Research in Jewish Demography and Identity 9781618114402

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Research in Jewish Demography and Identity

Jewish Identity in Post-Modern Society Series Editor: Roberta Rosenberg Farber — Yeshiva University Editorial Board: Sara Abosch — University of Memphis Geoffrey Alderman — University of Buckingham Yoram Bilu — Hebrew University Steven M. Cohen — Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion Bryan Daves — Yeshiva University Sergio DellaPergola — Hebrew University Simcha Fishbane — Touro College Deborah Dash Moore — University of Michigan Uzi Rebhun — Hebrew University Reeva Simon — Yeshiva University Chaim I. Waxman — Rutgers University

Sergio DellaPergola

Research in Jewish Demography and Identity Edited by Eli Lederhendler and Uzi Rebhun

Boston 2015

The publication of this book has been made possible through the generous assistance of

unione comunitÀ ebraiche italiane

Copyright © 2015 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-439-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-440-2 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2015 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Preface (Eli Lederhendler and Uzi Rebhun) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Sidney Goldstein Sergio DellaPergola’s Contributions to Jewish Demography: An Appreciation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Part A: Historical Demography Gur Alroey Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925: A Socio-Demographic Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Orly C. Meron A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Part B: History and Politics David Miron Return to the Golden Age: Immigration Policies as a Means of Preserving “Old America” and Its Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Manuela Consonni Split at the Root: Italian Jewish Identity Between Anti-Zionism and Philo-Semitism, 1961–1967 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

Part C: Immigration and Migrant Adaptation Erik H. Cohen Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class: A Case Study of Legal and Medical Professionals among the Jews of France . . . . . 126 Mark Tolts Demographic Transformations among Ex-Soviet Migrants in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Viacheslav Konstantinov The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Part D: Transnationalism Judit Bokser Liwerant Transnational Expansions of Latin American Jewish Life in Times of Migration: A Mosaic of Experiences in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Lilach Lev Ari Back Home: Return Migration, Gender, and Assimilation among Israeli Emigrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Israel Pupko “3.04 Times to the Moon and Back”: Transnational Jewish Migrants in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

Part E: Demography and Identity Shlomit Levy Jewish Identity Values of Israeli Youth and Adults in Contemporary Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Paulette Kershenovich Schuster Picture Perfect: The Role of Domestic Help in Syrian Jewish Households in Mexico City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Uzi Rebhun Geographic Dispersion and Mobility of Jews in Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 Ilana Ziegler A Research Note: Family Growth in Israel and the «Critical Child» . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 Sergio DellaPergola: Main Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414

Preface

Preface

This volume is in honor of Professor Sergio DellaPergola upon his retirement from teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Its contents—fifteen original papers by Prof. DellaPergola’s students and scholars who worked with him at the Hebrew University and academic institutions abroad—cover a broad spectrum of topics in Jewish demography and identity, focusing on Diaspora communities and the population of Israel. Prof. DellaPergola was born in 1942 in Trieste, Italy. When he was one year old, his family was displaced and moved to Switzerland. At the end of World War II, they returned to Italy and settled in Milan. DellaPergola completed his graduate studies in Political Science at the University of Pavia and immigrated to Israel in 1966. His doctoral dissertation, on the demography of Italian Jewry, was written between 1966 and 1973 under the supervision of the late Professor Roberto Bachi. He was a fulltime member of the academic staff of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University for nearly four decades (1973–2010), directed the Institute’s Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics from 1986  onward, and served three terms as head of the Institute. DellaPergola has been a visiting scholar in many academic institutions around the world, including Brown University, UCLA, the University of Illinois at Chicago, INED, the University of Pavia, and the University of Milan, to name only a few. He served as senior demographic consultant to the President of Israel, the Israeli Government, the Jerusalem Municipality, major Jewish communities in the Diaspora, and many 7

Preface

major national and international organizations. His achievements have earned him several prizes, including the Marshall Sklare Award for distinguished achievement from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (1999), and the Landau Prize in recognition of his outstanding achievements and contribution for the field of demography and migration (2013). DellaPergola’s studies are exceptionally comprehensive, spanning fields as diverse as historical demography, family, international migration, spatial dispersion, Jewish identification, and population projections. They are typically comparative, bridging different eras and communities. As such, they demand systematic data collection and attempts to achieve data uniformity. His Jewish case studies are set in the general social, cultural, and political contexts of the country under investigation and the Jews’ status as a religio-ethnic minority (in the Diaspora) or a majority (in Israel). Concepts and terminologies developed by DellaPergola have become de rigueur in all scientific discussions on Jewish demography and sociology. His crystal-clear, accessible writing style makes the reading of numbers fascinating. Prof. DellaPergola is an outstanding teacher and devoted mentor. His ideas and guidance have always served his students as essential building blocks in the formation of a broad outlook on social science relating to Jews—tools and perspectives that continue to accompany them in their scientific endeavors. He is a dear and affable colleague, with whom collaboration is always fruitful and productive. Everyone whom we approached to contribute an article to this volume responded in the affirmative with deep appreciation and respect for him. It is our hope that Prof. DellaPergola will be pleased to see these new scholarly works, the fruit of his students’ and close colleagues’ labor, collected and published in a special volume dedicated to him. We are confident that this book will enrich the corpus of knowledge on contemporary Jewish demography and identity. The book is structured in five parts. After a salutation by the senior demographer Sidney Goldstein, Part A concerns itself with historical demography: Gur Alroey compares Jewish migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century with that to Palestine, and Orly Meron analyzes the 1920 Greek census, along with complementary archival data, providing insights into the sociodemographic profile of the Jewish population as against the non-Jewish population as well as 8

Preface

of subethnic hierarchies within given Jewish sectors. In Part B, on history and politics, the first essay, by David Miron, investigates the public relations that accompanied the United States’ Great Society initiative in the mid-1960s. Miron reveals how President Lyndon B. Johnson used the Great Society to leverage the introduction of new immigration legislation, thus fostering a new historical narrative that could deal with the problems that arose in the American economy and society during the 1960s. Manuela Consonni makes use of two historical events that serve as poles of identity references—the Eichmann Trial and the SixDay War—to rethread the history of the dichotomy embodied in the self-image of Jewish anti-Fascism and Jewish “neo-Fascism,” the impact of which continues to affect the way Jews perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Part C, on immigration and immigrant adaptation, starts with a piece by Erik Cohen,1 who examines Jewish migration from France to Israel with specific focus on French Jews who work in the legal and medical professions. Mark Tolts discusses the dynamics of marriage, fertility, and mortality among former Soviet immigrants in Israel in comparison with the characteristics of Soviet Jews at the onset of mass emigration to Israel in the 1990s and in view of the demographic changes experienced by Jews who remained in the former Soviet Union. Viacheslav Konstantinov also looks at Soviet immigrants in Israel, especially those with higher education, revealing their professional mobility and its determinants. In Part D, on transnationalism, Judit Bokser Liwerant analyzes central aspects of the relocation of Latin American Jewish life to the United States amid recurring cycles of integration and distinctiveness. Lilach Lev Ari addresses gender differences in the motives for voluntary return migration among emigrants from Israel and their re-assimilation into their country of origin. Israel Pupko describes the day-to-day practices of North American and European transnational immigrants to Israel. In Part E, on demography and identity, Shlomit Levy investigates the importance that Israeli Jews attributed to Jewish identification and a variety of Jewish precepts as guiding principles in life; Paulette Kershenovich Schuster explores the complex relationships between Syrian Jewish women in Mexico City and their 1

Regrettably, Erik Cohen passed away in Jerusalem shortly before this book went to press. 9

Preface

household help; and Uzi Rebhun uses data from the 2008 Israeli census to examine the levels, directions, and determinants of Jewish internal migration, paying special attention to the interplay between individual characteristics and area-contextual factors. This section also includes a Research Note by Ilana Zigler that sheds light on the considerations that affect the process of family growth and an additional child among married women in Israel. We wish to thank Ms. Judith Even, chief librarian at the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics for many years, for her devoted editorial work on the articles in this book; and Ms. Dalia Sagi, Prof. DellaPergola’s long-time research assistant, for her assistance in readying the manuscript for press. Jerusalem, August 2014 E. L., U. R.

10

Sergio DellaPergola’s Contributions to Jewish Demography

Sergio DellaPergola’s Contributions to Jewish Demography: An Appreciation Sidney Goldstein Population Studies and Training Center Department of Sociology, Brown University

When I visited Israel for the first time in 1966, Jerusalem was still a divided city. This did not prevent a trip to what was then the new campus of The Hebrew University at Givat Ram and its Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics (hereafter: DJDS), then headed by the world’s most distinguished Jewish statistician/demographer, Professor Roberto Bachi, z’l. I  visited him and the Institute of Contemporary Jewry to discuss my recent experience in applying my own demographic expertise to the study of American Jewry. In 1963, I had directed a comprehensive study of the Jewish population of Greater Providence, Rhode Island, relying on recently developed methods for identifying the Jews living among Rhode Island’s one million residents. I used my visit to Jerusalem to share my experience with Prof. Bachi and to benefit by the advice he generously offered in connection with my hope of extending my research to other American communities, and eventually to the American Jewish population as a whole. One of the most valuable outcomes of my interaction with Prof. Bachi was the opportunity it provided to meet a young man then becoming involved in the work of the DJDS—Sergio DellaPergola. He had recently made aliyah from Italy, after completing his M.A. in Political Science at the Universita degli Studi Pavia. I was greatly impressed by Sergio’s strong command of demography and his commitment to Jewish population questions. This initial contact marked the beginning of a long, and for me, rewarding friendship and professional interaction that extended over the next half century. Indeed, it was clear by the time he completed his PhD in demography at Hebrew University in 1974, under 11

Sidney Goldstein

Prof. Bachi’s mentorship, that Sergio would, like Prof. Bachi, become a leading demographer of Jews, not only in Israel but worldwide. Soon after Sergio completed his degree, I had the good fortune to work with him at my home university, Brown, where he held an appointment as a Visiting Research Associate for 1978-79. That was the first of his many overseas professional visits designed to deepen his command of demographic analysis and research. Such visits included stays at institutions in Italy, France, and several universities in the United States. The long list testifies to the international recognition that Sergio gained between completing his PhD and his retirement four decades later as the preeminent demographer of Jews. It manifests his continuing eagerness to broaden not only his command of the methods and contents of demography but also of the related social science disciplines which he has used so effectively in his research and writing. It also attests to the worldwide recognition of Sergio’s expertise, as well as his contributions to the knowledge of colleagues with whom he worked while holding these visiting appointments. While his research is an outstanding feature of Sergio’s contribution to Jewish demography, one cannot overlook the crucial role he has played in training younger generations of students, both in Israel and around the world. In addition to the dozen or more universities and institutions in the United States at which he has taught, Sergio’s teaching experience includes Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, the Ukraine, and South Africa—a truly “United Nations” of countries. The knowledge these students (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) gained from Sergio’s mastery of Jewish population studies and their relevance to the local culture, politics, and the general demographic situation undoubtedly contributed much to their further research careers. Furthermore, between most of those overseas visits, Sergio held a number of responsible and leading positions at his home university, including Chair of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry (ICJ), and, in 1986, Head of the DJDS, succeeding Prof. Uziel O. Schmelz, whose worthy successor Sergio became. Because of Sergio’s worldwide experience and expertise as a demographer of the Jews, in 2003 he was appointed Senior Fellow and Project head of The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), organized by the Jewish Agency, to deal with policy issues faced by Jewish communities in the western nations and 12

Sergio DellaPergola’s Contributions to Jewish Demography

world Jewry as a whole, as they confronted problems associated with population decline, low fertility, aging populations, and mobility across and within countries. JPPPI’s choice of leader reflected its realization that confronting problems of policy planning on this scale required an expert like Sergio, who was already so familiar with the internal and international situations faced by Jewish communities around the world. Indeed, this recognition was reinforced by the prestigious awards given Sergio by the Italian government, and in 1999  by the distinguished Marshall Sklare Award of the Association for the Scientific Study of Jewry. As indicated, one purpose of my 1966 visit with Prof. Bachi was to explore ways in which I could be helpful in furthering the study of the Jewish population of the United States. Prof. Bachi believed strongly that because the Jewish population of the US was the largest of any country, there was an intense need to undertake a national study of the American Jewish population. With Prof. Bachi’s encouragement, and realizing that the 1970 National Jewish Population Study had encountered serious difficulties in successfully completing and analyzing its data, I accepted the Council of Jewish Federation’s (CJF) invitation to become chair of its newly established National Technical Advisory Committee on Jewish Population Studies (NTAC). Its key initial purpose was to try to rescue the 1970  survey results and to pursue analysis of the data. Secondly, it sought to develop, for the future use of the national community and individual US communities, high standards and comparability in questionnaire design, sampling procedures, and concept definitions. In carrying out my role as chair of NTAC, I conferred frequently with Prof. Bachi and also had occasion to consult with Sergio. In doing so, I was impressed by the important insights that Sergio shared with me on the issues at hand. Beginning in the late 1970s, Prof. Bachi vigorously advocated for a series of national censuses of Jews around the world, which would, of course, include the United States. Inspired by this, I proposed to the leaders of CJF that it sponsor a 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, taking into account the recommendations generated by the NTAC. CJF agreed to do so and launched efforts to fund it. In view of the proposed survey, the membership of the NTAC was reconstituted to take into account the kind of expertise necessary to make the careful decisions that would avoid the shortcomings of the 1970 Survey. With this in mind, 13

Sidney Goldstein

a leading candidate to be added to the committee was Sergio. Having had experience advising on a number of national surveys, his skills regarding design and implementation would be invaluable in decisions related to the sample design chosen for NJPS 1990, as well as concerns about questionnaire design and concept definitions. Indeed, Sergio’s presence on the 1990 NTAC contributed greatly to the success of the survey and eventually to its broad exploitation for analytic purposes. The favorable impressions I had developed since I first met Sergio in 1966 were strengthened during the course of the 1990 Survey. His incisive input proved a major asset to the final success of NJPS 1990 and eventually to the planning for NJPS 2000. Sergio’s extensive and comprehensive array of research projects encompasses such a range of topics and subjects that a brief review such as this cannot attempt a complete inventory of them or a summary of all their contents. They demonstrate his invaluable contribution to our understanding and evaluation of the dynamics and impact of demographic change (growth, fertility, mortality, distribution in space and socio-economic structure and ethnic stratification) on Jewish populations in Israel, North America, Latin America and Europe as well as on world trends. When leading demographers in countries around the world need to document key issues and facts related to the demography of the Jews, their first source is usually the body of research authored by Sergio. There are few aspects of Jewish demography and related concerns— from the impact of the Holocaust and anti-semitism to projections and future trends—that have not been treated scientifically and thoroughly by Sergio. Because of the leadership and guidance he has given to the DJDS since 1986, it has become one of the world’s leading demographic centers—as envisioned by Prof. Bachi in the 1950s. For all of his contributions, I wish to express a hearty “well done” (yasher ko’ach) to Sergio upon his retirement. We all know that we can count on him to continue his contributions worldwide and we will benefit from all the rich insights that he will yet provide on the demographic situation in Israel and in countries with Jewish populations.

14

Gur Alroey

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925: A Socio-Demographic Analysis Gur Alroey University of Haifa

Introduction Between 1881  and 1914  over two and a half million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe. The great majority of these migrants arrived in the United States and the rest of them, in much smaller numbers, settled in England, Argentina, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Palestine (among other destination countries). The resettlement of these Jewish immigrants in countries far afield from Eastern Europe radically changed the demographic map of the Jewish people and had wide ramifications for the economic, social, and cultural aspects of Jewish life in the modern world. The historical literature on the subject—especially American Jewish historiography—has long recognized the crucial importance of these events, and many studies have dealt with the causes of Jewish migration and the patterns of absorption and integration of the migrants within the new majority society (Howe 1977; Sorin 1992; Lederhendler 2009). Zionist historiography, on the other hand, has almost ignored the mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe to the west; only a handful of studies in Hebrew offer the Israeli reader an account of the epic event that the mass exodus to the United States represents (Gartner 1982; Lederhendler 2000). Rather, Zionist historiography has emphasized Jewish immigration to Palestine as a special and unique phenomenon: an epic in its own terms that seems (to judge by most Zionist histories) to have occurred almost independently, motivated and conditioned by its own separate set of circumstances. The implied distinction between “mere” migration, on the one hand, and Palestine resettlement, on the 16

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

other, has been based on a rhetorical distinction between “quality” and “quantity.” The limited number of migrants who had preferred the Land of Israel over America (or other western destination countries) seemed to Zionist writers to indicate that these were exceptional people and that theirs was an exceptional kind of migration (Halamish 2006: 12). Typically, studies that took this position also remained fairly narrowly focused on the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement, and laid great stress on the idealistic groups that came to the country with the well-coordinated purpose of settlement and nation-building. The guiding idea behind this type of literature seems to have been that mass migration to the west could be taken for granted, whereas migration to Palestine demanded close analysis and explanation. The period of large-scale East European Jewish migration (18811914) is typically divided, in Zionist parlance, into two sub-periods: the First Aliyah (1882-1903) and the Second Aliyah (1904-1914). Immigrants (olim) who arrived in these two immigration waves (aliyot) have been designated in the popular Zionist rendition as pioneering founding fathers—a veritable “pillar of fire” leading the Israelite camp in a nearly biblical mode (Slutzky 1973; Neuman 2009). This blatantly ideological viewpoint is hardly surprising when encountered in popularized national culture; but it comes as some surprise when we discover the extent to which certain ideological assumptions have been uncritically imported into the social sciences, with the result that migration to Palestine has rarely, if ever, been investigated according to the usual standards applied in migration research—such as economic and occupational as well as sex ratio data, all of which are normal avenues of research in the general migration field. Social and cultural research done by social scientists focusing on Zionist developments in pre-state Palestine often deal only with a small and unrepresentative sample: namely, the minority of immigrants who came to Palestine with a Zionist-pioneering ideology. This well-researched sector has often been taken as a proxy for the main body of migrants who came to settle in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hence, we find arguments in the research literature that reiterate the formula that migration to Palestine was not undertaken to improve economic or other quality of life conditions, but rather that immigration of Jews into Palestine was of a different, more programmatic nature (Gurevitch, Graetz, and Bachi 1944; Lestchinsky 1945; Bachi 1946; Eisenstadt 1954; Eisenstadt 1967). 17

Gur Alroey

It bears noting that the underlying assumptions already outlined have even found their way into discourse in the social sciences stemming from outside the orbit of Israeli academic institutions. For example, Calvin Goldscheider, an American Jewish demographer, explained as follows: “In a time when most of the Jews who migrated from East European countries did so in order to improve their economic situation, the Jews who migrated to Palestine were activated by ideological motivations and national ends” (Goldscheider 1992: 6). Nonetheless, such assertions have recently been questioned by a number of researchers who point to the resemblances—and not just the distinctions—between migration to the United States and migration to Palestine, and who address immigrant societies in a cross-comparative mode in order to reveal structural and tangible parallels at various levels (Toledano 1999; Alroey 2004; Razi 2009). These newer studies have reduced the importance of ideology as a central factor in migration and stressed other factors—more prosaic ones—that were an inextricable part of the process of departure, arrival, and reintegration. In light of these perspectives, it would seem that among the immigrants to Palestine were some Jews for whom The Land (in capitals) was not necessarily the object of a national teleology or a blank slate upon which to build a model society; rather, these were ordinary men and women whose personal goals were frequently pragmatic. This is a theme that I have pursued at length in some of my earlier research (Alroey, 2004), and here I will confine myself to a brief comparison between the demographic composition of Jewish immigration into Palestine and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. I  will explore some of the aspects normally regarded as crucial for international migration research, and I will apply the analysis to two successive periods of time: the first being the decade-and-a-half from the beginning of the twentieth century until the First World War (known in Zionist historiography as the Second Aliyah period), and the second extending from the end of the war until January 1, 1925, when the United States ceased to be an option for most Jews from Eastern Europe seeking a destination country (corresponding to the period of the Third and Fourth Aliyot). It is my contention that the statistical analysis and the comparative point of view will allow us to view the migrant Jewish population to Palestine and its counterpart in the United States as exhibiting certain similar characteristics. 18

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and to the United States, 1905-1914 Sources There are three main sources available to historians wishing to analyze the composition of the Jewish immigration that came to Palestine in the years 1905-1914. The first and most important one is the newspaper Ha-Olam, the official press organ of the Zionist Organization, which received statistical data from the Zionist information bureau in Odessa and began to publish them regularly in 1910 (Ha-Olam 1910: 14-15; 1911; 1913, 1914).1 The majority of the immigrants to Palestine passed through the Odessa information bureau and were registered there because this provided a considerable reduction in the price of the voyage. The immigration lists printed in the newspaper Ha-Olam therefore provide a great deal of information. One must bear in mind, however, that the data only relate to emigrants leaving from Odessa, and not to all those entering Palestine. Thus, for emigrants leaving from other ports, such as the port of Trieste, we have hardly any data. At the same time, Odessa was the main port for those leaving for Palestine from the Russian Empire, and 23,000 of the 35,000 Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the years 1904-1914  sailed from there. The data in this article, based on those that sailed from the port of Odessa, therefore relate to two thirds of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine in those years. However, there is another source from which we can take the measure of Jewish immigrants who entered Palestine through the port of Jaffa in the years 1912-1914, and that is the records of Haim Ridnik, an official of the Palestine Office. The tables and lists he drew up are preserved in the Central Zionist Archives, and some of them were published in the journal Ha-Po’el Ha-Tza’ir (Ridnik 1912). In an article published in that journal entitled “The Hebrew Immigration via Jaffa in the Year 1912,” 1

In 1910, Ha-Olam for the first time published the data for 1905-1909, and from 1910 onwards it published data regularly each year. Ha-Olam did not publish the data for 1914, but they can be found in the lists of the Odessa information bureau in the CZA, Ussishkin’s personal archive, 54/2, A24. These lists only reveal the number of immigrants who left for Palestine from Odessa and their distribution according to age and gender. 19

Gur Alroey

Ridnik wrote a little about himself and about the reasons he came to deal with matters of immigration when he reached the port of Jaffa: For three years now, I have been dealing with the Hebrew immigrants entering the country via Jaffa. In this period, I have seen many rises and falls in the numbers of those entering into the country, and the same applies to the numbers of those leaving it. In reading the many newspapers in this country and abroad on the development of our Yishuv, I became aware of how little idea our newspapers and communal workers have of the rise or decrease of the population in the country. […] They have no true or even approximately true idea of the numbers of those entering and leaving, or of their age, occupation, capital, etc. […] Obtaining this information under local conditions requires a great deal of time and work which are not within the capacity of the ordinary person. Rousing myself [to the task], I took it upon myself nevertheless to achieve a small part of this objective (Ibid.: 11)

Ridnik, who was in Jaffa, met the immigrants who came from Odessa, Trieste, and other places and conducted lists of both those who entered and those who left. This is what Ridnik wrote about his methods of work: In publishing the following numbers, I feel it is my duty to preface them with certain observations: 1. One must realize that they come from a private source and do not have the exactitude of statistics such as those provided by customs officials in all [other] countries. 2. I have registered the people coming from abroad on all the ships in various ways: through a careful questioning of the immigrants themselves, through an examination of the documents they presented, by investigating the ship-owners and hotel proprietors. I have sometimes used several methods simultaneously, and used one method to achieve what is lacking in another […] 4. In my questioning, I did not enter into many details, and I confined myself solely to questions concerning the family situation of the immigrant and his intention of going to or leaving the place he is asking about. (Ibid.)

