical: UNRWA interim director Herbert Kennedy

saw ‘The Arab’ as a ‘staunch individualist’ who forcefully resisted ‘thepoliticization of his plight’.56

‘Paradigmatic’ JewishDPs, it can nowbe argued, stoodon the right side ofthe qualitative divide separating European ‘dissidents’ from non-European

war victims in the post-world war.57 Their trajectory was unique: althoughsurviving remnants of the Eastern European Yiddishkeit, they were

‘westernised’ by the relief policies of the victors; and as ‘western’ candidatesfor emigration to Israel, they benefited from the political identity eventuallyascribed to all European displaced persons (Jews and ‘anti-Communist’

non-Jewish DPs) in the aftermath of the SecondWorldWar. In the post-warpolitics of recognition, Jewish DPs facilitated (and benefited from) new

perceptions of human rights. The international arena, as much as the innerworld of Jewish life, ultimately spurred the Jewish emergence from

powerlessness: a fact forgotten by contemporary Israeli governmentstraditionally wary of ‘internationalisation’; and by the numerous voices

eager to delegitimize the whole Zionist enterprise (including its early rescuephase), who conveniently forget the legitimising role played, not so long ago,by western humanitarian politics in the vindication of Holocaust survivors

in the aftermath of the Second World War.

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Notes

[1] Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope. On the Jewish DP musical bandnamed the ‘Happy Boys’, see Gay, Safe Among The Germans, 57.

[2] Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors”, 291–318.[3] Ofer, “Holocaust Survivors as Immigrants”, 2.[4] Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 162.[5] The IRO replaced UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation

Administration created in 1943.[6] Cohen, “Naissance d’une nation”, 56–78.[7] Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 64.[8] Diner, “Elemente des Subjektwerdung”, 245.[9] Dinerstein, “Does Anyone Want the Displaced Persons?”, 168.[10] Proudfoot, “The Anglo-American Displaced Persons Program”, 33–54.[11] Ristelhueber, Au secours des refugies, 141.[12] Dushnyck and Gibbons, Refugees Are People, 56; Martin, “Not ‘Displaced

Persons’”, 109–113.[13] Knudsen, “When Trust Is on Trial”, 13–36.[14] Quoted in Proudfoot, European Refugees 1939–52, 350. Emphasis added.[15] IRO. Archives, Archives Nationales (Paris), 43AJ-854.[16] Proudfoot, European Refugees, 342–343.[17] Penrose, “Refugees and Displaced Persons”, 139–71.[18] United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Official Records E/REF/75, Report

of the Special Committee on Refugees and Displaced Persons, 1946.[19] Ibid.[20] Penrose., 150.[21] See note. 18.[22] Kevonian, “Question des refugies”, 40–49; Power, A Problem From Hell, 6–14.[23] Skran, Refugees in Interwar Europe, 109.[24] Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 254.[25] Solomon, Refugees in the Cold War.[26] Rutland, “Subtle Exclusions”, 50–66.[27] Feinberg, “The Recognition of the Jewish People”, 1–26.[28] Ibid., 7.[29] Ram, “Zionist Historiography”, 91–124.[30] Quoted in Arad, “Israel and the Shoah”, 5.[31] Dyczok, The Grand Alliance.[32] Flanner, “Letter from Aschaffenburg”, 88.[33] Walcewski, Destin tragique des polonais deportes en Allemagne.[34] Arendt, “The Stateless People”, 150.[35] Proudfoot, European Refugees, 149.[36] Bracey, “Europe’s Displaced Persons”, 242.[37] Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 225.[38] Proudfoot, European Refugees, 346.[39] Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope, 102.[40] Grossmann, “Victims,Villains, and Survivors”, 299.[41] IRO. Archives, 43-AJ 1135.[42] Holborn, A History of the International Refugee Organization, 677–79.

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[43] IRO. Archives, 43AJ-687.[44] Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust, 32.[45] Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States and Jewish Refugees

limits itself to the scope indicated in its title.[46] Said, “Afterword”, 218.[47] United Nations Security Council, 18 August 1948.[48] United Nations Security Council, 13 July 1948.[49] United Nations General Assembly, 12 May 1949.[50] IRO Archives (National Archives, Paris), 43 AJ-687.[51] Ibid.[52] Ibid.[53] IRO Archives, 43 AJ-687.[54] Ibid.[55] IRO Archives, 43-AJ 1255.[56] Ibid.[57] Farah, “The Marginalization of Palestinian Refugees”, 155–74.

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