After concluding a visit to a family of immigrants who recently arrived from Germany to Palestine, social worker Helene Hannah Thon noted her disappointment with the state of the household. Thon chastised the wife and mother about what she saw at her home: an untidy living room, leftovers on the tables, and children in unkempt clothing. The woman responded that, in her new home in Palestine, she hoped “to be freer than before and not do trivial work all day long.” To Thon, this attitude appeared to abnegate not only the woman's responsibilities to her family but also women's work “for the sake of the country” in general (175).
The tension reflected in this encounter, which is detailed in Viola Alianov-Rautenberg's newly published monograph, conveys the centrality of gender in the migration experiences of Jews who fled Germany into Mandatory Palestine during the Nazi period. It also reveals the differing and often conflicting perceptions, held by the Zionist leadership on the one hand and by the migrants themselves on the other, with regards to the future of this community in the Jewish settlement in Palestine (the Yishuv). Alianov-Rautenberg's book captures the entanglements of these two currents—gendered experiences of migration and the ideological pressures of ethno-nationalism—as they shaped the lived reality of German Jews who fled to Palestine in the 1930s.
The flight of Jews from Nazi-controlled central Europe is hardly an underexplored topic. Yet this new publication offers a welcome and vital addition to the existing scholarship thanks to its sophisticated approach to gender. Alianov-Rautenberg is not simply interested in comparing the experiences of men and women. She seriously and consistently tackles the question of gender as an experiential field. Throughout the work, she shows how gendered categories and expectations were flexibly and dialogically formed, reframed, and reaffirmed, and how gendered identities intersected with ethnicity, class, ideology, and other categories of selfhood. Alianov-Rautenberg's book is thus a powerful testament to the fact that—as she states—“[l]ooking at migration through a gendered lens enables us to understand the category of gender in the process of its very construction and reconstruction” (250).
In five beautifully written chapters, Alianov-Rautenberg takes readers through various sites inhabited by German-Jewish migrants, from the ships upon which they arrived to the kitchens where they prepared and consumed their meals. To convey a comprehensive picture of their life in Palestine, she weaves together the perspectives of the migrants with that of the receiving authorities (an amalgam of Yishuv leadership bodies and German-Jewish aid organizations, which the author somewhat nebulously terms the “absorbing apparatus”).
Gender, Alianov-Rautenberg shows, was a defining aspect of how these absorbing bodies approached this migrant community and how they tried to structure its integration into the Zionist settler society. Concerns about the future of this group revealed broader anxieties about the health of the Zionist project. Male underemployment, for example, which aroused both pity and scorn, was blamed on the migrants' unwillingness to shed off their middle-class diasporic habitus. German-Jewish men aged 35 or older, who especially struggled with unemployment, found little understanding within the youth-idealizing Yishuv society. Young women were seen by the absorbing bodies in contradicting ways. When they fulfilled the expectations of the Zionist program, they were praised for epitomizing Jewish national rejuvenation. But their gender and sexuality also posed threats to the dream of nation-building. Alianov-Rautenberg shows that authorities considered German-Jewish young women prone to sexual exploitation and trafficking, especially at the hands of Arab men, who embodied the threat posed by Palestinian people to the realization of the Zionist project.
As for the migrants themselves, gender was significant in shaping their perceptions and experiences of Palestine. Alianov-Rautenberg shows, for example, that many German Jews framed their resentments against the Eastern European population of the Yishuv (who was more established and more dominant in leadership) in gendered terms. German-Jewish criticism of Eastern Europeans often focused on appearance and hygiene and sometimes echoed the racist discourse that the migrants themselves faced in Nazi Germany. As for interactions between German migrants and Jews from the MENA region, these were likewise governed by a gendered racialization of the latter. Such interactions frequently occurred in the household, where some German families employed MENA Jewish women as housekeepers. Alianov-Rautenberg shows how German migrants profited from the Yishuv's relegation of MENA Jews to a lower-class status, which enabled newly-arrived migrants from Central Europe to land a more comfortable place on the ladder of social hierarchies.
One of the important threads presented in the book is the author's critical analysis of the idea that German-Jewish women responded more smoothly than men to the challenges of migration—an assessment that emerged already in contemporary sources and was then replicated in scholarship. Alianov-Rautenberg approaches this common narrative (which is certainly founded in historical reality) with more caution, asking readers to consider the underlying gendered assumptions and expectations involved in discourses that praise women's resilience and ignore their struggles and resentments.
One aspect of the book that invites critique is Alianov-Rautenberg's classification of her subjects as nonrefugees. She explains this decision by pointing to the fact that the majority of immigrants who came to Palestine had choices and options available to them when planning their flight, and that most arrived before conditions in Germany worsened significantly in 1938. This definition follows a narrow, even problematic, understanding of the nature of refugee movements that only accepts an image of refugees fleeing immediate threats of severe physical violence (which some of the people mentioned in the book have—as Alianov-Rautenberg chronicles). The issue is not merely semantic. Describing this population strictly as migrants places more analytical emphasis on the place they went to than the one they fled from. The reason for their flight and the ways in which it may have impacted their experience in Palestine are thus relegated to background information.
This, however, does not lessen the value of Alianov-Rautenberg's book. The author crafted a thought-provoking study that both experts and newcomers to the topic will find rewarding. Her analysis of fascinating source material (especially the interviews that she herself conducted) produced an engaging, intriguing, and often moving account of this community's history.