A comparison between Ridnik’s lists and those of the Zionist information bureau in Odessa reveals certain differences between them. The number of passengers who left for Palestine from Odessa was greater than the number who entered it, according to Ridnik, even though he included those coming from several other ports, in addition to those 20

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

who sailed from Odessa. There could be various explanations for this discrepancy: First, Ridnik worked alone, without assistants, and it is very possible that he was unable to document the data of all immigrants who entered the country. Second, from the time the passengers left Odessa, it was not clear who continued to Jaffa and who left the ship at one of several stops along the way (such as Beirut or Haifa). Similarly, Ridnik had no information about passengers who disembarked at Jaffa and had no information about passengers who might have sailed to Egypt and then proceeded to Palestine by train. It is also possible that some immigrants were wary of identifying themselves to an unknown person immediately upon entering the country and therefore refused to furnish him with information. Despite the discrepancy between Ridnik’s lists and other statistical sources, it should be pointed out that, as we shall see, there were quite a few points of similarity between them, especially in their analyses of the immigrants’ profiles and the distribution of the migrant population among various social and occupational categories. From both the Odessa information bureau and Haim Ridnik’s lists one receives a fairly accurate picture of the Jewish immigrants who came to Palestine between 1905 and 1914. A third but somewhat unreliable source of data on the social profile of immigrants to Palestine is the partial lists of passengers who sailed from the port of Trieste in the years 1912-1914. Because these lists of names were drawn up for only a few months of the years in question, it is hard to draw firm conclusions from them about all Jewish immigrants to Palestine, most of whom hailed from Galicia, who took this route at the end of the pre-1914 stage. At the same time, they can be used to help estimate the number of immigrants who arrived in the country during that period and to gain an idea of their reasons for coming.

How Many Came? We do not have exact figures for Jewish immigration to Palestine in the period before the First World War. Mark Wischnitzer, who is considered a fairly authoritative observer, suggested two different assessments for immigration to Palestine in the years 1904-1914. One conservative estimate suggested a total of about 18,000 to 19,000 souls, and a more liberal estimate, based on the data cited by Jacob Lestschinsky, 21

Gur Alroey

put the number as high as 30,000 (Wischnitzer 1948: 133). Aryeh Tartakower agreed with Lestschinsky’s estimate, and wrote, “Although we do not have exact figures … the conjecture closest to the truth is that in the years 1904-1914 between 30,000 and 35,000 people arrived in Palestine” (Tartakower 1947: 15). All three—Wischnitzer, Lestschinsky, and Tartakower—were well known for their knowledge of Jewish migration patterns worldwide. A somewhat more generous estimate (35,000—40,000) is given in a more recent study (Gurevitch, Gertz, and Bachi 1994: 21) It appears, however, that Tartakower and Lestschinsky accord more closely with the data of the Odessa information bureau and Ridnik’s lists. The limited information that we have on emigrants who embarked from Trieste shows that in the years 1912-1914, an average of eighty to one hundred people left for Palestine each month. That is to say, the number of emigrants who took this route from Galicia to Palestine did not exceed 1,200 a year. According to this estimate, a total of between 10,000 and 11,000 immigrants might have arrived in Palestine from Trieste during the whole prewar period. Together with the 22,953 who arrived from Odessa, the total number of immigrants was about 31,000-33,000.2 Therefore, the figure we will employ is a total of 30-35,000 for the decade preceding the outbreak of World War I. Figure 1 depicts the waves of immigration to Palestine and the United States and reveals a similarity between them. The years 1905-1906 were peak years for immigration to both countries; in 1907-1909, however, there was a decline in the rate of immigration to the United States, but there was an increase in immigration to Palestine. The financial panic in the United States in 1907 may have prompted the relative decline in the number of immigrants choosing to head to America at that time, and that might have increased the share of immigration going to other destinations, such as Palestine and Argentina. When the United States recovered from its economic crisis in 1910, the number of US–bound immigrants began to increase, and the share of those going to Palestine and 2

22

On those sailing from Trieste, see CZA, L2, file 141 and file 84. It should be pointed out that these numbers do not include immigrants from Yemen and Salonika, who did not come to Palestine for the same reasons, and who should not be seen in the historical context of the mass-migration of the Jews from Eastern Europe. For this reason, we have not discussed them in this work.

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Table 1. Number of Jewish Emigrants from Eastern Europe to the United States and Palestine, 1905-1914 Year 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1905-1914 (from Trieste) Total

To Palestine

To the United States

1,230 3,450 1,750 2,097 2,459 1,979 2,326 2,430 3,050 2,182

129,910 153,748 149,182 103,387 57,551 84,260 91,223 80,595 101,330 138,051

10,000 32,953

1,089,237

(Source: Alroey 2014: 110; Lestschinsky 1927: 8-9)

Figure 1. Share of the United States and Palestine out of All Jewish Immigrants by Year of Immigration, 1905-1914

(Source: Alroey 2004: 110)

23

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Argentina declined. The point here is that Jewish migration from Eastern Europe constituted a fairly sensitive world system, in which individual patterns for each destination country must be seen in context alongside the other destinations in order to fully understand them. From 1911 to 1914, the rate of immigration to both the United States and Palestine increased considerably, and the wartime decline in civilian migration movements had its most immediate impact on the Palestine stream. As for the United States, which remained neutral until early 1917, the pattern shows a similarly precipitous decline, but not a total cessation.

Demographic Profile of the Immigrants, 1905-1914 Few of the many studies that have been conducted on the “Second Aliyah” have provided a socio-demographic analysis of the immigrants.3 One of the studies dealing with the question of the social structure of the immigrants of that era was Joseph Gorny’s “The Changes in the Social and Political Structure of the ‘Second Aliyah’” (1970). His study was based on the survey of “Immigrants of the Second Aliyah,” undertaken by the Pinhas Lavon Institute for the Labor Movement in the mid-1930s and the early 1940s. However, this survey of 937 people, of whom 644  were men and 293  were women, does not reliably inform us about the overall profile of all those who entered the country at the beginning of the twentieth century; clearly, it related only to those who remained in Palestine and were still available to be canvassed three or four decades after their first arrival (Gorny 1970). Below, tables published in the newspaper Ha-Olam, summarizing the numbers and composition of the passengers as registered at the port of Odessa, are retabulated as figures representing the profile of the immigrants according to gender, age, country of origin, occupation, and reason for coming, as well as a classification of those who came to Palestine on the advice of relatives. From the data provided by the Odessa information bureau about those who left the port of Odessa for Palestine in the years 1905-1914, we can see that 60% were male and 40% were female. This distribution resembles that of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the same 3

24

R. Katznelson was the first to examine the immigrants to Palestine from Odessa in the years 1905-1909 according to the three criteria of gender, age, and occupation. See Katznelson 1930.

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Figure 2. Immigrants to Palestine and the United States by Gender, 1905-1914

(Source: Alroey 2014: 112; Hersch 1931: 484)

period: 56% of those entering the United States were men and 44% were women. If we consider that adults often traveled in couples or in family groups, rather than as unaccompanied single people, we may say that the fairly even gender balance lends some support to this supposition. In the next figure, showing the age distribution of immigrants a similar inference is possible: that is, the preponderance of younger adults and the presence of children under age fifteen (about a quarter of the total) both tend to reinforce a family-based social profile. Interestingly, the two parallel immigration streams differed somewhat in that the Palestine-bound migrants included a relatively higher proportion of older adults. Upon closer examination, it appears that nearly two-thirds of these older immigrants may be identified as religious traditionalists (in Zionist nomenclature, they belonged to the “Old Yishuv”), and rather than undertaking their journey to rebuild economically independent lives in their new country, they were probably supported by charity funds (halukah). We see from the letters sent to the Palestinian information bureaus that some of the immigrants aged fifty and over wanted to come to Palestine because they feared that their children would fall into “bad ways” in America. Others over-optimistically 25

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believed that one could buy land cheaply in Palestine and make one’s living from agriculture. Still others cited different motivations, including fear of pogroms and concerns over the bad economic situation in Russia. Figure 3. Immigrants to Palestine and the United States by Age, 1905-19144

(Source: Alroey 2014: 112; Hersch 1931: 485)

One official of the information bureau in Odessa (a certain Spielberg) recorded his impressions of a group of emigrants just before they sailed for Palestine, and his account tends to confirm the above-mentioned observations about some of the older immigrants. Spielberg wrote that “those who think that the travelers over the age of fifty are unable to work and go to Palestine only in order spend the rest of their lives in prayer” are mistaken and mislead others. In a letter to Menahem Ussishkin (a leading Zionist official), Spielberg declared that “these people aged fifty and more can contribute” a great deal to the developing Yishuv in Palestine. In support of this contention he drew upon some of the cases he had encountered: “A man aged 56 and his wife aged 51 toured Palestine about four years ago (that is to say, in 1909), and now they have decided to settle there, and they are bringing with them a sum of 10,000  roubles ($5,000).” Another married couple (both aged fifty-four) were “going to Palestine with six dependants. Two of their children intend to enroll in a gymnasia (high school). I understand that the family is very wealthy” (Spielberg 1913). 4

26

The age-groups listed were slightly different in the United States than they were in Palestine: children aged 0-14, adults aged 15-44, and those over 45.

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

As these examples and others demonstrate, a cross-section of the immigrants allows us to describe a far more complex social reality: the immigrants’ worldview and social profile can hardly be said to match the venerable stereotypes about the radical, unattached, and socially marginal pioneering youth who came to Palestine to create a revolution. Clearly, the migrant population was far more varied. It included a sizeable number of older adults, some of whom were over age fifty, including numerous families who apparently judged their chances of succeeding and rehabilitating themselves as being greater in Palestine than elsewhere. Some considerations special to Palestine, such as a more embedded local infrastructure for Jewish education and a religiously observant environment, may have swayed some potential immigrants to favor Palestine over other countries. Indeed, some of them may have compared America unfavorably to Palestine in this regard (Kaplan 2002: 195-209). The historically accepted division between a traditionalist “Old Yishuv” and a pioneering, secularizing “New Yishuv” does not really account for such complex cultural realities, in which fairly traditional people were, nevertheless, also preparing to seek remunerative occupations in the developing economy of Palestine. Figure 4. Immigrants by Place of Origin, 1905-19145

(Source: Alroey, 2014: 121)

5

“Southern region” refers to the southern provinces of the Pale of Settlement, and this corresponds in effect with the Ukraine. 27

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The files of the information bureau in Odessa reveal that migration to Palestine was not evenly distributed throughout the Russian Jewish population, but rather possessed some regional selectivity. About 38% of the migrants came from the south and southwest districts of the Pale of Settlement (Ukraine and Moldova); 24% from the far more heavily populated northwest (Lithuania); and 17% from Poland. Regional selectivity may reflect the impact of the pogroms that took place mainly in the south and southwest of the Pale of Settlement. During the years 19051906, there were 657  such incidents in which more than 3,000  Jews were murdered and many others maimed and injured, or whose property and livelihoods were damaged. Several major urban centers in Ukraine may be cited in this regard: in Kherson alone, 82 separate violent outbreaks occurred during which 371 Jews died; in Kiev and Ekaterinoslav (today, Dnepropetrovsk) there were 41 such incidents, in which some 455 Jews were killed (167 in Kiev and 285 in Ekaterinoslav) (Lambroza 1992: 228). When we cross-tabulate the rate of emigration to Palestine with the timing of the pogroms (not according to a multi-year average), we find a very high correlation: during 1905  and 1906, the southern districts supplied about half the migration (49% and 52%, respectively, for those two years) from Russia to Palestine. Thus, pogrom-related factors boosted the rate of emigration on a regional basis. Interestingly, from 1905 to 1906 migration to Palestine increased by 180%, whereas the volume of migration to the United States from those same areas increased by only 18% (see Table 1). The location of the Black Sea port of Odessa in the easily accessible south of the Russian Empire, the short voyage required to reach Palestine, and the inexpensive cost of the trip also influenced the high rate of migration from southern Russia and Ukraine to Palestine. The regional distribution of emigrants bound for the United States was different. From the data that we possess and from studies that have examined this issue, it appears that the highest volume and rates of migration to the United States occurred largely in the northwestern parts of the Pale of Settlement, rather than from the pogrom-stricken areas in the south and southwest. Based on the annual summary reports of the JCA (Jewish Colonization Association), it appears that nearly one-third (32%) of all Jewish migrants who headed westward (mainly to North America and Argentina) came from the northwestern part of the Pale of Settlement (the governing districts of Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Vilna, and Kovno); 28

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

28% were from the southwest (Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia Kiev, Poltava, and Chernigov); 16% from southern Russia (Bessarabia, Kherson, Tavrida [Crimea], and Ekaterinoslav); and 24% from the ten districts of Congress Poland (Alroey 2006). The combined data for northwestern Russia and Congress Poland (under Russian imperial government) therefore suggest that over half the trans-Atlantic migration stemmed from those areas. Similar conclusions have been broached by other scholars (e.g., Stampfer 1985: 220-230). The data used by Stampfer to examine the rates of migration from the Russian Empire were not those of the JCA Information Bureau, but of the immigrant home-town associations— landsmanshaften—established in New York City during the period of mass East European Jewish immigration. Since these landsmanshaften were established on the basis of the town or city from which the immigrants had come, by classifying them and dividing them according to their regions of origin in Imperial Russia, migration patterns can be localized. According to Stampfer, 50% of the immigrants came from the northwest region of the Pale (JCA gives 32%); 20% from the southwest (JCA gives 28%); and only 6% from the south (JCA gives 16%). Joel Perlmann, in his research on the patterns of Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement, arrived at identical conclusions (2006: 1-41). Perlmann based his findings on lists of Jewish immigrants who entered the United States through Ellis Island. The murder and pillage perpetrated against the Jewish population, mainly in southern provinces, appear to have had some impact, but of a differential quality, insofar as the outflow from the southern areas affected immigration to the United States only marginally, or perhaps indirectly. By the same token, it may be inferred that increased migration to Palestine in certain years did reflect some degree of flight and panic. A comparison between arrivals at the two destination countries— Palestine and the United States—shows discrepancies in terms of the relative proportion of Jewish immigrants possessing or declaring a particular trade or profession, as against those with no declared skill or trade. In Palestine, 65% of the immigrants declared no profession, and in the United States, 43%. In comparison with other groups of immigrants who came to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews from Eastern Europe had the highest percentage of arrivals with no particular trade. One reason—perhaps the central one—was the much greater proportion of women and children in the 29

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Table 2. Immigrants to the United States and Palestine Declaring/Not Declaring a Particular Tradea

Trade declared No trade declared Total

United States (absolute figures) 841,000 644,000 1,485,000

Percentage

Palestine (absolute figures)

Percentage

56.7 43.3 100

8,123 14,830 22,953

35.3 64.7 100

(Source: Ha-olam 1910; 1911; 1913; 1914; Hersch 1931: 490) a These data refer to the years 1899-1914 in the United States and 1905-1914 in Palestine. The Palestine figures refer solely to the Odessa departures.

Jewish immigration stream. In addition, particularly in the case of immigrants to Palestine, there were, as we saw, a significant number of men and women over age fifty, which may have contributed somewhat to the high percentage of those with no profession. An analysis of the immigrants’ occupational backgrounds does not provide a clear picture of the Palestine-bound passengers embarking from Odessa. Without more detailed breakdowns within the broad classifications used, it cannot be determined precisely what trades were grouped under the category of artisans as compared to “workers,” nor is Figure 5. Occupational Profile of Immigrants to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1914.

(Source: Alroey 2014: 116; Hersch 1931: 501-502) 30

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

it entirely clear whether “agricultural laborers” and “workers” were ever used as a convenient proxy for those who had no previous experience or trade. Similar strictures apply to those who were listed as having been employed in “trade and industry,” and we cannot be sure whether students or minor religious functionaries were lumped together with those in the “liberal professions.” Yet, although these particular data sets do not enlighten us as to the internal breakdown of the global occupational categories, we do know from various other sources that a large proportion of immigrant Jews, both in Palestine and the United States, were artisans or petty tradesmen. The composition of immigrants according to occupation shows that 19% of those who came to Palestine followed the liberal professions. In comparison with their percentage in the Jewish population of the Russian Empire (5% in all), and their percentage among the immigrants to the United States (1%), it appears that a high percentage of educated people came to Palestine.6 The great majority of those arriving in Palestine clearly did not consider themselves agricultural laborers. None of this rules out the likelihood that immigrants changed their line of work upon arrival in their new countries. Lederhendler (2009: 16-17), in his latest study of Jewish immigration to the United States, shows that immigrants’ occupations in the United States did not necessarily match their occupations in their country of origin. Lederhendler found that there were 160,000 tailors in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, but more than 300,000 in the United States. In other words, many of the Jewish immigrants had not worked as tailors, nor had they ever even held a needle before arriving in America. The fact that urban trades probably predominated among the new arrivals receives added support from the immigrants’ stated intention to seek residences in cities, for the most part. Of those reporting such 6

Because the data we possess is divided into general and non-specific categories, a comparison cannot be made between the occupations of the immigrants who went to Palestine and those who went to the United States. Moreover, the professions that are placed in one category in Palestine are placed in another in the U.S., and there is therefore no basis for comparison. This perhaps is the explanation for the large proportion of members of the liberal professions who entered Palestine: a person defined as a member of the liberal professions in Palestine was not necessarily defined in the same way in the U.S. On the distribution of Jewish immigrants to the U.S. according to occupation, see Liebman Hersch 1931: 488. 31

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intentions, 38% indicated their preference to settle in Jerusalem or nearby Hebron; 36% intended to live in Jaffa; a minority of 16% were headed for rural colonies in Judea and Galilee, and the rest in cities like Haifa, Safed, Tiberias, or in major centers, like Beirut, in the close perimeter of Palestine. (Beirut was administratively linked under the Ottoman district system to the areas that later became British Palestine.) Figure 6. Immigrants to Palestine by Preferred Place of Settlement, 1905-1913

(Source: Alroey 2014: 117)

In other words, at least 74% of the immigrants wanted to live in the cities and only 16% wished to live in the rural colonies. There are several likely explanations for this: first, the great majority of Jews had lived in towns or cities in Eastern Europe, and continued to do so in Palestine. Second, many immigrants had earned their livelihoods from trade and crafts and could not envisage supporting their families merely from agricultural or other unskilled labor, under unfamiliar and possibly harsh conditions. These inferences are confirmed by some of the letters sent by immigrants to the information bureaus: Tel Aviv has an important role to play in developing the Yishuv. It draws new people, it makes the change of place, the move from Europe to Asia, easier for them. It binds them to the country, but there’s a fly in the ointment. Many of the immigrants want to rest and choose to settle here rather to go out to a colony, build a two-storey house and rent it, or plant an orchard or start a business (Mekhayey Yaffo 1913: 20). 32

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Figure 8. Personal Capital (in Rubles) Held by Immigrants to Palestine from Odessa, 1905-19107

(Source: Alroey 2014: 118)

Almost 60% of the immigrants to Palestine in the years 1905-1910 told the officials of the information bureau that they possessed less than a thousand rubles. In the context of the early twentieth century, this was a very modest sum, enough to cover the travel costs for an average Eastern European Jewish family to the United States. Passage on a ship sailing from Bremen, Hamburg, Rotterdam, or Antwerp cost about 75 rubles ($35.50, equivalent to $765 today). A child under a year old cost five rubles, and a child between one and twelve was half price. We may speculate that immigrants to Palestine were, on average, somewhat less affluent than those who went to the United States. Partial confirmation of that impression may be obtained from contemporary reports. Thus, the JCA information bureau published the following item in Der Jüdischer Emigrant in 1909: “Many [of the immigrants] point out that Palestine is closer. Most of them are very poor, and they cannot travel far, and they have to choose a place that is closer” (Der Jüdischer Emigrant, 1909: 9). Similarly, one well-placed observer on the scene, Menahem Sheinkin, thought likewise: “The current immigration for the most part brings us poor people for those who have some capital remain in Russia or go to America. Those who come to Palestine, 7

The data in Figure 8 is based on the answers given by 2,356 immigrants who were asked by an official of the information bureau in Odessa about the capital they possessed. 33

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on the other hand, are those who are down to their last cent, or old people who, if they do have any money, store it away in some bank or loan it to some shnorring institution [shnorring: looking for handouts; a pejorative Yiddish reference to religious charity foundations or schools], and trade does not benefit in the least” (Sheinkin 1907). A report from Sheinkin’s bureau dated May 1906 describes the state of the immigrants in the streets of Jaffa: “Most of the immigrants come here without any means of support, without any skill, and without any talent for any kind of business […] and we see here amongst us a large group of wretched immigrants who have no chance of settling in Jaffa and have no means to go to another country and seek a livelihood. […] Eye-diseases are prevalent here among the poorer residents, as sanitary conditions in the towns in the Turkish domains are beneath criticism. So you can imagine the terrible situation of the great mass of poor immigrants here” (ibid.). Figure 9. Immigrants’ Motivation to Move from Odessa to Palestine, 1905-19138

(Source: Alroey 2014: 119)

8

34

Those listed under the category of “came to visit” were people who were only in the country for a short time. Those listed under the category “came to die” were those whom the information office in Odessa described as coming “to pass their final days in the country.”

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Of immigrants who came to Palestine, 72% came in order to settle there (the large number of women and children supports this assertion); 8% came for a short time, to see the country, to visit relatives, to deal with business matters, and so on; and 13% came to spend their last days there. This latter group is particularly interesting, as we see from the immigrants’ composition according to age that 22% of the immigrants were aged fifty and over, yet only 13% claimed that they had come with the intention “to die in the country” and be buried there. That being the case, the other 9% of immigrants who belonged to this age group were not old folks who came to end their days in Palestine but rather active people who wanted to live there. At the same time, it is not clear how to classify those who came to the country to study Torah and live from halukah (charitable funds from abroad), but not necessarily to die there. It is uncertain whether these immigrants should be included with the 9% who came to live and work in the country or with the 13%who came to end their lives there. It is reasonable to suppose that the category of those who had “come to die” refers to immigrants who came to the country for the religious purpose of studying Torah and not necessarily of dying in the biological sense, so the students of Torah would therefore be included in that group (see figure 3). In 1905, 14% of the immigrants to Palestine stated that they had relied on the advice of relatives. By 1913, that proportion had increased significantly to 54%. This was undoubtedly an effect of chain-immigration. Figure 10. Immigrants to Palestine on the Advice of Relatives, 1905-1913

(Source: Alroey 2014: 120) 35

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In the earlier years, there were fewer new settlers to send back reliable information to other family members. As more Jewish immigrants continued to arrive, and as employment opportunities developed, firststage immigrants were able to send more information back home to their families or even to offer financial support. The fact that an increasing number of immigrants appear to have recommended Palestine as a good place to settle is interesting, given the hypothetical alternative: namely, that Jewish immigration might have fallen off, had the advice been negative. The evident importance attached by the immigrants to practical advice by relatives also should caution us against assuming that the primary factor in the decision to immigrate to Palestine was ideological Zionist fervor. Rather, there seems to have been a complex set of considerations involved.

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and to the United States, 1919-1925 Sources In contrast with the Ottoman period, the sources we possess about Jewish immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate period are more comprehensive and more orderly. The organization of the civil administration and cooperation between British authorities and the Zionist Movement made it possible to gather better data about the population in Palestine in general and the Jewish population in particular. In 1929, the Jewish Agency (the civil body entrusted under the Mandate to oversee Jewish communal affairs) issued its own statistics on the number of Jews then in Palestine. These data were collected and edited by David Gurevitch, head of the Department of Statistics of the Jewish Agency from the time it was established in 1924 until his death in 1947. Gurevitch was born in Latvia and emigrated to the United States, where he studied science, economics, and statistics. He came to Palestine in 1921. The Statistical Abstract of Palestine was the first statistical publication of its kind, and it served for years as the standard comprehensive guidebook on Jewish settlement in Palestine. In it, Gurevitch outlined his method of work: The material that has been included is based, as far as possible, on the official publications issued by the Governments of Palestine (annual 36

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Administrative Reports, Blue books, Departmental Report) and on the publications of the Zionist Organization (Reports to Zionist Congresses, Memoranda to the League of Nations, Departmental Reports, etc.), and has been supplemented by material drawn from reports, investigations, current literature, etc. The figures may therefore be deemed reliable or at all events as reliable as the primitive statistics methods at present in use in the compilation of Palestine statistics will admit. (Statistical Abstract 1929: VI)

This study and others that were subsequently published by the Jewish agency and the Mandate Government allow us to trace the number of entries into Palestine from the end of the First World War until 1925—the year when further large-scale Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States became impossible due to American quota restrictions. Further information may be derived from a database of Jewish residents in Mandatory Palestine constructed by economic historian Jacob Metzer. Based on contemporary lists of names and other particulars, Metzer’s data help us to analyze the demographic profile of the migrant population and enable access to missing information on immigration into Palestine during the 1920s (Metzer 2008).

How Many Came? During the first half of the 1920s, the number of Jews arriving in Palestine increased significantly. Its relative importance as a destination country was enhanced: comparing the distribution of Jewish migrants between Palestine and the United States during 1905-1914, only 3% came to Palestine and 97% went to the United States. By contrast, in the years 1919-1925 (especially after 1920), Palestine absorbed 27% while 73% went to the United States. The number of Palestine immigrants increased dramatically in 1924-1925, in the wake of American immigration restrictions. The year 1925  was a decisive turning point in the history of modern Jewish migration. For the first time the number of Jews entering Palestine was higher than of those arriving in the United States. This had historic implications for the Jewish people and the Zionist Movement. On one hand, the number of Jews in Palestine was significantly increased and the demographic gap between Jews and the Arab majority was 37

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considerably narrowed; on the other hand, it led the British authorities to limit the number of entry certificates offered to Jewish immigrants. The combined effect of American, British, and other western countries’ immigration restrictions in the 1920s and 1930s ultimately meant that far fewer Jews could migrate internationally than in the years before the First World War. Remaining in Europe, their fate was later sealed as the Second World War broke out. Table 3. Destination Choice of Jewish Emigrants: United States and Palestine, 1919-1925 Year

To Palestine

1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 Total

1,806 8,223 8,294 8,685 8,175 13,892 33,135 82,210

To the United States 3,055 14,292 119,036 53,524 49,719 49,989 10,292 296,852

(Source: Statistical Abstract 1929: 50; Lestchinsky 1927: 8-9)

Figure 10. The Waves of Jewish Immigration to the United States and Palestine, 1919-1925

(Source: Gurevitch 1929: 50; Lestchinsky 1927: 8-9) 38

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Demographic Profile of the Immigrants, 1919-1925 Figure 11. Sex Composition of Immigrants to Palestine and to the United States, 1919-1925

(Source: Gurevitch 1929: 45; Willcox 1931: 442-443)

The years 1919-1925  did not bring any significant change in the ratios of women and men, respectively, entering Palestine. Like the migrants of the Ottoman period, those of the early 1920s were divided roughly 60-40  in the percentages of men and women. On the other hand, Jewish migration to the United States reflects a new trend, insofar as, for the first time, the ratio of women immigrants exceeded that of men. During the early postwar years, 1921 and 1922, the proportion of females was even higher, and was estimated to be between 56 and 58% (Lestschinsky 1927: 8-9). The First World War had interrupted the steady flow of Jewish immigration to the United States, with the result that women and children—often left waiting their turn for departure while their male relatives established themselves in America—had been left stranded in Europe until 1919. When the war ended, many women and dependent children migrated to the United States in order to be reunited with husbands and fathers. It seems that in Palestine there were fewer men who were separated from their families during the war. Although migration to Palestine was also occasionally conducted in two stages, the men in Palestine apparently were able to bring their families from Eastern Europe more quickly to reunite with them. The attempt to examine the distribution according to age shows that there was a difference in population profile between Palestine and the 39

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Figure 12. Age Composition of Immigrants to Palestine and to the United States, 1919-1925

(Source: Gurevitch 1929: 45; Willcox 1931: 448-449)

United States after the First World War. There was a noticeable increase in the number of children and in the number of older adults entering the United States in comparison with the period before the war (30% as compared with 25%, and 13% as compared with 6%, respectively). Concomitantly, in the age range of 14-44  there was a proportional decrease. In Palestine, in contrast, there was a significant decrease in the arrivals of older adults. Correspondingly, in the youth and younger adults category (14-44) there was an impressive increase to 67% as compared with 53% before the war. The main reason for the demographic changes in the age composition of the immigrant population in Palestine was primarily the growing intervention of the Zionist Movement in migration to Palestine. Compared to the Ottoman period, relatively more young workers for the rural sector (dubbed “pioneers”) arrived during the 1920s, and the distribution of certificates gave preference to certain types of migrants who were judged more suitable for building up the country. The changes in the distribution according to sex and age in the United States and in Palestine are echoed in the altered occupational distribution of the immigrants. The high ratio of women and children among Jewish immigrants to the United States raised the proportion of those without a classified trade from 43% before the First World War to 55% 40

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

Table 4. Labor Characteristics of Jewish Immigrants to the United States and Palestine

With Profession Without Profession Total

United States

Percentage

Palestine

Percentage

296,852 164,656 296,852

45 55 100

42,492 39,718 82,210

52 48 100

afterwards. In Palestine, on the other hand, there was a decrease in the proportion of persons without a declared occupation, going from 65% before the war to 48% afterward. It is not possible to obtain an accurate record of immigrants’ regional origins in Eastern Europe, given the data in British Mandatory Government and the Jewish Agency sources. We get a rough idea that about 40% arrived from Poland, about 26% from Russia, 4% from Rumania, 3% from Lithuania, and smaller fractions from various European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Greece, etc.). The map of Europe changed after the war, empires vanished, and these were now replaced by new nation states; thus it is not clear from these data which areas were included in Poland and which in Russia. Moreover, the war and then the devastating antiJewish pogroms in Ukraine and along the Polish-Soviet border between 1918 and 1921 left many thousands of Eastern European Jews displaced from their former homes.

Conclusions This article examined the demographic profile of the immigrant population that arrived in Palestine before and after the First World War. The point of departure for this article is that the Jewish migration to Palestine has to be contextualized in a global migration process. It was not unique, guided by unique motivations and social features, but rather was an integral part of Jewish (and non-Jewish) migration out of Europe, with destination countries throughout the western hemisphere and elsewhere. Therefore, comparisons are potentially fruitful when we seek to portray the lives and backgrounds of Jewish immigrants in Palestine. In this article, the main comparison has been with Jewish immigrants in the United States. In light of the data, which relate to 41

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people belonging to the same pool of potential migration—inhabiting the same countries of origin, speaking the same languages, professing the same religion, and affected by the same cultural background—we become aware of similarities as well as some differences. This approach also allows us to reevaluate the relative weight of Zionist ideology in the decisions of some Jews to immigrate to Palestine. The purpose of this article is to examine the “second and third Aliyot”— the most ideological among the waves of immigration to Palestine—in the broad historical context of the period of the great migration from Eastern Europe, and to do so by using the accepted methods of research into immigration in general and Jewish immigration in particular. The statistical analysis questions the accepted Zionist narrative which sees immigration to Palestine as a special and exceptional phenomenon and points out the similarity between the immigration to Palestine and that to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The immigration to Palestine and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the emergence of two entities of importance in the Jewish world: the State of Israel and the Jewish community of the United States. Despite the differences that can be found today between these two great Jewish communities, the historical circumstances that led to their formation were similar. The case of the immigration to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century also exemplifies the waves of immigration to Palestine and the State of Israel in later years. If one examines the motivations and the demographic profile of the immigrants who came to Palestine from the 1920s until present, one will find them very similar to those of the immigrants to Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century. In nearly all the waves of immigration to Palestine, the forces driving the emigrants out of their countries of origin were much stronger than the power of attraction of the Zionist ideology and the land of Israel. In 1925, for the first time, after the issuing of the strict quota laws, more immigrants came to Palestine than to the United States. The Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in the 1930s and antisemitism in Poland resulted in another significant wave of a quarter of a million Jews in less than ten years; in the 1950s—the period of the great immigration to the young State of Israel—immigrants from the Arab countries came after their political and economic situation had been undermined with the founding of the State of Israel, and in the 1990s about a million Jews 42

Jewish Immigration to Palestine and the United States, 1905-1925

came from the Commonwealth of Independent States after the breakup of the communist bloc and the uprooting of the old political order. Although in every wave of immigration there was a minority which cherished the Zionist idea and dreamed of return to the ancestral land, the great majority were immigrants for whom the land was not an ideal. This was the case at the beginning of the twentieth century, and so it was in the other waves of immigration to Palestine and the State of Israel.

REFERENCES Alroey, G. (2004). Immigrants: Jewish Immigration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi. (Hebrew) Alroey, G. (2006). Patterns of Jewish emigration from Russian Empire from the 1870s to 1914. Jews in Russian and Eastern Europe, Winter 2 (57), 24-51. Alroey, G. (2008). The Quiet Revolution: Jewish Emigration from the Russian Empire, 1875-1924. Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar. (Hebrew) Alroey, G. (2014). An Unpromising Land: Jewish Migration to Palestine in the Early Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bachi, R. (1946). Between migration and aliyah. Akhdut Havoda, 4, 269-71. Der Jüdischer Emigrant (1909). Men Shreibt undz. Der Jüdischer Emigrant, 8 (23 Iyar), 9. (Yiddish) Der Jüdischer Emigrant (1911). Die Invanderung Kein Palestina. Der Jüdisher Emigrant, 3 (1 Adar), 10. (Yiddish) Eisenstadt, S. (1954). Aliyah and immigration: Outline for sociologic typology. Metsuda, 7, 83-91. (Hebrew) Eisenstadt, S. (1967). The Israeli Society: Background, Development, Problems. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (Hebrew) Gartner, L. (1982). The mass Jewish European migration, 1914-1881. In A. Shinan (Ed.), Emigration and Settlement in Jewish and Genral History (pp. 343-383). Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar. (Hebrew) Goldscheider, C. (1992). Demographic transformations in Israel: Emerging themes in comparative context. In C. Goldscheider (Ed.), Population and Social Change in Israel (pp. 1-38). Oxford: Westview Press. Gorny, Y. (1970). Ha-Shinu’im Bamivne ha-hevrati ve ha-politi shel ha’aliya ha-shniya bashanim 1904-1940. Ha-tsiyonut, 1, 204-246. 43

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Gurevitch, D. (1929). Statistical Abstract of Palestine, 1929. Jerusalem: Keren Ha-yesod. Gurevich, D., Gertz, A., and Bachi, R. (1944). The Jewish Population of Palestine: Immigration, Demographic Structure and Natural Growth. Jerusalem: Ha-sochnut Ha-yehudit. Ha-olam (1910). The departure from Russia to Eretz Israel, 17 (12.5.1910), 14-15. Ha-olam (1911). The departure from Russia to Eretz Israel, 5 (13.2.1911), 18-19. Ha-olam (1913). The departure from Russia to Eretz Israel, 16 (6.5.1913), 9-10. Ha-olam (1914). The departure from Russia to Eretz Israel, 9 (10.3.1914), 15-16. Halamish, A. (2005). A Dual Race Against Time: Zionist Immigration Policy in the 1930s. Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi. (Hebrew) Hersch, L. (1931). International migration of the Jews. In W. Willcox and I. Ferenczi (Eds.), International Migrations (pp. 471-520). New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. Howe, I. (1976). World of Our Fathers. New York: Touchstone. Kaplan, K. (2002). Ortodoxia be-olam he-hadash. Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar. Katznelson, R. (1930). L’Immigrazione Degli Ebrei in Palestina Nei Tempi Moderni. Napoli: Studio Statistico Demografico. Lambroza, S. (1992). The Pogroms of 1903-1906. In J. D. Klier and S. Lambroza (Eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (pp. 195-247). New York: Cambridge University Press. Lederhendler, E. (2000). Whither? New Trends among East European Jews. Tel Aviv: Open University (Hebrew) Lederhendler, E. (2009). Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 18801920. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lestschinsky, J. (1927). The Jewish Immigration in the Last Twenty-five Years. Berlin: Zentral Bureau. (Yiddish) Lestschinsky, J. (1945). The Jewish Wandering. Jerusalem: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Mekhayey Yaffo. (1913). Mekhayey Yaffo, Ha-poel Hatzair, 1 (7 Tishrei), 20. Metzer, J. (2008). Jewish immigration to Palestine in the long 1920s: An exploratory examination. The Journal of Israeli History, 27 (2), 221-251. 44

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Neumann, B. (2009). Land and Desire in Early Zionism. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Perlmann, J. (2006). The Local Geographic Origins of Russian-Jewish Immigrants, Circa 1900. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, August 2006 (Working Paper no. 465). Razi, T. (2009). Forsaken Children: The Backyard of Mandate Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Ridnik, H. (1912). Ha-hagira ha-ivrit dereh hof Yafo be-shanat 1912. HaPo’el Ha-Tza’ir (23 Shevat 1913), 11-12. Sheinkin, M. (1906). Report on the Jewish immigration to Palestine, Labor Archives, 1V-108-12b, 1. Sheinkin, M. (1907). Ha-modi’im be-eretz isra’el, 1907, Labor Archives, IV-108-12. Sorin, G. (1992). A  Time for Building: The Third Migration 1880-1920. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins. Stampfer, S. (1985). The geographic background of East European Jewish migration to the United States before World War I. In I. Glazier and L. De Rosa (Eds.), Migration across Time and Nation (pp. 220-230). New York: Holmes & Meier. Slutsky, Y. (1973). Introduction to the History of the Labour Movement in Israel. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew) Smilansky, M. (1928). Writings, vol 8. Tel Aviv: Hitachdut ha-ikarim. (Hebrew) Spielberg, B. (1913). Spielberg to Ussishkin, 5 July 1913, list of passengers No. 51, CZA, A24, 1152. Tartakower, A. (1947). The Jewish Wandering in the World, Jerusalem: Jerusalem: Ha-makhon le haskala tzionit. (Hebrew) Toledano, S. (1999). The 1890-1891 Aliyah and its meaning for the development of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Haifa, Haifa. Wischnitzer, M. (1948). To Dwell In Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration Since 1800. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America.

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A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars Orly C. Meron Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Introduction At the end of 1912, the majority of Greece’s Jewish population was distributed between Old Greece and New Greece.1 Earlier research provides a demographic analysis of Greece’s Jewish population mainly for the new northern territories, especially Salonica (Meron 2008a), in New Greece. The population of Old Greece had been living under the geo-political framework of the Greek successor nation-state of the Ottoman Empire since 1830. In this article I aim to construct a retrospective socio-demographic profile (population size, spatial distribution, literacy, occupation) of the Jewish population of Old Greece between the two World Wars, using rare official census data for 1920, available only for Old Greece. Compiling the socio-demographic attributes of this population will then allow us to determine the applicability of the Kuznets model, based on the experience of Central-Eastern European Jews (Kuznets 1960) and their mass migration to the US (Kuznets 1972), to Jewish minorities in the pre-World War II backyard of Europe. In other words, did the Jewish population in Old Greece share the socio-demographic profile of the Ashkenazic Jewish population of Central Europe before World War II? 1

46

“Old Greece” included five regions: Central Greece and Eubée; Thessaly; the Ionian Islands; the Cyclades Islands, and the Peloponnesus. “New Greece” included the provinces acquired by Greece after the Balkan Wars (1913): Macedonia; Epirus; some of the Aegean Islands (Lesbos, Chios and Samos, and excluding Rhodes and the Dodecanese, which came under Italian rule in 1912 and were transferred to Greece only in 1947 following completion of an international postwar settlement); Crete and Western Thrace (Fleming 2008: 32–33).

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

The Kuznets model relates to non-assimilated Jewish groups in modern Europe, generally migrant-generated (that is, relative newcomers, compared to the more veteran groups living in a locality, sometimes with roots going back hundreds of years). Kuznets (1960) suggests three main reasons why the economic structure of such minorities characteristically features a relatively narrow range of occupations, concentrated in fewer branches of the economy, when compared with the majority population: their traditional skills (“economic heritage”); their attempts to maintain cohesiveness (non-assimilative; cluster residence; and communal institutions for mutual assistance); and conditions in the host country (governmental and public attitudes towards minorities: ethnic discrimination and economic structure of opportunities in the host labor market). As discrimination (overt or latent) intensifies, the economic structure tends to become narrower and more concentrated, and “abnormal” in comparison with the mainstream economy. This model has proved applicable to pre-World War II Jewish migrantgenerated minorities in Central Europe (Don 1990; 1992) and to Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe in Western Europe (Green 1998) and the New World (Godley 2001). Moreover, it has also proved applicable to indigenous Jewish minorities living in Muslim societies, such as Iraq before the establishment of the State of Israel (Darvish 1985; 1987), as well as Jewish groups in Argentina (Syrquin 1987) and Turkey after World War II (Tuval 2004). Lately, DellaPergola has suggested that the Kuznets typology can also be applied to the non-modern Jewish Diaspora between 70 and 1492 C.E. (DellaPergola 2013: 269–270). In laying out the guidelines for reconstructing a socio-demographic profile of the “Jewish communities in the Orient,” DellaPergola (2002) recommends conducting both an inter-ethnic (Jews and non-Jews) and an intra-ethnic (for example, Sephardic, Ashkenazic) comparative analysis of the different external variables (geo-political factors, economic structure, host attitude towards minorities) as well as an analysis of the social or communal frameworks in which the various sub-group members lived and operated. This approach makes it possible to analyze the socio-demographic patterns common to Jewish groups around the world as well as to distinguish those patterns which differ, and thus to determine whether a specific population fits the Kuznets model (1960) for Jewish minorities. 47

Orly C. Meron

The comparisons in this article are presented on two levels: first, between the Greek majority and the Jewish minority populations—the majority-minority perspective; and the second, between the Jewish sub-populations within Old Greece—the intra-ethnic perspective. This article contains nine sections: section one introduces the methodological issues; section two surveys the demographic growth of the Jewish population in the Greek nation-state according to the official data, supplemented by other records from that period; sections three, four, and five focus respectively on demographic indices (sex-ratio, literacy, internal ethnic make-up) associated with population movements; sections six, seven, and eight present employment data and analyze occupational structure according to gender and ethnicity; finally, section nine presents some conclusions.

1. Greek Jewry: Definition, Sources of Data, and Methodology The national Greek population census of 1920 presents data that identify the religion of the enumerated population. It also provides tables which distribute the religious sub-populations according to literacy, language, employment and occupation. This furnishes a relatively detailed socio-demographic picture, but only for Old Greece. Five census volumes are devoted to the five regions of Old Greece. The five census volumes for New Greece were never published because of claims by the census bureau that these data had become irrelevant after the radical demographic transformations resulting from the population exchange between Greece and its neighbors, Bulgaria and Turkey, which ended in 1923 (National Center for Social Research, Athens, 1972: 154 n. 1). This decision was apparently intended to “hide” the minority populations in New Greece, particularly the large Jewish population concentrated in Salonica that was heavily engaged in the seaport economy of this second largest city in Greece. With ethnicity identification serving as an instrument for justifying territorial demands, the presence of significant minorities presented potential problems for Greek delegations at international conferences where the fate of the former Ottoman Macedonia was being decided. Hiding ethnic-religious affiliation data for minorities is not unique to the Greek national census. This phenomenon is found also in some central European censuses for reasons similar to those 48

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

in Greece (Deutsch 1966: 210-211). However, in the Greek case, the indigenous Jewish population in Old Greece, which was considered a small and relatively geographically dispersed minority, and thus not a threat to Greece’s territorial and national integrity, was treated differently (compared to other minorities) when the 1920 census data were compiled and published (Meron 2008a: 12-18). Thus, the only available detailed census data on Greek Jewry in 1920 relate to Old Greece. The Greek census of 1928 provided data according to religion and literacy, but did not provide ethnic indications for detailed socio-demographic attributes such as age, education, employment and occupation for Greece as a whole. Consequently, Greece’s Jewish population became an invisible component in the country’s official economic records. The following sections focus on the main concentrations of Jewish population in the regions of Old Greece: Central Greece, the Ionian Islands and Thessaly—including Greater Athens, Corfu, Larissa, and Volos.

2. The Jewish Population of Old Greece, 1830-1928: Size and Spatial Distribution Greece’s Jewish population grew steadily from 1830 onward, in tandem with the expansion of its borders. The Jews of Corfu became Greek citizens in 1864, while the Jewish communities of Larissa, Volos, Trikala and Arta came under Greek rule only after 1881 with Greece’s annexation of Thessaly and part of Epirus.2 In 1905, according to Elkan Nathan Adler, a British Jew visiting Volos (1905: 147), Volos’s Jewish population numbered some one hundred and fifty families, totaling approximately 750 persons (this figure is obtained by multiplying by five, the parameter for a Jewish family; see Meron 2008a: 63). Larissa’s Jewish population, too, totalled approximately one hundred and fifty Jewish families in 1905 (Adler 1905: 147), and some two hundred families at the beginning of the 1920s, according to the editors of the Jewish Almanac of Salonica (Angel and Levi 1923: 65). The latter note that Larissa’s Jewish population, which totalled one thousand families before 1881, shrank 2

A sketched map attached to the 1920  Greek census shows the successively changing borders of Greece at various periods between 1828 and 1923. 49

Orly C. Meron

in the early 1920s as a result of the Greek occupation. Adler reports that between the Russo-Turkish war (1878) and 1905, Larissa’s Jewish population gradually decreased (Tables 1, 2, 3) to about half its original size because the Jews “were molested by the hillmen [sic] of Epirus, out of revenge for their Turkish sympathies, but the Volo [sic] Jews were under no discomfort. Volo [sic] is a sea-port and has consuls, to which fact, indeed, it owed its immunity from the damage during the Turkish occupation” (Adler 1905: 148). The Jewish population of Corfu followed a pattern similar to that observed in Larissa. According to a census of the town and its districts (1853), the rapid population growth that characterized the era of British rule (1815-1863), when the Jewish population numbered 2,160  local Jews in addition to 224 foreign Jews, ceased with the transition to Greek rule (Gekas 2004: 177). As a result of the blood libel of 1891, the banning of Jewish businesses, and persecution, Jews emigrated from Corfu to seaports in Italy and in the Ottoman Empire, including Salonica, thus reducing the local Jewish population (Gekas 2004: 183-191). Although regarded as Greek citizens, the Jews of the rising nationstate were subject to nationalistic discrimination. Greek territorial expansion, propelled by the Great Idea (Magali Idea) and aimed at the territorial re-creation of the Byzantine Empire, was accompanied from the very beginning by anti-Jewish manifestations (Fleming 2008: 23–31). The riots and blood libel in Corfu in 1891 (Gekas 2004: 183–191) and the persecutions against the Jews of Larissa following the Greek occupation of Thessaly (wrested from the Ottomans) in 1897 (Emmanuel 1972: 164–165) attest to only two of such violent events against local Jews that resulted in waves of emigration to various destinations. Representatives of the International Organization of Jewish Societies (Union des Associations Israélites), which was established to unify relief work in the Balkan countries after the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars, reported that Greece’s Jewish population was subject to “repeated evidence of anti-Jewish fanaticism among the Greeks even in recent times” (AJYB 1913–1914: 199). In 1907, the entire Jewish population of Greece totalled 6,127 persons or 0.23% of Greece’s total population of 2,631,952 (AJYB 19151916: vol. 17, 343). In 1913 there were approximately 6,830 Jews in Old Greece out of a total Greek population of about 2,630,000 (less than 0.3% of the total population), most of whom were urban dwellers (Table 1). 50

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Table 1. The Jewish Population in Urban Centers of Old Greece, 1913 City/Town

Jews (I)

Corfu Larissa Volos Trikala Athens

2,800 1,250 1,000 600 500

Total Population (II)

Percentage of Jews (I/II*100)

18,978 18,041 23,563 17,809 167,479

14.75 6.92 4.24 3.37 0.27

(Source: Adapted from AJYB 1913-1914: 201)

The census records of 1920  provide the first detailed data regarding the urban Jewish population of Old Greece. Table 2 shows that the Jewish population in Greater Athens was a minority within the rather homogeneous Greek Orthodox population, whereas in Corfu, Larissa, and Volos the Jewish population lived in a more ethnically mixed environment. The Jewish minority population in Corfu was second in size to the prominent Catholic minority, which constituted 9.2% of Corfu’s total population (2,798 out of 30,569 persons). At least a third of this Catholic minority declared Italian as their mother tongue (928 out of 2,798), and were apparently indigenous residents from the era of Italian rule at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Corfu was also home to 248 Muslims including 110 Albanians and 103 Turks—a “reminder” of the island’s Ottoman history (these calculations are based on the detailed sources in Table 2 below). Similarly, Larissa and Volos contained a relatively significant Muslim-Turkish minority (Larissa: 424 out of 502; Volos: 590 out of 678, with the remainder in both municipalities Gypsies and Greeks)—a reminder of their Ottoman past and the Turkish-Greek wars toward the end of the nineteenth century. The Greek census of May 1928 provides the first detailed official data for the total Jewish population of Greece, which totalled 72,791 persons, of whom 71,899 were urban dwellers (municipalités et grandes communes) while a tiny minority of 892 were rural dwellers (Greek Census 1928, Vol. 1: Table 7*). The majority of the Jewish urban population (91.4% or 65,683 out of 71,899) lived in the municipalities of New Greece, with the largest concentration (76.8% or 55,250 out of 71,899) residing in Salonica (see above). 51

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Table 2. Population in Municipalities of Old Greece by Ethnicity, 1920 Athens Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

317,209 135,833 Total populationa Percentage of Greek Orthodox 98.0 99.0 Percentage of Muslims 0.2 0.0 Percentage of Jews 0.3 0.1 Number of Jews 798 77

30,569 85.2 0.8 4.4 1337

22,401 93.9 2.2 3.5 780

30,046 95.1 2.4 2.3 678

(Source: Adapted from Greek Census 1920: République Hellénique, Ministère de l’Economie Nationale, Statistique Générale de la Grèce (1928). Recensement de la Population de la Grèce au 19  Décembre 1920-1  Janvier 1921. Résultats Statistiques Généraux: A. Population B. Familles. Athens: Imprimerie Nationale. For Athens and Piraeus: Vol. I. Résultats Statistiques pour la Grèce Centrale et Eubée (1927), Table Xid, 310-315, 318-324. For Arta, Larissa and Volos: Vol. II. Résultats Statistiques pour Thessalie et Arta (1929), Table Xid, 217-218, 219-223. For Corfu: Vol. III. Résultats Statistiques pour les Iles Ioniennes (1924), Table Xid, 152-156.) a The total population figures include other negligible minorities.

In contrast to the trend that began in the late nineteenth century, wherein Jewish populations were concentrated in the capital cities of most European countries (Ruppin 1931: vol. 1, 87-108), the majority of Greece’s Jewish population was concentrated in Salonica, New Greece. Even in Old Greece, the largest center of Jewish population was in Corfu, and not in the nation’s capital, Athens (Table 3 below). This mirrored the situation that had existed under Ottoman rule, prior to the geo-political transformations in the region. Demographically, from the very beginning of the New Greek nationstate, the Jewish population of Old Greece was a geographically scattered numerical minority within a Greek majority. In contrast to the mass concentration of Jews in Salonica, the Jewish population of Athens, which more than doubled by 1940, totalled only some 3,500 Jews (Molho and Nehama 1965: 224; Kitroeff 1995: 50). The increase occurred in the 1930s due to the arrival of Jewish migrants from Salonica, who were generally businessmen (Bowman 2002: 80). Athens became the main center of Jewish population only after the Holocaust, during which some 96% of Salonica’s Jewish community perished. 52

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Table 3. Jewish Urban Population of Old Greece, 1928 Region

Municipality

Central Greece and Euboea

Agrinion Athens Piraeus Kallithea Salamis Chalcis Lamia

2 1,578 167 6 6 61 1 1,821

Larissa Pagasses (Volos) Cardista Trikkala

767 948 49 480 2,244

Zante Corfu Argostoli

138 1,819 1 1,858

Total Thessaly

Total Ionian Islands

Population

Total Cyclade Islands

Hermopolis

Peloponnese

Aegion Amalias Letrines (Pyrgos) Patras Calamata

1 12 4 170 4 191

Arta

389

Total Epirus

2

Total Old Greece

6,216

Percentage of Urban Jews Old Greece out of Urban Jews in whole Greece

8.6

(Source: Greek census 1928, vol. 1, Table 7*.)

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3. Sex Ratio To produce a socio-demographic profile of the Jewish population in Old Greece, we will begin with a calculation of the sex-ratio distributions in the municipalities with the largest Jewish populations. Table 4 shows a balanced sex ratio for most of the Jewish population in urban areas (Corfu, Larissa). The distorted sex ratio in Athens, the rapidly developing new national capital, reflects the slow but steady migration of Jews to Athens because of new economic opportunities there. The male-biased sex-ratio in Athens is offset by the female-biased sex-ratio in Volos, due to the migration pattern (compare with Rivlin 1998: 104-105). Table 4. Jewish Population in Municipalities of Old Greece by Sex, 1920

Males Females Total Sex ratioa

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volosb

418 380 798 110

38 39 77 97.4

671 666 1337 100.8

388 392 780 99.0

304 374 678 81.3

(Source: see Table 2.) a Sex ratio is defined as the proportion of males to females multiplied by one hundred. b In the census, the municipality of Volos is identified with the municipality of Pagasses.

Table 5  shows a consistently distorted sex ratio in the non-Jewish urban populations, compared with the respective Jewish populations. The highest sex ratio is found in Greater Athens, to which non-Jewish rural migrants also flocked. The distorted sex ratio and other evidence indicates that already after the great fire in Salonica (1917) and before the Transfer (1923), Athens had become the new internal migration destination of Greek Jewry. However, the higher sex ratio in the nonJewish population (which almost equalled that of the Greek Orthodox population, the national majority), especially in Greater Athens, leads to the conclusion that at least in the early 1920s, the Jewish population in Old Greece did not regard Athens as a main migration destination. By 54

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

contrast, among the Greek Orthodox majority there was an increase in the pace of internal migration to Greater Athens, which had become the most sought-after destination even before the arrival of Greek refugees from Asia Minor. The absence of data on age and marital status by religious affiliation prevents us from conducting an in-depth analysis of the above findings. The strongly male sex ratio in Larissa reflects the presence of both Greek soldiers and the remaining Muslim Turks in the area in 1920. The sex ratio in Larissa’s Muslim population was 168.4 (315  males, 187 females). Table 5. Non-Jewish Population in Municipalities of Old Greece by Sex, 1920a

Males Females Total Sex ratio

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

176,156 140,255 316,411 125.6

71,680 64,076 135,756 111.9

14,720 14,512 29,232 101.4

13,127 8,494 21,621 154.5

15,022 14,346 29,368 104.7

(Source: see Table 2.) a The data for the non-Jewish population was calculated by deducting the figures for the Jewish population from the figures for the total population.

4. The Language Dimension: An Indicator of Sub-ethnic Affiliation The national majority in Old Greece—Christians of all denominations, but mostly Greek Orthodox—generally displayed linguistic uniformity. Their mother tongue was Greek. The Jewish population, by contrast, was linguistically heterogeneous. Although religiously distinct from the Greek Orthodox majority, the Jewish population was not ethnically uniform (Meron 2005a). The language which Jews declared in the census as their main language indicated their sub-ethnic affiliations and geo-political origins (see Table 6). For example, the existence of a small number of German literates among Athens Jews suggests a German background for the founders of the 55

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Jewish community in the Greek capital in the mid-nineteenth century. German Jewish businessmen, including Max Rothschild, accompanied the German king, Otto of Bavaria, to Athens following the development of new opportunities for financial investments there. Small groups of Judeo-Spanish literates recorded as living in Athens were descendants of Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Izmir and Ioannina. They, too, moved to the developing capital in search of new economic opportunities (Fleming 2008: 22-23). Sub-ethnicities formed bases for cohesiveness in the separate communities of the Jewish population. Yet, while these internal ethnic boundaries provided social networks and economic resources for members of these communities, they also caused intra-communal conflicts, mainly between the Italian, Sephardic and Romaniote (descendants of the ancient Byzantine Jewish community, Greek speakers) communities. It is well known, for example, that a long-standing conflict existed between the Greek and Italian Jewish communities in Corfu, home of the largest Jewish population in Old Greece. This conflict focused on the Romaniote insistence on its historically legal, exclusively privileged integration into the Venetian governmental framework. This Greekspeaking Jewish community, whose members claim historical and cultural primacy and uniqueness, discouraged the entry of newcomers Table 6: Jewish Population in Municipalities of Old Greece by Linguistic Affiliation (1920) (percentages) Language

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

Greek Spanisha Italian French German Otherb Total Total Jews

55 33 3 3 2 4 100 798

56 26 0 1 5 12 100 77

76 0 23 0 0 1 100 1337

5 94 0 0 0 1 100 780

39.2 54.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 6.5 100.0 678

(Source: see Table 2.) a Spanish literates include a negligible number of Portuguese literates. b The category “Other” includes other languages such as Japanese (Japonaise), Gipsy (Tzingane). 56

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

into their community (Fleming 2008: 38–41). Table 4 shows the predominant presence of Sephardic Jews in Thessaly (Larissa and Volos), where the Ottomans ruled until the end of the nineteenth century, in contrast to the higher proportion of the Greek-speaking Jews in Greater Athens.

5. Language and Literacy Both Jewish males and females in Old Greece were, on average, more educated than their non-Jewish counterparts. According to official data from 1920 (published only in 1951), 42% of all enumerated Greeks (4,816,025) declared literacy, while 58% declared themselves illiterate. Out of 2,407,345 males, 56% declared themselves to be literate and 44% illiterate; out of 2,408,680 females, only 27% declared themselves to be literate, while 73% declared themselves to be illiterate. Illiteracy rates were lower among the total population aged ten and over—the potential labor force that totalled 3,766,832 persons. Of these, 48% were literate and 52% were illiterate. The distribution of these figures by gender is as follows: of the 1,859,834 males, 66% declared themselves to be literate and 34% illiterate; out of 1,906,998 females, only 30% declared themselves to be literate while 70% declared illiteracy.3 A comparison of the literacy data for Jewish males and females (Tables 7, 8), who were generally urban, with the above data for the entire Greek population, which was both urban and rural, reveals higher literacy rates among the Jewish population due to the inclusion of the rural non-Jewish population. A  comparison of urban Jews and nonJews reveals the opposite trend (Tables 9, 10). Illiteracy was greater among urban Jewish males than among urban Greek males, while illiteracy was greater among urban Greek females than among urban Jewish females.

3

The Greek Census 1951 (Chapter XI, Table 1: Distribution of the population in Greece by education according to the Greek Census of 1870-1951) provided data regarding education for the entire Greek population in the censuses of 1870, 1879, 1907, 1920, 1928, and 1951 for both the total population and for the population aged ten and over (10 ans et plus). 57

Orly C. Meron

Table 7. Jewish Males in Municipalities of Old Greece by Literacy, 1920 (percentages)a

Literate Illiterate Total Total Jewish males

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

74.2 25.8 100.0

70.6 29.4 100.0

51.1 48.9 100.0

51.8 48.2 100.0

55.1 44.9 100.0

418

38

671

388

304

(Source: see Table 2.)

Table 8. Jewish Females in Municipalities of Old Greece by Literacy, 1920 (percentages)a

Literate Illiterate Total Total Jewish females

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

67.0 33.0 100.0

65.8 34.2 100.0

37.4 62.6 100.0

34.8 65.2 100.0

47.1 52.9 100.0

380

39

666

392

374

(Source: see Table 2.) a Tables 7, 8 exclude enumerated males and females who did not provide literacy information.

Table 9. Non-Jewish Males in Municipalities of Old Greece by Literacy, 1920 (percentages)a

Literate Illiterate Total Total non-Jewish males (Source: see Table 2.)

58

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

79.1 20.9 100.0

68.6 31.4 100.0

59.4 40.6 100.0

72.6 27.4 100.0

71.8 28.2 100.0

171,736

70,076

14,423

12,442

14,654

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Table 10. N  on-Jewish Females in Municipalities of Old Greece by Literacy, 1920 (percentages)a

Literate Illiterate Total Total non-Jewish females

Athens

Piraeus

Corfu

Larissa

Volos

60.0 40.0 100.0

51.1 48.9 100.0

46.5 53.5 100.0

41.1 58.9 100.0

50.5 49.5 100.0

135,934

62,705

14,231

8,120

14,061

(Source: see Table 2.) a Tables 9, 10 exclude enumerated males and females who did not provide literacy information.

The 1920 census data provides literacy figures according to religious affiliation for Old Greece before the enactment of the Compulsory Education Law in 1929, which established Greek as the language of instruction throughout Greece. Jews declared themselves literate in different languages, depending on their mother tongue. Since literacy in Greek appears to have been a matter of Greek patriotism, the census question about literacy may have become a sensitive issue for the Jews, mirroring their social integration into the Greek nation-state, especially in Thessaly (finally annexed to Greece only in the late 1890s). In Larissa, 94% of the Jews declared “Espagnole,” the language closest to JudeoSpanish, as their mother tongue. However, in Volos, only about half (54%) declared Spanish as their first language, while more than a third declared Greek as their native language, reflecting their ambition to be considered Greek in order to facilitate their social and economic integration into the new, growing port city. A few Jews oddly declared proficiency in Japanese and Romani (Gypsy), though perhaps mistakes crept in (see above, Table 6), which subsequently distorted the literacy data regarding the Jewish population. Still, the apparent gap in literacy rates in favor of the Greek urban population in 1920  may mirror the impeded penetration of modern education among the Jews in contrast to the relatively early revival of mass modern Greek education following the Greek Kingdom’s establishment in 1830 (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2002: 160–164). This delay mainly affected the Jewish poor, considered “non-paying” pupils (Allatini 1875: 23), and consequently may have affected the literacy of 59

Orly C. Meron

Jewish adults, mainly in Thessaly, where the Ottoman regime ruled until the late nineteenth century. Jewish primary schools were established by the Jewish communities and Jewish philanthropic associations in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Alliance Israélite Universelle primary school for boys was established in Volos as early as 1865, and in Larissa in 1868 (Rodrigue [1993] 2003: 16), followed by a primary community school in Larissa (1870–1926). However, these schools suffered from financial constraints that frequently led to their closing. Thus, for example, the school in Volos eventually closed in 1878  and reopened only in the 1880s (Rivlin 1998: 102–103). The absence of data for the distribution of literacy by age and religious affiliation prevents us from analyzing the literacy rate in the potential Jewish workforce. The above socio-demographic profile of the total Jewish population in certain localities in Old Greece may have affected the rate of labor force participation and, in particular, its occupational structure.

6. Employment Under the heading “Population de fait de 10 ans et plus par sexe, religion et profession,” the census provides rare data regarding occupations in the Jewish population, but only by departments (which include both urban and rural areas). Since the Jews were concentrated in urban areas, this distorts the comparison of employment data with that of the Greek population. In Greater Athens and Corfu, the proportion of gainfully employed males was much higher among the Jewish population than among the Greek population, whereas in Larissa, the employment rates were similar. The relatively high rate of unemployed Jews in Larissa reflects the fact that it served as a battlefield between Greece and the Ottoman Empire (Table 11). In 1881, Thessaly was incorporated into Greece. However, in 1897  the Ottomans reoccupied the region and ruled there for over a year. According to Salonican Jewish sources, the Jews of Larissa, the capital of Thessaly, found themselves persecuted by both sides (Greeks and Ottomans) within the unstable new borders until the Lausanne Agreement (January 1923). This had a negative impact on their economic opportunities. The reduced sources of employment accelerated emigration from Larissa to Salonica and Athens (Angel and Levi 1923: 65). 60

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Table 11. J  ewish Male Employment in Departmentsa of Old Greece, 1920 Jews

Non-Jews

Employed Unemployedb Total labor forcec Percentage unemployed

297 20 317 6.3

211375 67668 279043 24.3

Employed Unemployedb Total labor forcec Percentage unemployed

394 27 421 6.4

36,083 9,860 45,943 21.5

Employed Unemployedb Total labor forcec Percentage unemployed

365 141 506 27.9

70,166 25,657 95,823 26.8

Attica and Beotia

Corfu

Larissa

(Source: Adapted from the Greek Census 1920: For Attica and Beotia: Vol. I. Résultats Statistiques pour la Grèce Centrale et Eubée (1927), Table XIIb, 337-338; For Thessaly and Arta: Vol. II. Résultats Statistiques pour Thessalie et Arta (1929), Table XIIb, 241-242; For Corfu: Vol. III. Résultats Statistiques pour les Iles Ioniennes (1924), Table XIIb, 166-168.) a The smallest administrative unit available for the distribution of occupation by religion was “Department” (Département). The Departments chosen for the table included the major concentrations of Jews for each region. b “Unemployed” includes “sans profession” and “profession non-déclarée.” c The labor force includes all males aged 10 and over.

7. Occupation 7.1 Males In an analysis of the data for the gainfully employed, the most notable finding shows the absence of Jews from agricultural occupations (Table 12), which accorded with the generally low propensity for Jews to engage in agriculture as compared to the non-Jewish population 61

Orly C. Meron

(Kuznets 1960: 1605-1606). At the same time, about a quarter of the Greek majority in Attica and about two thirds in Corfu and Thessaly worked in agriculture. Like the Greek majority, two thirds of gainfully employed males of the Muslim minority (62%, or 797 out of 1285) in Larissa4 worked in agricultural occupations.5 Table 12. J  ews and Non-Jews in Agricultural Branches in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 Attica and Beotia

Agriculture Livestock Fishery Total Percentage of gain­ fully employeda

Corfu

Larissa

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

1 1 0 2

40,511 6,986 1,703 49,200

4 0 0 4

20,231 793 792 21,816

1 0 0 1

30,486 9,779 685 40,950

0.7

23.3

1.0

60.5

0.3

58.4

(Source: As of Table 11 and Table 11.) a “Gainfully employed” includes both the self-employed and employees.

As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, a traditional preference for urban dwelling, which supported Jewish communal life, as well as historical restrictions on land ownership, affected Jews’ occupational patterns. Indeed, one may speak of a Jewish “urban economic legacy” similar to that in New Greece, mainly for the Jewish population in Salonica (Meron 2005b: 25). Moreover, the absence of Jews from mining and quarrying—which are land-related occupations—indicates that land, the form of capital that was a symbol of power, belonged to the national majority, especially in the newborn nation-state (Don 1992: 255). In the mid-1930s, Jewish industrialists often took on Greek partners to facilitate access to supplies of raw materials mined in Greek quarries, which were considered a national resource (Meron 2011: 154-158). The mass of the Muslim workforce, i.e. aged ten years and over (1,649  out of 2109, or 78%), including the non-employed, was concentrated in Larissa (Greek Census 1920, Vol. II. Résultats Statistiques pour Thessalie et Arta [1929], Table XIIa, 233-234). 5 Greek Census 1920 Vol. II. Résultats Statistiques pour Thessalie et Arta (1929), Table XIIb, 241-242. 4

62

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Table 13. G  ainfully Employeda Jewish and Greek Males in Non-Agricultural Economic Branches in Departments of Old Greece, 1920b (percentages) Attica and Beotia Branch Mining and quarrying Industryc and crafts Electricity and waterd Transportation and communicatione Commercef Finance, brokerage and insurance Domestic services Professional services Public sector administrationg Total No. of gainfully employed

Jews

non-Jews

Corfu Jews

Larissa

non-Jews

Jews

non-Jews

0.0 23.4 0.3

1.7 35.6 1.6

0.0 40.3 0.0

1.7 36.0 0.4

0.5 43.7 0.0

0.5 42.6 0.7

1.7 48.8

14.0 23.0

23.1 30.5

18.0 25.1

6.0 37.9

16.9 22.8

14.2 0.3 8.8

2.4 1.4 10.6

2.1 1.0 2.6

1.2 2.0 8.6

4.9 0.8 4.9

1.3 1.5 9.0

2.4 100.0

9.9 100.0

0.5 100.0

6.9 100.0

1.1 100.0

4.6 100.0

295

162,175

390

14,267

364

29,216

(Source: see Table 11) a “Gainfully employed” includes both the self-employed and employees. b In order to examine the applicability of the Kuznets model and also to allow for comparison according to religion, the original occupational categories of the 1920 census were processed according to the detailed census categories available only for the entire population in municipalities, according to sex only (and not according to religion), e.g. Greek Census 1920 Vol. I, Table IV, 191-209. c Industries polygraphiques were also separated from “Industries et services d’ordre général ou collectif” and moved to Industry as the sub-branch “Printing industry.” d “Electricity and Water” includes production and distribution of electricity, lighting, water, heat, and sanitary services. e The sub-category “Communication” was separated from the original census category “Industries et services d’ordre général ou collectif’” and retitled “Transportation and communication,” which is more consistent with the detailed census category. “Transportation and communication” includes: public land transport—trains, trams etc., and private transport—automobiles, bicycles, etc., carriages and animals; maritime transport; loading and unloading works; communications services: post, telegraph, telephone. f Large-scale commerce (finance, commission, commercial representation and insurance) was separated from Commerce. g “Public Sector Administration” includes public administration, army, and police. 63

Orly C. Meron

The rate of employment of Jews in public utilities (“Electricity and Water”) was negligible. There appears to be a significant disparity between the general assumption that “legally the Jews enjoy all rights of citizenship” (AJYB 1913-1914: 199) and actual Jewish access to employment in the government-run public utilities, where Greeks were preferred to Jews. The Jewish presence in the clerical sector of communication services was lower than that of non-Jews in Larissa as well as in Greater Athens, despite the non-official reports that in Athens “Jewish officials are in the postal and telegraph service, and the Jews are employed in the railroads...” (AJYB 1913-1914: 199). The structure of opportunities in “Transportation and Communi­ cation” in the three Departments was similar. Each had a seaport— Piraeus (Attica and Beotia), Corfu, and Volos (Thessaly). However, the absence of more detailed information on the distribution of occupations by religion for the category “Transportation and Communication” (see Table 13, note 2) prevents us from precisely defining the percentages of the different ethnic groups who were employed in port services. In the Jewish workforce, the rates of employment in “Transportation and Communication,” including port utilities, differed in the various port cities. In Corfu, the percentage of Jews employed in this sector was higher than among the Greeks, while in Piraeus and Volos it was lower (Table 13). The relatively high Jewish employment rate in Corfu’s port was a carryover from the British era (1815-1864) when the port economy was dominated by Jewish labor. During that period Jews felt safe and also had easy access to employment in the public sector and related infrastructure, such as the port. However, after Corfu was incorporated into Greece, the port lost its cosmopolitan character and became a peripheral Greek port (Gekas 2004: 177-183). The decline of the port made the work there less profitable and less attractive for Greek workers. By contrast, the ports of Piraeus and Volos, which developed mainly within the Greek nation-state, attracted dominant (Greek Orthodox) workers. The port of Piraeus—Athens’s main port—was favored by government funding (HMSO 1920: 26-27; DOT 1922: 42). As of 1922, it was regarded as the alternative to the former glory of the Greek port of Smyrna (Meron 2006; Meron 2008b). The port in Volos ranked fourth in both imports (after Piraeus, Salonica and Patras) and exports (after Cavalla, Patras and Salonica), and third 64

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

(after Cavalla and Patras) as a tobacco port (DOT 1925: 48). Access to port employment was easier for Greek seamen and laborers not only because they were members of the national majority, but also because of the “Greek” character of the shipping industry, which preferred Greek labor (Harlaftis 1998). The above data suggest that new job opportunities in these ports were generally not accessible to Jewish workers. Only 22 of the 364 gainfully employed Jewish males in Larissa who declared an occupation were employed under the category “communication,” apparently in overland transportation, as evidenced by the report that “the head of the accounting department and the assistant manager of the Thessalian Railroad are Jews” (AJYB 1913-1914: 199). The unique makeup of Thessaly’s population also affected the ethnic distribution of employment in the port in Volos. The presence of Muslim workers among the non-Jewish Greek workers in “Communication” reflects the significant proportion of the Muslim workforce in the Thessaly port: about 13% or 157  out of 1,225  gainfully employed Muslims in Larissa were employed in “Communication” (Greek Census 1920 vol. 3 Table XIIb, 242). This also reflects the complicated ethnic make-up of the population among which Thessaly’s Jews had lived ever since the Greek incorporation of Thessaly in 1881. Thessaly’s Jewish population felt pressure and discrimination at the hands of both Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks, who ruled the area in succession. The suspicion with which the Jews were regarded was evident in employment problems, which accelerated their steady emigration (Angel and Levi 1923). Table 14  shows that in all of the geographical Departments, the Jewish employment rate in “Public Sector Administration” was much lower than among the non-Jewish Greeks, while the Jewish presence in “Private Sector Administration” was higher. The existing census categories for occupation do not allow us to conduct a systematic ethnic comparison of occupations between the public and the private sectors. Unfortunately, we are unable to distinguish between judges (governmental clerical sector) and advocates who make their living from the private sector, who along with the related personnel were incorporated into the category “Juridical Professions.” However, census data verified by a report of the American Jewish Committee indicates the presence of Jews in the public clerical sector in Old Greece: “In Corfu there are Jews in the City Council and Jewish notaries. Volos 65

Orly C. Meron

Table 14. J  ewish and Greek Males in the Clerical Sector and Professional Services in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 (percentages) Attica and Beotia

Corfu

Larissa

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

15.15 6.06

19.75 28.50

0.00 16.67

20.69 23.80

4.55 13.64

14.70 19.19

21.21

17.01

33.33

8.82

13.64

14.68

6.06 15.15 9.09

3.00 4.36 6.61

0.00 33.33 8.33

14.26 9.36 8.73

22.73 13.64 22.73

14.53 8.69 7.67

0.00

6.43

0.00

6.57

4.55

6.61

24.2 3.0 100.0

10.8 3.5 100.0

8.3 0.0 100.0

4.4 3.4 100.0

4.5 0.0 100.0

8.8 5.1 100.0

33

33218

12

2223

22

3992

Public sector Administration Army and police Private sector Administration Professional services Religion Education Medical professions Juridical professionsa Academic professionsb Fine artsc Total No. of gainfully employed

(Source: see Table 11.) a “Juridical professions” includes advocates, notaries, judges and tribunal employees. b “Academic professions (Lettres et sciences appliquées)” includes translators, journalists, engineers, architects, chemists, geometers, geologists, accountants, interpreters. c “Fine-Arts (beaux-arts)” includes artists (e.g. musicians, sculptures, singers) and related personnel, excluding street artists.

had at one time a Jewish councilman. In Athens, a Jewish judge sits in the highest court, and there is a Jewish Professor at the University” (AJYB 1913-1914: 199). Larissa is unique in Old Greece, with Jews employed in the scientific (academic) professions, as many of Larissa’s Jews completed their higher education in universities in Greek or other European cities (Angel and Levi 1923: 65). The small proportion of Jewish professionals in the Larissa census is consistent with Angel and 66

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Levi’s report (1923) about the emigration of the more highly educated Jews to Athens, inter alia (AJYB 1913-1914: 199). Thus, the relatively small Jewish workforce had a narrower occupational structure than did the Greek majority. Gainfully employed Jews were concentrated in light industry, usually in artisanal manufacturing (metal repair work, carpentry, clothing, leather, printing, and paper), as well as in commercial activity on all scales. The Jewish presence in largescale commerce and finance, compared with the non-Jewish population, was notable in all Departments. The relative prominence of Jewish brokers (see above Table 13) was significant in Greater Athens, where the entrepreneurial elites were concentrated. Table 15 shows that Jewish workers were not found in the “cereals and fruits” industry due to their non-participation in agriculture. The absence of Jews in the vital, majority Greek-dominated basic staples industry (e.g., flour) might reflect the gradual implementation of the post-World War I Greek national policy that promoted agricultural self-sufficiency at a country-wide level. The government’s emerging interventionist policy with its readiness to employ protective tariffs and domestic price support to guarantee wheat production was a byproduct of the suffering induced by the 1916–1917  Allied blockade, an event that brought home the consequences of a heavy reliance on imported staples (Mazower 1991: 88–91; Meron 2011: 62, 148–151). The Jewish workforce was poorly represented in the growing capitalintensive and non-liquid “Construction” industry. This industry was dominated by Greek contractors who enjoyed easy access to Greekdominated networks that facilitated their access to tenders in the public sector, whether governmental, regional, or municipal (Meron 2011: 83, 146-147). Table 15 reflects the differences in the economic structure of opportunities for Jews and non-Jews in manufacturing, as well as the different ethnic makeup of the local populations. In Corfu, as well as in greater Athens, the Jewish male industrial workforce was concentrated in light, labor-intensive (semi-skilled or non-skilled, cheap co-ethnic workers) industries requiring modest capital investment. A large proportion of the Jewish male industrial workforce in Greater Athens (some 25%) and Corfu (about a third) was concentrated in “Clothing and Home Textiles,” while the majority of the Jewish male industrial workforce in Larissa and Volos was concentrated in “Tobacco.” The small to medium scale 67

Orly C. Meron

of production and modest capital investment (a sewing machine) that characterized the clothing industry, as opposed to the generally largescale textile plants that produced semi-raw materials, largely explains the attraction of the clothing industry to migrants and minority groups, both entrepreneurs and workers (for Salonica, see Meron 2011: 88-91). At the same time, about 25% of the Jewish male labor force was concentrated in the rapidly growing, highly profitable tobacco industry of the early 1920s in Larissa and Volos, where the tobacco was grown (DOT 1923: 21-22). A  Jewish-owned cigarette factory in Piraeus, as well as Jewish-owned tobacco plants in the vicinity of the port in Volos, expanded the Jewish presence in this industry, which also included the Jewish Macedonian tobacco centers (Meron 2011: 84-87). Table 15. J  ewish and Greek Males in Sub-Branches of the Manufacturing Industry in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 (percentages) Attica and Beotia Sub-branch Metals Machinery and tools Construction Wood Cereals and fruits Raisins, oils and tobacco Hides and leather Paper Textiles: spinning and weaving Clothing and home textiles Chemicals Printing Others Total No. of gainfully employed

Jews

non-Jews

Jews

8.70

14.01

19.75

7.25 2.90 4.35 0.00

7.96 15.59 13.07 10.07

7.25 18.84 20.29

Larissa Jews

non-Jews

7.10

18.24

10.65

0.64 6.37 11.46 0.64

3.14 12.26 15.15 17.63

0.00 0.00 13.84 2.52

1.51 14.30 12.94 10.91

3.88 17.36 1.20

0.00 14.65 0.00

4.80 22.23 0.96

24.53 23.27 0.63

14.24 21.29 0.40

2.90

2.02

0.64

3.86

2.52

2.65

24.64 0.00 2.90 0.00 100.00

7.22 4.09 2.86 0.67 100.00

34.39 4.46 7.01 0.00 100.00

5.17 1.87 4.93 0.92 100.00

13.21 0.63 0.00 0.63 100.00

8.74 0.96 1.04 0.37 100.00

69

57,721

157

5,129

159

12,447

(Source: see Table 11.) 68

Corfu non-Jews

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

Commerce in commodities (Table 16) and large-scale finance (Table 13) remained the main domain of Jewish males in Greece, where the national majority traditionally engaged in commerce. Trading in “Mixed Commodities” reflected Jewish entrepreneurs’ preference for trading in finished products sold directly to consumers on the open market, which was generally “blind” to group identity and devoid of discrimination. Jewish specialization in the apparel trade reflects the wellknown strategy of both minorities and migrants to cut costs by vertically integrating from manufacturing to commerce. The smaller presence of Jewish males in “Hospitality Services” is consistent with their relatively low presence in private sector “Domestic Services” (Table 13). Table 16. J  ewish and Greek Males in Sub-Branches of Commerce in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 (percentages) Attica and Beotia

Corfu

Larissa

Commodity Typea

Jews

non-Jews

Jews

non-Jews

Jews

non-Jews

Food Clothing, haberdashery and perfumery Mixed commoditiesa Domestic waresb Specialized tradec Hospitality servicesd Total No. of gainfully employed

0.0

17.0

10.1

16.4

16.7

16.0

27.8 64.6 2.1 4.9 0.7 100.0

13.6 29.5 2.7 5.2 32.0 100.0

22.7 55.5 3.4 0.8 7.6 100.0

4.9 45.9 0.9 4.3 27.5 100.0

25.4 46.4 1.4 3.6 6.5 100.0

9.6 37.9 2.4 7.4 26.7 100.0

144

37,228

119

3,587

138

6,669

(Source: see Table 11.) a “Mixed commodities” (Commerce d’articles variés) includes shopkeepers, peddlers, general traders and entrepreneurs of all sorts. b “Domestic wares” (Articles de construction, d’ameublement, d’eclairage, de chauffage, d’ornement etc. des maisons) includes furniture, glassware, ceramics as well as lighting and heating articles. c “Specialized (other) trade” (Autre articles) includes bookshops, stationery shops, stores specializing in the sale of: journals; tobacco; pharmaceuticals; animals; machines; tools; chemicals; flowers; navigation articles. d “Hospitality services” (Professions d’utilité publique) mainly includes the retail sale of hospitality services e.g. hotels, coffee-houses, restaurants, etc. and a negligible category called Theater (spectacles publics). 69

Orly C. Meron

7.2 Females The distribution of gainfully employed females by occupation may shed additional light on Jewish occupational patterns, complementing what we have seen above in terms of trends in male occupations. Among the gainfully employed in both ethnic groups, the female employment rate was much lower than the male employment rate. The employment rate for Jewish women was lower than for Greek women, with the exception of Corfu, which exhibited the opposite trend (Table 17). Table 17. J  ewish and Greek Female Employment in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 Jews

Non-Jews

Employed Unemployed Total labor force Percentage of unemployed Percentage of employed

42 306 348 87.9 12.1

39,968 194,027 233,995 82.9 17.1

Employed Unemployed Total labor force Percentage of unemployed Percentage of employed

66 526 592 88.9 11.1

39,985 194,099 234,084 82.9 17.1

Employed Unemployed Total labor force Percentage of unemployed Percentage of employed

140 520 660 78.8 21.2

6,446 85,476 91,922 93.0 7.0

Attica and Beotia

Larissa

Corfu

(Source: see Table 11.)

The virtual absence of Jewish women from the agricultural branches compared to Greek women (but similar to Jewish males) affected their participation in the labor force, resulting in a higher employment rate for Greek women in this sector (Table 18). Agricultural occupations are frequently found in farm households, and are thus considered home-based 70

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

occupations. This facilitated the removal of cultural barriers, including patriarchal values, which prevented both Jewish and non-Jewish women from working outside the home (Meron 2005c; Meron 2011: 92-93), and, in this case, facilitated the participation of Greek women in the labor force. The fact that women worked at home and not elsewhere is underscored by statistics regarding the actively employed population registered with the National Statistical Service of Greece even in the late twentieth century (Simmons and Kalantaridis 1994: 659). Table 18. J  ewish and Greek Females in Agricultural Branches in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 Attica and Beotia

Agriculture Livestock Fishery Total Percentage of gainfully employed

Corfu

Larissa

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

0 0 0 0

2,262 783 22 3,067

2 0 1 3

1,588 148 13 1749

1 0 0 1

1,423 321 3 1,747

-

7.7

4.5

27.1

0.7

32.5

(Source: see Table 11; Table 17.)

Table 19 shows that unskilled or semi-skilled Jewish female workers, as well as unskilled or semi-skilled Greek female workers, were concentrated mainly in “industry and crafts” and “domestic services.” In Attica and Beotia, the growing private and public service sectors created new employment opportunities for females following the consolidation of the capital city, Athens. Indigenous Greek females were employed in new clerical positions in “public sector administration.” At the same time, young Greek females from the villages around Athens were attracted to the capital, which offered profitable jobs in the growing “domestic services” industry (Sandis 1973: 18-19). The Jewish female presence in “domestic services” was significantly lower than that of Greek females. A consistently notable difference between the two ethnic groups in the three Departments is found in “administration” and “professional services.” The proportion of Jewish females in “private sector administration” (Jewish-owned businesses and the Jewish communal sector), which generally does not suffer from ethnic discrimination, was higher 71

Orly C. Meron

Table 19. J  ewish and Greek Females in Non-agricultural Economic Branches in Departments (Départements) of Old Greece, 1920 (percentages) Attica and Beotia Branch Mining and quarrying Industry and crafts Electricity and water Transport and communication Commerce Finance, commission and insurance Domestic services Professional services Public services Total No. of gainfully employed

Corfu

Larissa

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

Jews

Non-Jews

0.0 40.5

0.6 46.3

0.7 56.2

6.4 46.5

0.0 70.8

0.0 56.8

0.0

0.2

0.0

0.1

1.5

0.1

2.4 11.9

1.1 3.6

1.5 3.6

0.8 3.8

0.0 7.7

1.1 2.5

2.4 21.4

1.2 33.4

0.0 36.5

0.5 24.8

1.5 18.5

0.5 28.4

19.0 2.4 100.0

10.4 3.3 100.0

1.5 0.0 100.0

15.9 1.2 100.0

0.0 0.0 100.0

9.4 1.1 100.0

42

36,918

137

3,622

65.0

4,699

(Source: see Table 11.)

than for Greek females (Table 20). Jewish females, like Jewish males, were apparently barred from entering Greek-majority-controlled “public sector administration” due to their inferior minority political status. Urban Jewish female workers were absent from male-labelled industries (metalwork, construction, wood, and hide processing), but were heavily concentrated in the clothing industry, while urban Greek female workers were divided between the “clothing” industry and the “spinning and weaving” industry. The relatively high Jewish female presence in the clothing industry was double that of Greek urban females in Corfu and Larissa and still higher than in Greater Athens. Jewish female workers appear to have integrated horizontally into the clothing industry, which was over-represented by Jewish males. They worked as either self-employed seamstresses or were employed in sewing workshops generally operated by their co-ethnic men. The latter recruited cheap unskilled or 72

A Socio-demographic Profile of Old Greece’s Jewish Population between the World Wars

semi-skilled women, frequently family members or other co-ethnic women, for their labor-intensive workshops (Meron 2011: 91-94). In Larissa, Jewish females also integrated horizontally into the tobacco industry, where their co-ethnic males were highly represented (Tables 15, 21). Table 20. J  ewish and Greek Females in Professional Services in Attica and Beotia, 1920 (percentages)

Public sector administration Private sector administration Religion Education Medical professions Law Academic professions Fine-Arts Total percentage No. of gainfully employed

Jews

Non-Jews

11.1 22.2 11.1 22.2 11.1 0.0 0.0 22.2 100.0 9

24.2 18.3 2.6 24.1 19.2 0.6 1.5 9.4 100.0 5,058

(Source: see Table 11.)

Table 21. J  ewish and Greek Females in Sub-Branches of the Manufacturing Industry in Departments of Old Greece, 1920 (percentages) Attica and Beotia Sub-branch Raisins, oil and tobacco Paper Textiles: spinning and weaving Clothing and home textiles Other Total No. of gainfully employed

Corfu

Larissa

Jews

non-Jews

Jews

non-Jews

Jews

non-Jews

5.9 11.8

2.6 3.9

0.0 9.1

1.6 2.0

8.7 0.0

10.4 0.3

0.0

15.9

0.0

28.1

2.2

37.9

82.3 0.00 100.0

62.6 15.0 100.0

88.3 2.6 100.0

40.4 27.9 100.0

80.4 8.7 100.0

41.9 9.5 100.0

17

17086

77

1,685

46

2,670

(Source: see Table 11.) 73

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8. Old Greece vs. New Greece: A “Kuznetsian” Minority Within a Consolidating Nation-State Based on the socio-demographic profiles that we have considered, constructed from the rare Greek census data for 1920, we may conclude that the Jewish population of Old Greece presents a basic Kuznetsian pattern, as it is small, mainly migrant-generated, permanent, and subject to overt and latent discrimination. The occupational structure of the Jewish minority in Old Greece was much narrower than that of the majority population and was characterized by the following: 1. negligible participation in primary occupations (agriculture, mining, and quarrying); 2. highly concentrated participation in both light industry and commerce on all scales, in the non-primary occupations; 3. vertical integration into the clothing industry through manufacturing and trade; 4. Jewish female horizontal integration into tobacco and clothing, which heightened the Jewish concentration in industries where Jewish males were frequently either the owners or managers (compare with Meron 2005a; 2005b; 2005c). A brief comparison with Jewish populations in other new nation-states between the World Wars, such as Iraq (Darvish 1985: 260-263), Egypt (DellaPergola 1983: 59) and Turkey (Tuval 2004: 123)—successor states of the Ottoman Empire with Muslim majorities—on the one hand, and with Poland and Hungary (Kuznets 1960: 1615-1618)—with Christian majorities—on the other hand, shows similar occupational patterns despite the different environments for Jewish economic activity. Although the Jewish minorities in these countries were not typically “recently arrived” migrants, they were all “new” in that they had all made the transition to new conditions under the regime of new nation-states. However, a detailed discussion of this subject is beyond the scope of this article. This article relates to a Jewish sub-population in that part of Greece (Old Greece) that, after the Holocaust, became home to the majority of the surviving Jewish population. The findings presented here indicate that scholars may profitably compare this case with other cases of Jewish sub-populations, both in Europe and elsewhere. It would clearly be necessary, to extend these findings, to compare these data with the corresponding data for the major share of Greece’s Jewish population between 1912 and 1943, the Jewish population of New Greece. “Jewish data” may possibly be recovered from census records (Meron 1999) for this time period, allowing scholars to apply demographic research methods to the study of historical Jewish communities. 74

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REFERENCES Official Documents DOT [Department of Overseas Trade]. (1921). General Report on the Industrial and Economic Situation in Greece, Dated February 1921. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1922). Report on the Industrial and Economic Situation in Greece to April 1922. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1923). Report on the Industrial and Economic Situation in Greece, Dated July 1923. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1925). Report on the Industrial and Economic Situation in Greece, For the Years 1923 and 1924. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1927). Report on the Industrial and Economic Situation in Greece, Dated May 31, 1927. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1928). Report on Economic Conditions in Greece, Dated May 1928. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1934). Report on Economic Conditions in Greece, 1932-33. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. DOT. (1937). Report on the Economic and Commercial Conditions in Greece, April 1937. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Rawllins, E. C. D. [Commercial Secretary to H. B. M. Legation, Athens]. (1920). Report on the Commercial and Industrial Situation of Greece for the Year 1919. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Greek Census 1920: Royaume de Grèce, Ministère de l’Économie Nationale—Direction de la Statistique (1923). Renseignements généraux sur la population de la Grèced’après le recensement de 1920. Athens: Imprimerie Nationale. (French-Greek) Republique Hellénique, Ministère de l’Economie Nationale, Statistique Générale de la Grèce. (1928). Recensement de la Population de la Grèce au 19  Décembre 1920–1  Janvier 1921. Résultats Statistiques Généraux: A. Population B. Familles. Athens: Imprimerie Nationale. (French-Greek) Vol. I. Résultats Statistiques pour la Grèce Centrale et Eubée (1927). Vol. II. Résultats Statistiques pour Thessalie et Arta (1929). Vol. III. Résultats Statistiques pour les Iles Ioniennes (1924).

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Greek Census 1928: République Hellénique, Ministère de l’Economie Nationale, Statistique Générale de la Grèce. (1933-1937). Résultats statistiques du recensement de la population de la Grèce du 15–16 mai 1928. Athens: Imprimerie Nationale. Vol. I. Population de fait et de droit—Refugiés (1933). Vol. II. Age—Etat matrimonial—Instruction (1935). Vol. III. Professions (in two parts, 1932 and 1937). Vol. IV. Lieu de naissance—Religion et langue—Sujetion (1935). Adler, E. N. (1905). Jews in Many Lands. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Alexandris, A. (2003). Religion or ethnicity: The identity issue of the minorities in Greece and Turkey. In R. Hirschon (Ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (pp. 117-32). Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Angel, J. V., and Levi, A. (Eds.). (1923). Almanach Israélite 5683. Thessaloniki: Edition “Renasinsia.” Bowman, S. (Ed.). (2002). The Holocaust in Salonika: Eyewitness Accounts. Translated from Greek and Judeo-Spanish with introductions and notes by Isaac Benmayor. New York: Sephardic House and Bloch Publishing Company. Darvish, T. (1985). The economic structure of the Jewish minority in Iraq vis-à-vis the Kuznets model. Jewish Social Studies, 47 (3-4), 255-266. Darvish, T. (1987). The Jewish minority in Iraq: A comparative study of economic structure. Jewish Social Studies, 49 (2), 175-180. DellaPergola, S. (1983). La transformazione demografica della diaspora ebraica. Turin: Loescher. (Italian) DellaPergola, S. (2002). Comments on the socio-demographic research of the Jewish communities in the Orient. Pe’amim, 93, 149-156. DellaPergola, S. (2013). Discussion: Maristella Botthicini and Zvi Ekstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 (PrincetonOxford: Princeton University Press, 2012). Quest, 6 (December), 264–271. Retrieved from http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/discussion.php?id=64 DellaPergola, S., Sabagh, G., Bozorgmehr, M., Der-Martirosian, C., and Lerner, S. (1996). Hierarchic levels of subethnicity: Near Eastern Jews in the U.S., France and Mexico. Sociological Papers, 5 (2 June), 1-42. Don, Y. (1990). Economic behaviour of Jews in Central Europe before World War II. In E. Aerts and F. M. L. Thompson (Eds.), Ethnic Minority 76

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Groups in Town and Countryside and Their Effects on Economic Development (1850–1940) (pp. 114-124). Leuven: Leuven University Press. Don, Y. (1992). Patterns of Jewish economic behavior in Central Europe in the twentieth century. In M. K. Silber (Ed.), Jews in the Hungarian Economy, 1930-1945 (pp. 247-273). Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Emmanuel, I. S. (1972). Toldot Yehudey Saloniki (The History of the Jews of Salonica). In David A. Recanati (Ed.), Zikhron Saloniki (A Memoir of Salonica) vol. I (pp. 1-272). Tel Aviv: The Committee for Publishing the Book of the Jewish Community of Salonica. (Hebrew) Fleming, K. E. (2008). Greece: A Jewish History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gekas, A. (2004). The port Jews of Corfu and the “blood libel” of 1891: A tale of many centuries and of one event. Jewish Culture and History, 7 (1-2), 171-196. Godley, A. (2001). Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London 1880–1914: Enterprise and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, N. L. (1986). The Pletzel of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque. New York and London: Holmes & Meier. Kahan, A. (1986). The urbanization process of the Jews in nineteenthcentury Europe. In R. W. Weiss (Ed.), Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (pp. 70-81). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kitroeff, A. (1995). War-Time Jews: The Case of Athens. Greece: Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. Koliopoulos, J. S., and Veremis, T. M. ([2002] 2004). Greece: The Modern Sequel. London: Hurst. Kuznets, S. (1960). Economic structure and life of the Jews. In L. Finkelstein (ed.), The Jews, Their History Culture and Religion, vol. II (pp. 1597-1666). New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Kuznets, S. (1972). Economic Structure of U.S. Jewry: Recent Trends. Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry. Retrieved from http://www. bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=4413 Makris, E. (1972). Statistical Studies 1821-1971: Statistics for the 150 Years of Greek Revival. Athens: National Center for Social Research. (Greek) Mayer, N. (1913). The Jews of Turkey: A Lecture Delivered by N. Mayer before the Jewish Literary Society at the Beth Hamidrash. London: [s.n.]. Mazower, M. (1991). Greece and the Inter-War Economic Crisis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 77

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Meron, O. C. (1999). The Jewish Community of Salonica (1881–1936): Middleman Minority in a Process of Peripheral Incorporation into the Capitalist World-Economy. (Doctoral dissertation). Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan. (Hebrew) Meron, O. C. (2005a). Sub-ethnicity and elites: Jewish Italian professionals and entrepreneurs in Salonica (1881-1912). Zakhor. Rivista di Storia degli Ebrei d’Italia, 8, 177-220. Meron, O. C. (2005b). The Jewish economy of Salonica (1881–1912). Jewish Journal of Sociology, 47 (1-2), 22-47. Meron, O. C. (2005c). Minority within minority: Jewish women in the Greek labor force (1928). In T. Cohen and S. Regev (Eds.), Woman in the East, Woman from the East: The Story of the Oriental Jewish Woman (pp. 163-189). Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. (Hebrew) Meron, O. C. (2006). An ethnic-controlled economy in transition: Jewish employment from European semi-colonialism in Ottoman Macedonia to Greek nation-state. Sociological Papers, 11, 1-58. Meron, O. C. (2008a). The demographic development of the Jewish population in Northern Greece (1893-1928). Pe’amim, 116, 7-78. (Hebrew) Meron, O. C. (2008b). Economic nationalism from a comparative perspective: Jewish port workers between Salonika and Haifa, 1923-1936. Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, 18, 193-235. (Hebrew) Meron, O. C. (2011). Jewish Entrepreneurship in Salonica, 1912-1940: An Ethnic Economy in Transition. Brighton UK, Portland OR, and Toronto, Canada: Sussex Academic Press. Miller, W. (1928). Greece. London: Ernst Brown. Rivlin, B. (Ed.). (1998). Pinkas Hakehillot—Greece. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. Entries: Athens, 67-86; Corfu, 353-370; Larissa, 169-177; Volos, 101-110. Ruppin, A. (1931). The Sociology of the Jews, vol. I. Tel Aviv: A. Y. Shtibel, Berlin. (Hebrew) Sandis, E. E. (1973). Refugees and Economic Migrants in Greater Athens: A Social Survey. Athens: National Centre of Social Research. Simmons, P., and Kalantaridis, C. (1994). Garment manufacturing in Peonia County, Greece. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (4), 649-675. Syrquin, M. (1985). The economic structure of the Jews in Argentina and other Latin American countries. Jewish Social Studies, 47 (2), 115-134. Tuval, S. (2004). The Jewish Community in Istanbul, 1948-1992. Jerusalem: The Zionist Library. (Hebrew) 78

David Miron

Return to the Golden Age: Immigration Policies as a Means of Preserving “Old America” and Its Values David Miron Research Fellow at the Institute of Western Cultures, The Hebrew University, Israel

Introduction In American political culture, the decade of the sixties really began in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to vacate her bus seat for a Caucasian passenger, as was required at the time of African-Americans in the state of Alabama. The long decade may be said to have ended in 1973 with the departure of American forces from Vietnamese soil (Hughes 2004: 173–174; Greene 2010; Lytle 2006). These two events bracketed a time when many Americans took a long, hard look at their society and its fundamental values. The issues of the day—civil rights, the Vietnam War—and a crisis of public confidence in civic leaders and institutions led many Americans to wonder whether those values comprising “Americanism” were being upheld. The American “liberal consensus,” whose heyday was marked in the 1950s and 1960s, was pitted against both right-wing and left-wing extremism. The belief system that it represented was founded upon a set of universal values derived from the legacy of the European Enlightenment. These served as the moral sanction for common political goals as well as a source of pride and self-definition for a nation composed of people of mixed cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Attempts to undermine these values were portrayed at various times by moral, intellectual, and governmental representatives as undermining the legitimacy, the character, and the very existence of the United States. At times of crisis, extreme measures might be taken to reassert the sanctity of those values in the public’s perception (Ninkovich 2001: 16–17). 80

Immigration Policies as a Means of Preserving “Old America” and Its Values

The case before us—that of the new policies fostered during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1968)—illustrates how the United States government was moved to deploy an intensive propaganda effort in order to reassert public, national values that were thought to be essential but vulnerable. This article focuses on the Johnson Administration’s amendment of the Immigration Act in order to assure the priority of liberal values and to usher in a new era of largescale migration to the United States.

American Identity in Crisis Of all the collective myths at large in American culture, one of the more enduring has been that of America as an “innocent nation.” Inspired by Protestant eschatological beliefs, the “innocent nation” myth involved a perception of America’s unique historical and moral position among the nations of the world. America is not simply situated along the standard historical continuum, but rather is perched at history’s two antipodal ends, standing athwart both the dawn and the end-goal of humankind. This idea took its initial shape in the claim that America’s founding fathers left the “Old World,” characterized by degeneration, corruption, and wickedness, and followed their vision of creating a new society based on “good proportion,” freed from all baleful effects of European society, and founded “from scratch” in a new and unpopulated land. This new society was of a decent nature, characterized by all that is “right,” and was, in fact, a utopian project with explicitly biblical overtones. As such, America is the “dawn of humankind” (a new Adam and Eve in a new Garden of Eden); while, at the same time, in striving to create such an ideal society, Americans sketched out the progressive course of all human history and indicated its end goal (Hughes 2004: 153, 155, 172). The force of this ideology, which has resurfaced periodically in American history, imposes a set of obligations on American governments: a missionary obligation and an obligation to serve as a role model. The first of these is expressed through policies said to be aimed at spreading the gospel of democracy, capitalism and the “American way of life”—all of which form the basis of the American social order. In its role as a guide for all humankind, the United States is obligated to fulfill the principles of “Americanism” and to remain righteous. Early in its national history, America’s civic leaders were well aware of the 81

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global implications of their political experiment. They were conscious that their rebellion against European political and social traditions and values in favor of a society based on the values of the Enlightenment would disturb most, if not all European regimes. In the period under review here, many Americans who weathered two world wars in which they had fought against foes depicted as criminal nations, reinforced this self-image and were loath to part with it. The post-1945 division of the political world between two rival blocs—“east” and “west”—retrospectively ratified the United States’ emergence from its own internal and continental affairs, just as it provided a rationale for massive American assistance to those postwar allies. American society was ready, by and large, to embrace its national calling as leader of the free world. The burgeoning of global transportation and commerce, including the developing prowess of American corporations alongside American foreign aid, also helped to nurture this trend. From consumer products to cultural products, American influence was felt abroad and appreciated at home (Hughes 2004: 155; Fousek 2000: 63, 74, 83, 90–102). One core issue that was related to the redemptive American national myth was that of immigration. The attractiveness of the utopian version of American nationalism was concretely reflected in the desire by so many people from around the world to enter American society and to become Americans. Yet just a few years after the end of World War I, Congress had severely limited the extent of foreign immigration, in effect holding the rest of the world at bay while “preserving” America’s domestic harmony. In 1911, the commissioner of immigration of the port of New York, William Willams, warned Congress that “the new immigration […] proceeds in part from poorer elements of the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe and from backward races with customs and institutions widely different from our own and without the capacity of assimilating with our people as did earlier immigrants. […] if this country is to open its doors to certain classes of unfortunates, it is difficult to see why we should not do so as the unfortunates of the world, including those amongs the Africans and Hindus” (Fitzgerald 1996: 138). The Dillingham Commission—which deeply affected the restrictive legislation of 1917, 1921, and 1924—defined the new immigrants as a racially deficient, and who characterized by various expressions of social and moral evil. The commission concluded that Southern and Eastern 82

Immigration Policies as a Means of Preserving “Old America” and Its Values

European immigrants are responsible for growing crime in America (see: Fitzgerald 1996: 136–140). Congressman Albert Johnson, the leader of the restrictionist lobby in the 1920s argued that new immigrants “were not the traditions of the country that had come up from the colonies, so that as they came on in ever-increasing numbers the conditions in the United States changed [...] the conditions in the United States changed, traditions changed, customs changed—at first hardly noticeable—until suddenly we find that everything is changed, literature is changed, language is changed, methods in the schools have changed, the stage has changed, relations of parent and child have changed” (King 2000: 201–202). A report of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1950 states: “the subcommittee believes that the adoption of the national origins quota formula was a rational and logical method of numerically restricting immigration in such manner as to best preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States” (King 2000: 236–237). It can be said that throughout the 1920s and on into the years of the Great Depression, World War II, and the incipient beginnings of the Cold War, the “innocent nation” sought to protect its “purity,” its economic and political way of life, by halting the troubled “outside world” at America’s threshold. The dynamics of change which, once more, would alter the nation’s immigration policies, began to set in during the 1950s and early 1960s. When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, the United States was already in the midst of social upheaval. Unrest among AfricanAmericans could no longer be ignored. Social protest became vocal and widespread, forcing many Americans to acknowledge that despite their freedom and equality, their country had not eradicated discrimination and racism, nor had it provided equal opportunity for all (Hughes 2004: 174). Universal “Americanism” was exposed as being limited to certain ethnic groups and no different from the vexed history of other nations in that respect. The Vietnam War was another cause for unrest. Convinced that Communism could only be contained by preventing countries from “falling,” like so many dominoes, to Russian or Chinese domination, President John F. Kennedy had chosen to support a militant approach toward North Vietnam. The U. S. military formulated plans to gradually increase its presence in South Vietnam, ultimately committing the American government to conducting massive air strikes, the large-scale 83

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deployment of ground forces, and the use of non-conventional weapons (Boggs 2005: 169). Well aware of the risks, Kennedy’s successor in the White House initially embraced the escalation of the war. But by 1965, Johnson sought a way to extract the United States from combat while he conducted a policy of international damage control in the wake of such a retreat (Martel 2007: 126–128). Faced with increasing public criticism at home and abroad, Johnson understood that military violations of international law (see for instance: Nelson 2008) and the unacceptable number of civilian casualties were inconsistent with the self-image that the American people wished to claim. The Vietnam War had other consequences, as well, for the United States’ international standing. French President Charles de Gaulle sought to improve his country’s status at the expense of American power and influence in Europe and, indeed, even in the western hemisphere (prompting his famous visit to Quebec). He aimed at replacing American hegemony in NATO with an AmericanFrench-British forum, claiming such a forum for decision-making would best guarantee the interests of France and Britain, which would not have to remain secondary to foreign American interests. In 1963, De Gaulle signed a treaty of friendship with West Germany as another way of gaining leverage for a European political alternative (Dockrill and Hopkins 2006: 89–91). The ongoing war in Vietnam also fed concern as to the stability of the American economy. Some economists now agreed that the postwar Bretton-Woods system, based on government gold reserves and establishing the U.S. dollar as the international base currency, ought no longer to be depended upon as the supreme international economic stabilizer. The system was seen as exposing currencies to undesirable risks, given the changes in the global economy. Vast American investments in Europe, along with the American penchant to issue currency as a means of fighting the national deficit, brought the European market to be flooded with inflated dollars. The ongoing war and the decline of America’s influence in Europe further undermined public confidence and placed in doubt the notion that the world needed to embrace America’s values, its way of life, and its leadership in global affairs. In the political and economic context of the time, some voices within the American public also questioned the validity of the capitalist system as practiced in the United States. Until the 1960s, the neo-classical approach in economics was assured of virtual hegemony in the thinking 84

Immigration Policies as a Means of Preserving “Old America” and Its Values

of most American government and academic analysts. Central to postwar fiscal and economic policy, its theories of market growth, rational consumerism, and national debt management appeared vindicated by America’s prosperity in the 1950s. Economic developments in the U.S. during the 1960s placed some of these verities in doubt. There were incipient signs of stagnation, and average American consumers suffered from rising prices and growing unemployment rates, which seemed reflected in rising social tensions. The combination of all these factors fostered an atmosphere of doubt as to the validity of American values, as they had been conventionally understood (Ninkovich 2001: 16). In the 1960s, no less than in times past, such undercurrents were considered potentially damaging, even dangerous. Widespread discontent could not be dismissed lightly, if only for electoral reasons. Unlike times past, however, it proved difficult for the government to “reaffirm” the patriotic values of Americanism by promoting political consensus around a “just war,” because the war being waged was itself becoming an element of broad public discontent.

Framing a New Narrative One of the ways out of this dilemma was the validation of the American narrative and self-image via a new strategy. Leading members of the Johnson administration worked to formulate policies which would enunciate a new political vision around which it was hoped the public could once more rally together. This renewed historical and political narrative rested first on the need to admit that the difficult issues at the heart of public controversy were indeed evidence of a failure to maintain American ideals. Second, deviations from “true Americanism” and its value-ideals had to be defined as amenable to legislative change (see for instance the quotations in: Bellah 1970: 181). This policy met various social and economical needs. But public relations that accompanied it reveal that this policy was also intended to meet the difficulties in strengthening national morale, described above. The path to a new social contract was formulated under the slogan “The Great Society.” It was focused on two goals: removal of discrimination in practice and racism in general, as well as other pressing issues in health, welfare, and women’s equality. In this area, Lyndon Johnson steered to successful passage a number of legislative programs aimed 85

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at supporting and protecting the more underprivileged parts of the population. Among these were the Civil Rights Act, the Freedom of Choice Act, healthcare services for the aged and the poor, educational and occupational training programs, and the enforcement of egalitarian admission codes to ensure the opportunities of African-Americans in institutions of higher learning previously open exclusively to Caucasians. In introducing the “Great Society” programs, Johnson projected his assurance that “freedom for all” would be restored and that new foundations would be laid for a society based on equal opportunity. The plan was to provide the basic conditions necessary for all citizens, regardless of their status or ethnicity, to make use of their country’s resources and to enfranchise them in terms of American traditions of self-betterment and social progress. This program, Johnson claimed, would position the American people to resume its rightful place in the world as a leader and a role model. The “Great Society” plan, as Johnson explained, was to mobilize American citizens for the greater good: “a common enterprise, a cause greater than themselves” (quoted in: Pickus 2005: 126; see also: Levine 2004: 77–78; Woods 2006: 462–466; Greene 2010: 68–74, 83–86). Johnson made it clear that the possibility of creating a new community based on ideological values was not limited to the twin goals of economic redress for the poor and the fulfillment of new opportunities in American cities. The initiative required an injection of new sources of talent and enterprise into the American social fabric (Levine 2004: 78). Within the framework of this overall vision, the administration therefore attached great significance to its plan to amend the nation’s immigration policy, mainly by abolishing the national origins quota system that had been in place since the 1920s. The 1965 Immigration Bill set in motion significant changes in the ethnic profile of the United States (see table 1). Basing American immigration policy on a purely numerical quota basis without ethnic or racial filters provided an additional rationale to support liberal legislation to eliminate discrimination and promote social equality (see for instance: Moyers to Valenty, September 27, 1965; Memorandum for Moyers, September 26, 1965; Draft Remarks for the President; Johnson to the Speaker; Statement by the Secretary of State, July 2, 1964; Pamphlet for Each Immigrant who Become a Citizen; Arent to Johnson January 20, 1964; Printz to Johnson January 21, 1964; Johnson to Douglas December 13, 1963; 86

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Remarks of the President January 13, 1964; Johnson to Errigo August 24, 1965, President’s Speech; Remarks of Henry Fowler, July 4,1967; A  Draft for the President’s Speech; Valenti to Paulucci October 10, 1965). Table 1: Change in the Ethnic Composition of Immigration to the United States following the 1965 Immigration Law Years 1951–1960 1961–1970 1971–1980

European and Canadian Immigration (%) 70.2 22.5 6.2

Hispanic Immigration (%) 45.9 39 13.4

Asian Immigration (%) 20.4 40.3 38.4

(Source: Graham 2004: 94.)

Amendments to the United States immigration policy were highlighted for the public as an expression of renewing the country’s moral image around the world, showcasing “Americanism” as a worthy model, and renewing commitments to values enshrined in the American heritage (Draft for the President’s Speech; Statement by the Secretary of State, July 2, 1964; President Johnson to the Speaker; Address by Senator Kennedy). The administration actively recruited the cooperation of American voluntary humanitarian aid associations in publicizing the new policy, even though immigration was not normally a central aspect of these organizations’ activities and they did not normally function as lobbies in Washington. Their recruitment was therefore not aimed at assuring the bill’s approval in Congress. Their high foreign profile, however, was eminently suited to buttressing the administration’s public relations efforts abroad. However, while there seemed much to be gained on the international scene, given the potential for improving America’s image overseas, domestic considerations were actually at the center of attention in the amendment process itself. Reaffirming America’s global role was deemed to be essential for the American public itself. Accordingly, the bill-signing ceremony was staged at a location that bore significant associative meanings for U.S. citizens, with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the background (Memorandum for Bill Moyers, addressed by Jack Rosenthal; Memorandum for Mr. Valenti, January 11, 1964). 87

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Opening the country’s gates to immigrants from all countries, especially Asians—a significant angle since the United States was engaged in a war in Southeast Asia—bore a message for the average American citizen—namely, that the war in Vietnam was not motivated by racial considerations (Draft for the President’s Speech). Through immigration reform, the American government was also able to foster a sense that the United States remained attractive to people born abroad, that it was, after all, “the best alternative for the citizens of the world.” An active program of public relations was put into effect in order to prepare the groundwork for a positive reception among the American public (see for instance: “Pamphlet for Each Immigrant”). Johnson himself underscored on numerous occasions that “we can take renewed faith in the eagerness of people throughout the world to become citizens”(Statement by the President, January 17, 1964: 144). Moreover, the turn in migration strategy made it possible to reaffirm anti-communism as a basic part of Americans’ self-understanding. The Immigration Act adopted in 1965 provided any immigrant from the Communist bloc with refugee status, regardless of whether they were actively escaping persecution on ideological, political, religious or ethnic grounds (Refugees from Communism in Asia, February 9, 1965). By defining communist countries as countries in which “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were not really possible, the new law provided formal confirmation to the image of the United States as a safe haven and as an ideal to be upheld against rival ideologies. The ratified bill was signed into law in the presence of an invited audience of former immigrants who had contributed significantly to the American economy, culture and politics (Memorandum addressed by Califano; Johnson to the Speaker,” August 26, 1965; Johnson to Errigo, August 24, 1965; Pamphlet for Each Immigrant; Schwartz to Valenti, September 30, 1965; Memorandum for Watson, August 31, 1965). Here was yet further proof that, even though America’s historical remote “frontier” had long been incorporated into society at large, there were still more “frontiers” to be tapped for the benefit of the nation and the world (Hughes 2004: 154). The waves of immigrants about to arrive indicated that even in modern times it was possible to pursue research, industry, and art, to make them productive for both personal and collective advantage, and in so doing to allow America to grow and serve as a “world protector” from communism (Statement by the President, January 17, 1964: 144). 88

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Given the rising criticism of American social realities from within and outside of the African-American community, the reopened flow of immigration and the emphasis of the government on the potential success of people flocking to American cities were intended to play their part in reaffirming the American lifestyle and the “American dream.” By widening the social diversity of the population, it was implied, the nation was being offered a new chance to make the system work (Honig 2001: 79–80).

Jewish Organizations and the Amendment to the Immigration Law In its efforts to impress the general public with the normative significance of the immigration law amendments, the Johnson Administration turned to a number of ethnic organizations to solicit their public support of the new measure. Jewish organizations—including those normally not associated with social affairs or political lobbying—joined Southern and Eastern European ethnic organizations in promoting the legislation (See, for instance: Memorandum addressed by Terman, February 14, 1964; Remarks of the President, January 13, 1964; Letter for President Kennedy, August 13, 1963; Faine to Kennedy, July 29, 1963; Marks to Kennedy, April 4, 1963; Press Release from the Jewish Organizations, July 30, 1963; Weinstein to Feldman, July 31, 1963; Rosenberg to President Kennedy, July 26, 1963; Immigration, December, 1964; Immigration February 1965). Indeed, Jewish organizations stood out in these public relations efforts (Schwartz to Valenti, September 30, 1965; The Administrations’ Immigration Proposal—a Memorandum, January 7, 1964). It should be noted in this regard that the support of the organized Jewish community did not arise out of any expectation that the legislation would significantly increase the rate of Jewish immigration. Many of the Jewish communities with a potential for new migration were located beyond the Iron Curtain. There was at the time little sense that this potential could readily be fulfilled. In addition, American Jewry tended to see Israel as the primary solution for easing the persecution of Jews abroad. Jewish refugees from totalitarian countries who wished to immigrate to the United States were expected to find shelter in America under laws that preceded the 1965  legislation: the Parole 89

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Program, developed mainly for Hungarian or Cuban refugees, or via the 1962 legislation (PL 87-510) that extended the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States from totalitarian states to an unlimited amount of people regardless of immigration quotas (Cohen 1972: 368; The Plight of the Jews in Eastern Europe 1959: 18–19, 22–23; Slawson 1961: 11–13, Sanua 2007: 55–56; Dijour 1963: 77). Despite this, liberalization of immigration laws gained a consensual status within the Jewish community (NCRAC 1962–1963: 15; NCRAC 1963–1964: 24–25; NCRAC 1964–1965: 17, 29; NCRAC 1965–1966: 8, 31–32). When in 1955  Isaiah Minkoff, chairman of NCRAC (National Jewish Community Relations Council)—an organization that aspired to become a forum for Jewish organizations in the United States—probed for issues that the constituent member groups of NCRAC could agree upon without forfeiting their autonomous positions on policy, he found that the issue of immigration fit this need. Promotion of immigration reform was sure to gain the support of a broad range of individual organizations while at the same time providing NCRAC with actual content. The community’s support for immigration reform was based essentially on two motivations: fighting antisemitism and promoting the Jewish community’s liberal agendas. For Southern and Eastern European ethnic organizations, the amendments to the immigration law were perceived as a means of obtaining full social legitimization. The imposition of quotas to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe some forty years earlier, it was felt, had dealt an unwarranted blow to the American self-image of those immigrant communities. In effect, the political system had put into law a racially oriented barrier against the natives of those parts of the world, defining them as a foreign and unwanted element in American society. Although Americans of those ethnic backgrounds (Italians, Poles, Jews, and others) were no longer perceived in quite the same negative light—in the 1960s, they were more apt to be grouped together with Irish-Americans and other “white ethnics” in the social parlance of the day—their representative social organizations were apt to maintain that the successful integration of their sons and daughters in American society had been an uphill struggle. For them, the proposed amendment to the immigration laws was a symbolic act that would put an official seal on their full integration in American society. 90

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In that context, descendants of Jewish immigrants who had faced antisemitism viewed immigration reform as a significant demonstration of the government’s commitment to end any expressions of ethnic discrimination. The status of the Jewish community in the United States began improving in the 1950s and a decrease was evident in acts of hatred toward American Jews (Dinnerstein 1994: 150–152, 169–170). Discrimination once sanctioned in leading institutions of higher learning—such as “Jewish quotas” that affected Jewish students and faculty members—were fast disappearing or already a thing of the past (Norrel 2006: 282). The Jewish community was perceived as mainstream and some of its members took an active part in the struggle against racial discrimination against African-Americans. It has been said that, in so doing, they fostered a view of themselves as an integral part of the elite of American society, attempting to reach a solution to the problem (Hertzberg 2003: 267). The economic and occupational achievements that marked the Jewish community buttressed the perception that Jews offered a positive model for immigrants to America to emulate (Dollinger 2000: 157) (see table 2). Table 2: Occupational Status of Employed Jews in the United States, 1957-2001 Women (%) Year Total Uppera Middleb Lowerc

1957

1990

2001

100 24 63 3

100 49 47 4

100 63 34 3

100 55 24 20

100 56 29 15

100 65 27 8

Men (%) Total Uppera Middleb Lowerc

(Source: DellaPergola 2007: 6.) a Professionals, Managers b Lower Managerial, Clerical, Sales, Services c Crafts, Operatives, Unskilled. 91

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Despite their rather disproportionate successes, persistent memories of discrimination and antisemitism remained part of the general ethos that many Jews—at grass roots level as well as in the leadership of communal organizations—tended to embrace. It was indeed true that antisemitic acts did not disappear during the 1950s and 1960s and various expressions of bias as well as sporadic anti-Jewish hate crimes received a certain amount of publicity. Jewish representation remained low in high-level executive offices in the banking system, transportation, and industry; as late as 1950  there were still fifty-seven openly active antisemitic organizations in the country (Dinnerstein 1994: 151, 155, 162, 173).

Liberalism as an Ideological Factor in the Political Action of Jewish Organizations Above all, Jewish organizations’ support for reform in the nation’s immigration policy was consistent with their memberships’ general inclination to support liberal causes (Shapiro 2005: 172, 174). It is one of the truisms of American Jewish social research that the Jews, taken as a political constituency, lean toward the liberal side of American politics. That was true during the 1950s when certain mainstream groups like the National Women’s League of the United Synagogue (the Conservative movement’s women’s organization) and NCRAC openly voiced their concern for civil liberties and opposed cooperation with the anticommunist hearings inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy (Dollinger 2000: 140–141). During the 1960s, Jews figured prominently among Caucasian Americans who were active supporters of the Civil Rights Movement (Wald 2005: 112–113; Elman 1985: 338). Furthermore, Jewish voters and Jewish organizations continued to support governmental aid to weak populations despite the consistent improvement in their own socio-economic status, contrary to trends elsewhere in American society (Lipset and Raab 1995: 146–148). The approach taken by Jewish organizations towards immigration policy fits into this context. Despite the fact that the Jewish community was not expected to benefit from the amendment to immigration laws, immigration reform gained widespread support within much of the community (Glazer 1995: 136–137). Apparently, Jews tended to see immigration policy as yet another plank in the overall liberal agenda. 92

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The right of a person to choose where to live and the chance to be free of discrimination represented positive values to many in the Jewish community. Thus, President Johnson’s public messages that spoke of immigration reform as a way of returning America to its “true values” fell on fertile soil within the Jewish public.

REFERENCES Books and Articles American Jewish Committee. (1959). The Plight of the Jews in Eastern Europe. New York: American Jewish Committee. Bellah, R. N. (1970). Civil religion in America. In R. N. Bellah (Ed.), Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in Post-Traditional World (pp. 168–189). New York: Harper & Row. Boggs, C. (2005). Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Cohen, N. W. (1972). Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. DellaPergola, S. (2007). Go to school, work, marry, have children: Jewish women and men in the U.S., France and Israel. Paper Presented at International Seminar on Jewish Family Policies. Brandeis University, Waltham. Dijour, I. (1963). Jewish immigration to the United States. American Jewish Year Book, vol. 64 (pp. 77-79). New York: American Jewish Committee. Dinnerstein, L. (1994). Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Dockrill, M. L., and Hopkins, M. F. (2006). The Cold War, 1945-1991. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dollinger, M. (2000). Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ellman, I. (1985). American Jews in a Pluralistic Society. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat po’alim. (Hebrew) Fitzgerald, K. A. (1996). The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and the National Identity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 93

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Fousek, J. (2000). To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Glazer, N. (1995). The anomalous liberalism of American Jews. In R.  M.  Seltzer and N. J. Cohen (Eds.), The Americanization of the Jews (pp. 133–143). New York: New York University Press. Graham, O. L. (2004). Unguarded Gates: A History of America’s Immigration Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Greene, J. R. (2010). America in the Sixties. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Hertzberg, A. (2003). A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Honig, B. (2001). Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hughes, R. T. (2004). Myths America Lives By. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. King, D. S. (2000). Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, D. P. (2004). Attack on Government: Fear, Distrust, and Hatred in Public Life. Charlottesville: Pitchstone Publishing. Lipset, S. M. and Raab, E. (1995). Jews and the New American Scene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lytle, M. H. (2006). America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martel, W. C. (2007). Victory in War: Foundation of Modern Military Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, D. (2008). The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes. New York: Basic Books. Ninkovich, F. (2001). The United States and Imperialism. Malden: Blackwell. Norrell, R. J. (2006). The House I Live In: Race in American Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Pickus, N. (2005). The Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sanua, M. R. (2007). Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 94

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Shapiro, E. S. (2005). We Are Many: Reflections on American Jewish History and Identity. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Slawson, J. (1961). The Realities of Jewish Integration. New York: American Jewish Committee. Wald, K. D. (2005). Toward a structural explanation of Jewish–Catholic political differences in the United States. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 21, 111–131. Woods, R. B. (2006). LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Documents A Draft for the President’s Speech. P. L. 89-236 (HR 2580), Reports on Enrolled Legislation, Box 27. Abba Schwartz to Jack Valenti, September 30, 1965. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Address by Senator Kennedy. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Albert Arent to President Johnson, January 20, 1964. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Bill Moyers to Jack Valenti, September 27, 1965. Ex LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Dr. Prinz to President Johnson, January 21, 1964. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Dr. Sidney Marks to President Kennedy, April 4, 1963. White House Central Subject Files, Box 483 LE/IM (yellow), JFK Library. Draft for the President’s Speech. P. L. 89-236 (HR. 2580), Reports on Enrolled Legislation, Box 27, LBJ Library. Draft Remarks for the President. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Immigration and Citizenship. Background for Planning Including Recommendations for Major Program Emphases, NCRAC, 1964–1965. Immigration Policy Reform. Background for Planning Including Recommendations for Major Program Emphases, NCRAC, 1965–1966. Immigration. American Affairs Kit, November-December 1964, AA5. Immigration. American Affairs Kit, January-February 1965, AA4. 95

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Immigration. Joint Program Plan for Jewish Community Relations, 1962– 1963, NCRAC. Immigration. Joint Program Plan for Jewish Community Relations, 1963– 1964, NCRAC. Irving J. Faine to President Kennedy, July 29, 1963. White House Central Subject Files, Box 483 LE/M1 (Green), JFK Library. Jack Valenti to Jano Paulucci, Oct. 10, 1965. Ex LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Letter to the President Kennedy by Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, August 13, 1963. White House Central Subject Files, Box 483 LE/M1 (Green), JFK Library. Lewis H. Weinstein to Myer Feldman, July 31, 1963. White House Central Subject Files, Box 483 LE/M1 (Green), JFK Library. Memorandum addressed by Isaiah Terman, February 14, 1964. Blaustein Library, IMM-US/AJC Archive. Memorandum addressed by Joe Califano. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Memorandum for Bill Moyers, addressed by James Greenfield, September 26, 1965. Ex LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Memorandum for Bill Moyers, addressed by Jack Rosenthal. Ex LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Memorandum for Marvin Watson, addressed by Eric Goldman, August 31, 1965. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Memorandum for Mr. Valenti, addressed by Abba Schwartz, January 11, 1964. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Mr. Abba P. Schwartz to Jack Valenti, September 30, 1965. Ex LE/IM, White House Central Files LE, Box 73, LBJ Library. Mrs. Max Rosenberg to President Kennedy, July 26, 1963. White House Central Subject Files, Box 483 LE/M1 (Green), JFK Library. Pamphlet for Each Immigrant who Becomes a Citizen. Ex IM, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. President Johnson to Paul Douglas, December 13, 1963. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. President Johnson to Joseph Errigo, August 24, 1965. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. 96

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President Johnson to the Speaker. Ex LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. President Johnson to the Speaker. August 26, 1965, Lx LE/ IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. President’s Speech. Lx LE/IM, Box 73, White House Central Files LE, LBJ Library. Press Release from the Jewish Organizations, July 30, 1963. IMMIGR-US/ AJC Blaustein Library. Refugees from Communism in Asia: a Study of the Committee on Judiciary, February 9, 1965. Senate Report: Special Reports, Vol. 3, 89th Congress 1st Session, No. 12664. Washington, DC: Government Press Office, 1965. Remarks of Henry Fowler, July 4, 1967. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Remarks of the President to Representatives of Organizations Interested in Immigration and Refugee Matters the Cabinet Room, January 13, 1964. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Remarks of the President, January 13, 1964. Ex IM, Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. Statement by the President in Response to a Report on Immigration, January 17, 1964. 1965. Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, vol. I. Washington, DC: Government Press Office. Statement by the Secretary of State, July 2, 1964. Ex IM Box 1, White House Central Files IM, LBJ Library. The Administrations’ Immigration Proposal, by Abba P. Schwartz — a Memorandum, January 7, 1964. Ex LE/IM, White House Central Files LE, Box 73, LBJ Library.

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Split at the Root: Italian Jewish Identity Between Anti-Zionism and Philo-Semitism, 1961–1967 Manuela Consonni Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and the Department of Romance and Latin American Studies The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“If Israel were destroyed, it would be more serious than the Nazi Holocaust.” —Claude Lanzmann, Le Monde, June 2, 1967

Introduction In Italy in the 1960s, as a result of both the Eichmann trial and the Six-Day War of 1967, there was a reversal in the image of Israel and of the Jews in the Diaspora. This phenomenon involved more than just Italy, of course (Novick 1999; Wolf 2004), touching the core of post-war relations between Jews and non-Jews, and influencing historical debate by reshuffling the categories deployed within national discourses. Italy in the present discussion represents a litmus test and a specific model— given Italy’s wartime history and post-war memory construction—with wider applications in the European (western) narrative at large. I wish to address these two paradigmatic events, and to present an interpretive hypothesis involving two constitutive categories of identity related to the Jews. The Eichmann trial may be defined as an event that ostensibly unified attitudes among both Jews and non-Jews. The event was read as reinforcing Italian Jewish identification with the anti-Fascist national narrative fostered by the CLN (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale), the National Liberation Movement, specifically highlighting a shared ethos of anti-Fascist resistance during the war years. It is important 98

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to stress that the main political and military force inside the CLN was represented by the Garibaldi Brigades, 575  units strong, which were identified with the Communist Party. This had an impact on the construction of the national resistance narrative after the war. Indeed, for many, the power of that political ethos lasted well beyond the war and continued to possess currency, as the ideological pathos of the struggle against Nazism and Fascism was constantly rededicated and renewed in contemporary engagements with the politics of “resistance” in the postwar era. In contrast, the Six-Day War may be viewed in this context as a historical counter-event. It appeared to cancel, as it were, the universalism hitherto promoted under the slogan of anti-Fascist resistance. By striking at the core of the Jewish–non-Jewish united front, the response of the Italian Left to the 1967 war implicitly challenged the bond between the Jewish cause and that of humanity at large. By the same token, it thereby also challenged the self-image of many Jews and, thus, undermined pre-existing Jewish identities. The 1967 war seemed to present to the world a novel construct, “new Jews,” no longer the successors of the old European resistance struggle but rather the heirs and agents of a new imperialism. It is in this context and between these two poles of reference, between an image of Jewish anti-Fascism and what might be dubbed an opposing image of Jewish “neo-Fascism” (to put the contrasting images in their starkest terms), that we may try to reread the recent history of Italian Jews and their attempts to re-define their identity, with itself and with the Left and its culture, until then its privileged system of reference.

The Eichmann Trial and the Italian Left-wing Press The trial of Adolf Eichmann, taking place sixteen years after the end of the war, distinguished the deportation and extermination of the Jews as an independent historical event from what had earlier been referred to as “war crimes,” and had had a mostly political valence. Now for the first time, it seemed, the victimization of the Jews was being considered on its own. To a large degree, this Judeocentric phenomenon was unanticipated. At first the Italian press depicted the trial as another “routine” 99

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war-crimes trial. Public opinion makers, having taken their postwar cue from the dominant discourse of the Resistance (with its hardcore leftist orientation), were prepared to view Eichmann’s trial and conviction as a remnant of Nuremberg, another docket in the unfolding process of postwar justice. Following his capture by Israeli agents and again just before the start of the trial, Germany was widely featured in all the leading Italian newspapers: the Germany of Adenauer juxtaposed with the Germany of Eichmann. Similarly, before the trial began, the left-wing Italian press resorted to standard Cold War language, characteristic of Italian political discourse at the time. Thus, leading exponents of the Italian left depicted Eichmann as a link in the chain of continuity between the struggle against the Third Reich (then) and the conservative government of the German Federal Republic—and its prime minister, Adenauer—in the present. In making such a case, it was especially the Communist Party and its press that took this direction. In March 1961 the party organ, L’Unità, launched its campaign against Adenauer’s Germany and against Eichmann over the byline of Rubens Tedeschi, who was sent to Jerusalem to cover the trial (Tedeschi 1961). The paper published a photograph of Eichmann in prison near Haifa on its front page. Background articles, written with a bias against Bonn, were repeatedly interspersed with profiles of the man who had been in charge of Jewish affairs in the Third Reich. Similarly, writing in the same paper, correspondent Sergio Segre began by accusing Eichmann of crimes that covered “more than seven times the distance from the Alps to Sicily” (Segre 1961), and ended his train of thought by indicting leading members of Adenauer’s government as old Nazis: Hans Globke, secretary-general of the Chancellor’s office; Adolf Heusinger, head of the operations office of the NATO High Command; and Hermann Foertsch, the Bundeswehr commander.1 1

Hans Globke (1898–1973), German politician, was a minor official during the Third Reich. He is often attributed with the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws, for which he also wrote an official commentary. He was director of the Federal Chancellery of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1953 and 1963  and as such one of the closest aides of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Adolf Heusinger (1897–1982) joined the German Army and served throughout the First World War. Heusinger remained in the army and soon after the outbreak of the Second World War was promoted to colonel and appointed chief of operations at the Oberkommando des Herres (OKH). In 1944,

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According to Giorgio Conato, “The true problem is not that of the names. […] It is rather the problem that, at a distance of 15 years, the old Germany, traditional and arrogant, conformist and insensitive, irritated and ambitious, once again exists between the Rhine and the Elbe” (Segre 1961: 2; Conato 1961). Globke, especially, was directly linked to Eichmann and his role was emphasized as that of being personally implicated, not merely as an accessory, in the extermination of Jews (Conato 1961a; 1961b; Tedeschi 1961a; 1961b; 1961c). The independent Rome daily Il Messaggero also devoted extensive coverage to Eichmann’s arrest in Argentina and his surreptitious transfer to Israel aboard a merchant vessel flying the Panamanian flag (Il  Messaggero 1961a). Il Messaggero sent Matteo De Monte to Jerusalem to cover the trial (Il Messaggero 1961b). Vero Roberti, already in Jerusalem as the correspondent of Il Corriere della Sera, along with Dino Frescobaldi and Massimo Caputo, who had been posted to Bonn, wrote editorials and articles on Adenauer’s Germany, the issue of collective German guilt, and Eichmann, publishing interviews with his intimates (including one with Robert Eichmann, the brother of the “hangman of the Jews”). From early March through the summer of 1961, such items appeared daily (Corriere della Sera 1961: March 5-August 30). Only the neo-Fascist press in Italy also mobilized during the Eichmann trial, but in support of the defendant. After the execution of the former S.S. Obersturmbahnfuehrer, Signal, which called itself an “international daily,” published a bloodcurdling text with the title, printed between two swastikas, “Camerata Eichmann: Present!” and an even more horrifying subhead: “The Jewish beast has had its ration of Christian blood.” Their “Judeocentric” position reflected the most obscurantist and traditional anti-Judaism, recalling the accusation of Heusinger became temporary army chief of staff and was standing next to Adolf Hitler when the bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg exploded on July 20, 1944. Heusinger, who was slightly injured in the blast, was arrested by the Gestapo and accused of being involved in the July Plot. After the war he played an important role in NATO and was chairman of its military committee (1961–1964). Hermann Foertsch (1885–1961) was Chief of Staff of the Twelfth Army. He was put on trial together with other German generals in what was known as the Hostages Trial (officially, The United States of America v. Wilhelm List et. al.). 101

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deicide and soaked in racist and antisemitic remarks,2 as it is clearly pointed out in the following text: The savagery of the deicides was not even willing to spare the ashes of the immolated victim. […] We Europeans, we Aryans, we Christians will never be able to forget this crime, after the Jews have once again spilled European, Aryan, Christian blood. In the days immediately following the assassination of Eichmann, the entire world was shocked by catastrophes …: it is the manifestation of God’s wrath against the people who murdered his son. (Barbieri 1962: 73)

In addition to extensive coverage on the pages of the important Italian dailies, which chronicled the trial in detail, book-length biographies of Eichmann were also published, as were new works about the concentration camps and the death camps, impressing the Nazi policy of genocide against the Jews on an ever-larger and better-informed public.3 This was not because the public had somehow become aware of the lacunae in the historical field and wanted to fill them or because someone had decided to “share” the truth with others. It would be naïve to believe that these were mere coincidences. As Andrea Devoto wrote at the time: “Even admitting that the Eichmann trial constituted an optimum publicity campaign for works that, in the not-so-distant past, no one would have bought and that absolutely no editor would have judged marketable, we must nevertheless recognize that the current flowering of publications on the Lager theme is certainly a very good In one famous episode of antisemitism, Judge Durante accused the Jews of deicide. Several times the Supreme Court of Genoa handed down verdicts against the Judge, who was accused of contempt toward the Jewish religion, but then, on January 28, 1963, he was absolved of this accusation (Levi, 1963). 3 “Six million victims: On the eve of the trial of the man directly responsible for the genocide of the Jews, there appears for the first time in Italian the appalling documentation of his criminal activity” (Poliakov 1961). The book concludes with the 15 articles of the indictment filed by the Attorney General of Israel, Gideon Hausner, against Eichmann. On another book’s cover there appeared an emaciated man against a red background, pointing and saying “It’s him” in accusation (Perlman 1961); both books were reviewed (Levi, 1961a). A  West German journalist wrote another book (Ludwig 1961), and this also received two long reviews (Levi 1961a; Segre 1961c). Two other translated works appeared in 1961 (Reynolds 1961; Zeiger 1961). 2

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thing, whatever the reasons that produced it” (Devoto 1963: 73-82). Primo Levi followed a similar tack with regard to the trial taking place in Jerusalem: It seems to me that, even in a world miraculously restabilized on foundations of justice, even in a world in which, hypothetically, no one threatens [the world’s] peace any more, all violence has disappeared, every crime has been rectified, every evil has found its punishment and amendment, even in that world, so far from ours, it would be wrong and foolish to keep quiet about the past. […] We all know that history is not always just, that Providence does not always operate. On the other hand, we all love justice. Why should we hide from our children this exemplary sign of historical justice? (Levi 1961: 646-650)

Throughout the preceding decade, and despite the massive cultural influence of former political prisoners, the Jewish memory of the deportations and the extermination found its way into the public forum quite slowly and hesitantly. It was not yet an explicit right to difference claimed by ex-prisoners, but rather the establishment of a presence, seeking to become a voice. It was not done, at least at the beginning, to stress the difference in the Jewish Holocaust. There was, by the late 1950s, a new interest, a greater attention to the history of the war, which found expression in the commemoration of such tragic events as the Ardeatine massacre. The attention of the Italian press to Adenauer’s Germany became an excuse to talk about the past, about fascism and war: thus, the quest to bring to justice former war criminals was juxtaposed to the reminder that 600 ex-Nazi officials were still part of the justice system in Bonn and that, among them, some had simply been absolved of their crimes. Current concerns thus became occasions for comparing the present with a dubious and problematic past.4 And last, we must take into consideration the appearance of a new generation. The new participants in the discussion, if only because of 4

In L’Unità, March 30, 1959, Orfeo Evangelista wrote a harsh article significantly entitled “The Courts of Adenauer Legalize Racist Anti-Semitism,” dealing with the double acquittal of the former Nazi Nieland in Germany by a former Nazi judge. He concluded the article with the following observation: “It is a wave of racism that is striking, often disturbing, intimidating the public opinion of the federal republic.” 103

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their youthful age, had no historical past to defend or to hide. Perhaps, too, they knew little of the extermination of the Jews, and what they did know was often inaccurate. The remarkable interest in the Eichmann trial therefore reflected a change in the general attitude toward the past, opening new spaces of discourse about memory, which in earlier historical moments and conjunctures had been hard to express. Even had they been expressed earlier, they would most likely not have been heard, because these memories were considered to carry extreme, ineffable pain. They had been unpublishable because unsalable (Devoto 1963: 80). The Adornian idea that the uniqueness of the phenomenon did not authorize consideration of it as an isolated deed but rather as an event that, having happened once, could be repeated and might give rise to relapses, made slow inroads (Adorno 1969). There also emerged another position, which was somewhat ahead of its time: survival itself might be understood as active (not passive) resistance against the Nazi process of annihilation—a perception that even the survivors were not yet expressing or, indeed, fully conscious of at the time. Now, in the wake of the changed discursive atmosphere, it could be affirmed that their very survival merited recognition. As Mario Saccenti pointed out, “without wanting it, without being compelled to do it,” they had acted “contrary to the policy of the ‘lords of death’ of the Nazis, who had wanted to persuade their victims, from the outset, of their fundamental ‘non-humanity’ or ‘sub-humanity,’ to make it easier to slaughter and kill them” (Saccenti 1955: 260-261). Given the European—especially the Italian—background of unitedfront anti-Fascism, this specific thrust, highlighting the case of Jewish victimhood and resistance, was completely new. This change of perspective and perception was not understood at first: the Eichmann trial was too dramatic an event, and it brought too much to light, to enable commentators to pause and reflect on the impact that it would have on the reconstruction of memory. Only about a decade later, around the mid-1970s, was the change in perception retrospectively understood as having reframed the memory of the extermination of the Jews as a new and essential category of political identity. For it was at about that time that both general and internal Jewish discourse began to regularly posit a stark contrast, if not indeed a conflict, between this Jewish identity (victim, survivor, anti-Fascist resistor) and the one apparently proffered by the State of Israel. 104

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The change in perception among Jews led them from the universal to the particular. Many Jews had previously identified with the premise of the Resistance model, accepting that Jewish memory should be placed within the context of European history and the war against Nazism and Fascism (Lagrou 1997; 2000). But they had had some difficulty finding their particular place in that larger story. Despite Italian Jews’ active participation in the fight against Nazism and fascism,5 there were too many dead Jews, and too many of them had died in death camps, where they had suffered deaths that could not be claimed as heroic in the paramilitary or political sense. As a result of the Eichmann trial, however, Jews began to reclaim their own narrative of Resistance, namely that the racial deportations could be considered a kind of political deportation, as Primo Levi put it. To have survived the concentration camps, it was now asserted, was tantamount to active (i.e., political) resistance to Nazism. Thanks to the arrest, trial, and hanging of Adolf Eichmann—in Jerusalem, not Nuremberg6—the Jewish narrative was given full expression. Jews as such, one might say, were retroactively inaugurated into the company of all the other partisans and freedom fighters—rather than passive victims of persecution or as anonymous co-combatants in the universal anti-Fascist struggle. In that sense, they could finally and definitively identify themselves as fully belonging to the Resistance ethos. At the same time, the implied comradeship and universalism of that ethos were subverted—once again, because of the venue of the trial in the Israeli capital—as Jewish memory was specifically and symbolically identified with the one place from which they might be observed in their own right.7 The Eichmann trial had thus opened the doors of Israel to the Diaspora and Jews abroad were seen as the heroes of Jerusalem—no Of the 200,000 Italians who joined the partisans, about 2,000 were Jews. This is a relatively large number considering the proportion of Jews in the population of Italy at the time, and even higher if we refer only to the inhabitants of the regions where partisans were active. On Jewish resistance groups during the fascist era, see: Consonni 2004; Cohen 2004; Coen 1988. 6 Eichmann was hanged in Ramle, not Jerusalem. 7 Slavoj Zizek wrote about the image and the gaze, about the distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification, between “constituted” and “constitutive” identification (Zizek 1989). 5

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longer just the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, Jewish courage during that war resurfaced thanks to the heroism and battles of other Jews in a different campaign—the Jews of Israel. It was no longer only Auschwitz or Sobibor for the Jews. It was Adolf Eichmann, captured, tried, and executed by the “new Jewish partisans.” One result of the trial, as seen from Italy, was that all Jews could, by extension, and perhaps belatedly, embrace a fully accredited place of their own within the Italian and European Resistance ethos. In this context, the fight against Nazism and fascism and the anti-Fascist choice were not only the moral and political bases, necessitated by the war, of the encounter between the Jews and the anti-Fascist movement in Italy, and later between the Jews and the postwar left; rather, they had become identity categories that above all defined Jewish existence (Molinari 1995: 7). It was in this context, following the Eichmann trial, of a joint and mutual recognition based essentially on the anti-Fascist identity paradigm and the Resistance paradigm, that the events of the Six-Day War found their resonance.

The War, the Left and the Jews The war of 1967—especially the contrasting images of fears for Israel’s survival on the eve of the war and those of victory beyond expectations— stirred up the fears and emotions of many Italian Jews, just as it did for many others around the world. But in Italy these events would prove to have particular, dramatic, and confusing repercussions that filtered throughout the Jewish community. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War we might say that the already familiar, accepted reference to an identity system—the accommodating framework of anti-Fascist solidarity and Resistance—was severely challenged. The political confrontation was especially traumatic in the face-off between representative Jews and the Italian Communist Party (the PCI). The Six-Day War and its impact on the Diaspora initiated a dichotomous identity that has left a lasting mark on Jewish relations with others. Memory of the deportations and extermination of the Jews under German and Italian Fascism, as the preferred field for a possible and legitimate reconstruction of a European identity for Italian Jews, was now juxtaposed to the Zionist concept of Jewish nationhood and the idea that Israel was the exclusive site for a Jewish national rebirth. The war 106

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of 1967, just six years after the Eichmann trial, required Italian Jews to measure themselves not only in reference to the Shoah, but also in reference to the existence of Israel and the complex relationship between these two different identity constructs—one of them Diaspora-based and associated with the victimization (and resistance) of the Jews, and the other the Zionist–based version of redemption in Israel (Carpi 1997; Luzzatto 1997). I believe that this fraught interplay of two distinct identity-narratives was especially marked in Western European countries (in France and Germany, in addition to Italy), and must be contrasted to what happened in the United States. There, apparently, Jews felt little contradiction at the level of identity; rather, the two issues of the Shoah and Israel were superimposed, one on top of the other, and were never fixed in public memory as two distinct historical paradigms. American Jews, it must be recalled, operated in a semantic and political field that (unlike the French, Italian, and German cases) was uncomplicated by wartime memories of resistance, political deportees, occupation, and the like. American Jewish memory of the Shoah featured a common identification with the Allied cause, a single-minded focus on the Jewish survivors, and (of course), only a second-hand reception of knowledge about Jewish deportation and extermination (Consonni, 2010). Thus, in a Jewish community like the one in America, where the Jewish narrative of the Shoah was relatively independent of other political factors, the fears for Israel in the weeks preceding the Six-Day War—followed by the Israeli victory—could all the more readily become catalysts for what has been termed the American Jewish civil religion of survival, in which Israel and the Shoah assumed interchangeable value.8 For American Jews, as the historian Peter Novick affirmed, “Israel became much more important …, and, in a set of spiraling interactions, concern with Israel was expressed in ways that evoked the Holocaust, and vice versa” (Novick 2000: 146). 8

The term civil religion, popularized by Robert Bellah in a seminal essay of 1967, commonly refers to the symbols, rituals, myths, and tenets that together comprise “the transcendent universal religion of the nation” was used by Jonathan Woocher in his book Sacred Survival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). See Bellah, Robert N., Civil Religion in America. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96 (1) 1967: 1–21. 107

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Returning to the Italian case, I believe that the entire mesh of Jewishrelated issues, which had been peripheral to Italian national memory until the Eichmann trial, subsequent to the Six-Day War became essential elements of public discourse. As such, they deeply affected Jewish identity, not only on the level of historical discourse, but also in contemporary political discourse. In that light, relations between Italian Jews and the anti-Fascist culture of the Left, the child of the Resistance model, bulked very prominently in the years after 1967. The rupture between the Jews and the Left was deep, traumatic, and (so it would seem today) irreversible. The consequences of that breach had profound repercussions, provoking political splits, complex discussions, and identity crises. The Left is of almost exclusive relevance in this regard, for in Italy the Right never presented a real political or ideological alternative for Jews. Here it is very appropriate to cite the words once written by Sergio DellaPergola, who pointed to the ontological impossibility of such a choice: We want to completely allay any doubt that anyone may harbor, namely, we deny that any dialogue with the forces of the Political Right is possible. Such a hypothesis is ridiculous, even if one might regret the limitations placed upon the political and ideological autonomy of Italian Jewry. Any hypothetical dialogue with the political Right would not only repeat all of the inconveniences of that which we have with the political left, but also it would lack the moral justification of the universal validity of its political ideals. (DellaPergola 1968: 10)

The Jewish relationship with the Left, and especially with the Communist Party, was rather complex. The PCI, which always supported the Italian Jewish minority during the past years of continual friction with both the extreme right and conservative Catholic forces9 now defined Israel, in keeping with directives from Moscow, as “another hotbed of American imperialism” (L’Unita 1967). However, the schematic, programmed nature of this line of reasoning on the Mideast question did not escape either the Jewish community or the communist grass-roots, 9

Appeals for the survival of Israel appeared in most of the leading Italian dailies. The signatories included Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini, the historian Alessandro Galante Garrone, the journalist Alberto Ronchey, and the philosopher Norberto Bobbio.

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where those who rebelled against Party directives loudly supported the Israeli cause and referred to common Resistance-model ideals. At one rally for Israel, a message from the Roman Federation of the PCI was read, as follows: “We Italian Communists recall the positions repeatedly expressed [in the past by the party], concerning recognition of the State of Israel’s right to full national independence, and [we] repeat our wishes for it to develop in peace. […] Both of us [i.e., Jews and communists] have given testimony in the Resistance and in the sacrifice of our commitment to liberty and human dignity against the aberration of racism and antisemitism” (Zevi 1970: 378). It was not only the communist grass-roots that resisted the party’s one-sided position. The positions of left-wing intellectuals and authors like Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who did not follow the PCI on the path led by Moscow, also found an echo in the Italian press. Pasolini, for example, harshly criticized the official stand of the PCI and its daily L’Unità: “These days, when I read L’Unità I feel the same pain I felt when reading the most mendacious bourgeois newspapers” (Pasolini 1967: 273-280). Concerned Jews found themselves burdened with a sense of conflict, without clearly understanding why, with those with whom they had fought and suffered in the common struggle against Nazism and fascism, who in 1947 had defended the right of the Jewish people to their own state but now were unaccountably taking the other side.10 Bitterness and concern with the communists’ anti-Israel positions were expressed most acutely by those Jews who considered the communists to be “the traveling companions who [had] betrayed” them. For example, Eloisa Ravenna, then the director of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC) in Milan, wrote, “For all of us the conflict became a dramatic internal conflict. […] All of us felt like fish out of water” (Ravenna 1967b: 1); and elsewhere, “I am very much worried by the positions taken by the Communist press, […] which are displaying authentic hate propaganda: the lies, the insults, the vulgarity do not fail to make an impression on the public and cannot avoid having dangerous consequences” (1967a). 10

Speech by Andrei Gromyko as Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, in 1947: “It would be unjust to deny the Jewish people the right to realize its own aspirations for the creation of a state.” 109

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It is worth mentioning that Emilio Sereni, one of the most important and leading figures of the PCI and Enzo Sereni’s brother, took a public, strong philo-Arab position during the war. In the weeks following the end of the war he reaffirmed, on the pages of the most prestigious communist journals such as Critica Marxista and Rinascita, his criticism against the imperialistic policy and the war of aggression of the Jewish State and in full support of the anti-imperialist Arab liberation movement, stressing the need of a just peace for the Arab world (Sereni 1967a; 1967b).11 There were a few voices of dissent within the Communist leadership. The Jewish senator Umberto Terracini, one of the leading figures in the Party, was the only one to maintain, without prevaricating, that Israel had fought the war for its survival. An isolated voice, in an open letter sent to L’Unità he denounced the position of his party and its alignment with Moscow and those who denied “the legitimacy of a Jewish state, on the plane of international law, and its right to existence, on a historical and political plane” (Terracini, 1969). The severance of Moscow’s diplomatic relations with Jerusalem strengthened the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist positions within the Party: “The birth of Israel [seems to be] no longer the fruit of the Jewish revival, in which so many participants were Marxists and socialists, but the result of ‘a technocratic and racist movement,’ solidly supported by the American banks, thick with upperclass pioneers, born conquerors who have descended on the Middle East” (Molinari 1995: 34; Ledda 1968; Della Seta 1969: Jacoviello 1969; Savioli 1969). Apart from these isolated examples, the Italian left became wholly devoted to the new party line. The words spoken by Terracini in Tel-Aviv on the eve of the Six-Day War, in which he declared that the communists and the Jews shared a common destiny because they had a common heritage of values that were consolidated over time, in recognition of 11

Although he thought that the Arabs should not demand the destruction of the State of Israel, Sereni saw nevertheless in the Arab liberation movement an important moment of liberation and of political maturity against the oppression. He firmly criticized the Israeli Communist Party for its capitulation before the policy of union sacrée with a chauvinist government (Rinascita 29 luglio [1967]: 10). Sereni was strongly criticized by the Italian Jewish community for his position, accusing him of betraying the memory of his brother Enzo, who was a Zionist and socialist, one of the founding father s of Kibbutz Givat Brenner, who died in Dachau in 1944.

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the great contribution of blood spilled by the Soviet Union to turn back Nazism, were henceforth a dead letter. If, before the 1967 war, it had been possible to be pro-Israel and to affirm that “the roots of socialism, of the Resistance, and of anti-Fascism were valid for Italy no less than for the Jewish people” (Terracini 1967: 1), without being dismissed as racist and anti-Arab, afterwards every argument in support of Israel was irremediably transposed into support “for the capitalist powers against the Arab population” (Molinari 1995: 31). The author and journalist Alberto Nirenstein saw something disquieting and new in the Soviets’ strongly anti-Israel line. It was not merely a political or strategic decision but something different that was being justified from a class perspective. It consisted of the “Chinese” attitude taken by the Soviets, according to which there could be no compromise between “good communists” and “wicked imperialists.” This “Chinese option” derived from the revolutionary competition between Moscow and Beijing to win over the emerging nations of the Third World. It thus tended to include all the countries of the eastern bloc as well as the western communist parties, beginning with the PCI As it seemed to him, it was thus “the rivalry with Beijing in Asia and in Africa that spurred Moscow to its hateful anti-Israel position” (Nirenstein 1967: 1; Garosci 1970). Others maintained that the communists’ rigid anti-Israel line was also intended to stem competition from the Italian extra-parliamentary left, which strongly supported, with the ideological ferocity that marked it, the destruction of Israel.12 The Socialist Party, in contrast, took a different approach, and voiced pro-Israel positions both before and after the Six-Day War. Giorgio Cabibbe, a member of the national executive of the Socialist Youth Federation, exemplified his party’s position. It became part of its broader polemic against the PCI and its subservience to Moscow, including its Middle East policy, and it sought to underscore the positions of the moderate Italian left, held by personalities such as Pietro Nenni and Aldo Garosci, who were “always engaged on the side of Israel and against 12

For example, the television series, “Mosè, la legge del deserto,” was attacked by Giuseppe Vita, a journalist for the Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, who saw it as “the confirmation of the supremacy of the Jewish people” and “the legitimation of the Zionist aggression against the Arabs” (Vita 1973; Di Nola 1967). 111

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Communism” (Shalom 1967: 3). L’Avanti, the socialist daily, entered the fray and without hesitation denounced “the Communist philo-Arab factiousness” and the “one-dimensional approach” that viewed the Jewish state as “the new Nazis and a base for American imperialism in the Middle East” (L’Avanti 1967: 1). Membership in Israel friendship associations increased around this time, and in October 1968, Piero Caleffi, a Mauthausen deportee and later a senator representing the Italian Socialist Party, was elected president of the Italy-Israel Association.13 Nevertheless, some Italian Jews, especially those with a close affinity for the radical Left, felt a strong desire to rescue their bond with that legacy at any cost. We may catalogue such Jewish reactions as falling into three patterns: some Jews quit the Communist Party; others, always less critical, stayed; while still others organized into groups and associations meant to maintain the strong ties that bound the Jews to the communists. Among those who stayed in the Communist Party, aligning himself with Moscow’s positions and releasing many pro-Soviet declarations, was the journalist and communist leader Piero Della Seta. He could not envision any political future in Palestine based on the Zionist ideology. It was unthinkable to him that, given Zionist dreams to “gather in the exiles,” Israel could ever become the homeland for more than 13 million Jewish people. He believed that such an idea would necessarily lead to an uncontrolled expansionist policy which would strengthen the more racist vein in the state. Della Seta was in favor of a binational state to replace Israel (Molinari 1995: 34; Della Seta 1967; L’Unità 1969; Ledda 1968; Jacoviello 1969; Savioli 1969). There was also the journalist, Paolo Alatri, who declared that the antiZionist policy of the Soviet Union was not based on antisemitic prejudice. To counter charges of antisemitism in the Soviet Union he asserted that Jews lived there in complete comfort and freedom (Alatri 1967). Yet another of this sort was the literary critic Franco Fortini (Lattes), whose 1967 book, The Dogs of Sinai (I cani del Sinai), denounced “the propagandistic exploitation of the Six-Day War [as he] condemn[ed] Israel’s policy and war, and those friends of Israel who barked at the wretched 13

However, there was an anti-Israeli faction within the Socialist Party that had an ulterior motive for its pro-Arab line: undermining the pro-government stance of the party secretary, Giacomo Mancini, and enforcing the convergence of policy with the PCI.

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Arab, allowing the anti-Arab racism to leak out from the petty bourgeois aligned with Israel” (Fortini 1967: 83). There were other Jewish communists, however, who attempted, rather, to reach a new modus vivendi with the rest of the Italian Jewish community. One of these was Luciano Ascoli, whose book, The Left and the Jewish Question (La Sinistra e la questione ebraica) (Ascoli 1970), while substantially agreeing with the political positions of the PCI, did not dismiss the fear expressed by many Italian Jews that the party’s strongly anti-Israel line concealed a species of antisemitic prejudice. He recalled certain remarks by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who had recently written that anti-Zionism was only the newest form of antisemitism (Sartre 1982). The Jewish Communists and their various statements inspired vociferous conflict within the Jewish community. Alberto Nirenstein, an exCommunist, accused Jewish Communists, especially Franco Fortini,14 of being the very model for the “rejection of the Exile” (shelilat hagolah) encapsulated in classical Zionist rhetoric; namely, Nirenstein charged, Fortini embodied a kind of Diaspora-based, perverse nostalgia for “the Jew who should be mourned and pitied” (Nirenstein 1968: 1). In late 1967, a group known as the “Left Jews” was founded in Rome, Milan, and Turin. The main points of its political manifesto promoted the dissemination of accurate information about the Jews and Israel, dialogue between Arabs and Israelis, and the prevention of a rightward slide by Italian Jews, so as to rescue the historical bond between the Jews and the Left, and especially between the Jews and the Communists.15 The Turin chapter of the group, which included three well-known survivors 14

15

Alberto Nirenstein’s wife, the Florentine journalist Wanda Lattes, was Fortini’s cousin. The leftwing Jews included an extremely active group of individuals who had lived in Israel for a while, frequently on a kibbutz, before returning to Italy. Prominent among them was the historian Guido Valabrega from Turin, who after a short experience in Israel decided to break with the Zionist project, which he felt had betrayed the ideals of liberty and human rebirth that had inspired its beginnings. In the late 1970s he founded Grmoc, the Contemporary Middle East Research Group. Valabrega engaged in polemics on the pages of the leading Italian dailies concerning the aggressive Jewish nationalism and wrote extensively about the impossibility of accepting Zionism as a solution to the Jews’ national and identity problems (Rinascita 1967; Valabrega 1980; 1986). 113

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and intellectuals—Primo Levi, Giorgio Olivetti, and Aldo Zargani—published a document that went beyond the declaration of principles in the founding manifesto. Their pamphlet compared Palestinian terrorism to the Resistance and found democratic and internationalist positions within it. By contrast, Israeli policy was harshly criticized as extremist and expansionist. The document represented the first real rupture between members of the Jewish left who had been deportees and partisans, who felt that they profoundly represented the Resistance ethos, and Israel. Their document was violently criticized in other Italian Jewish circles. Claudio Millul, editor of the monthly Hatikwà, the organ of the Italian Zionist Youth Federation, while affirming his journal’s leftwing worldview, defined the Turin document as “the theories of a cabal of politically naïve intellectuals” (Millul 1968: 1). The former editor of Hatikwà, Sergio DellaPergola, who had moved to Israel shortly before the Six-Day War, saw the leftist Jews’ position as the extreme vindication of “their Diaspora identity” (DellaPergola 1968: 10). He went further, affirming that this Diaspora syndrome could be overcome only by means of “a revolutionary line” that shattered the walls of the prison in which the Jews were held: immigration to Israel. Jewish responses to their erstwhile comrades on the Left—especially those whose new anti-Israel positions smacked of something akin to antisemitism—formed a major aspect of Italian Jewry’s reactions to the war. It would be inaccurate, however, to place partisan polemics (in the strict sense) at the heart of the issue. Rather, over and above the tactical aspects of the discussion, because of the war and its consequences new foundations were laid for a revised image of the Jew, both externally and internally. This revised image determined the pattern of relations between Jews and the regnant discourse among non-Jews. The war was perceived as “a trauma” and “a revelation”; it offered “the world at large a new awareness of the Jew and revealed to Jews in every corner of the Diaspora […] the true state of their soul, which they themselves did not know” (Toscano 1988: 312-313). For some Italian Jews there were essentially two consequences: a gradual estrangement from Israel, which was balanced by a simultaneous reinforcement of the memory of the deportations and extermination. In other words, the foundations were laid for a split of Jewish identity. While one group chose Israel as the fulcrum of its Jewishness, another, larger segment adopted (or continued to maintain) the Resistance ethos 114

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as the formative nucleus of its Jewish identity. From there, it was a short road to a Jewish identity that defined itself essentially through the memory of the deportations and extermination. These split options, one might say, were crucial to the majority of “ordinary” Italian Jews—those for whom their Jewish and Italian identities were not dialectical, as well as those who had always seen the left as their point of political reference. They all tended to agree that memory of the Shoah must take a central place in their identity, precisely because the threat of destruction hanging over the state of Israel had revived memories of the antisemitic persecutions and the tragedy of genocide. The official representatives of these “ordinary Jews” were well aware of this conflict and were afraid of its results. We see this in the text of the appeal prepared by Bruno Zevi and read out by him on May 28, 1967, during a rally for Israel convened by the official representatives of Roman Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, after the Egyptian closure of the Gulf of Aqaba:16 The State of Israel is in danger. The militarist, Nazi, anti-democratic regimes of the Arab countries that surround it proclaim their desire to destroy it and have taken the first act of war, blockading access to the port of Eilat and mining the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba. The only democratic state in the Middle East, Israel was reborn twenty years ago through the heroic energy of refugees who escaped the antisemitic persecutions and of the survivors of the Nazi death camps. (Zevi 1970: 371).

The rally was held on the grounds of the synagogue near the Portico d’Ottavia, in the heart of the “old ghetto.” Giovanni Russo reminded those who had come to the demonstration of “that ancient gate … which during the war years saw the drama of so many Jewish families deported to the German death camps, […] full of thousands of persons who have gathered together to bear witness to their solidarity and their indignation that Israel is threatened by Arab Fascism” (Russo 1967: 1). In many speeches, the possible destruction of Israel was equated with a new extermination of the Jewish people, and opposition to the Jewish state was defined as antisemitism (Zevi 1970: 371). 16

The initiators of the rally were the psychoanalyst Gianfranco Tedeschi, president of the Rome Jewish community, and Judge Sergio Piperno Beer, the president of the Comunità Israelitiche Italiane. Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff read a Psalm. 115

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The question that was being asked was, how could such memories be severed from the widespread identification (until then rarely if ever doubted) with Israel? In that sense, it seemed that the path from disdain for Zionism to ideological and practical anti-Zionism was a short one. No discourse regarding the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism could be accepted, for such a discourse exposed the ideological and sentimental limits—the “emotional blackmail”—of the debate. Fortini’s statements, such as “calling disapproval of Israeli policy anti-Semitic is nothing but bullying,” were rejected outright (Fortini 1967: 41). Those who accused the Jewish communal representatives of trying to foreclose any objective debate blamed them for equating anti-Zionism and antisemitism so as “to get the proletarian and socialist movement to accept, or at least to sustain, a bourgeois, reactionary, nationalist ideology like Zionism” (Massara 1972: 15). Further, there were those on the left who reintroduced a favorite idea of ideological anti-Zionism, namely, that Zionism was actually “anti-Jewish.” That is, Zionism and Israel represented a refusal to accept the Jews’ rightful place in the universal, revolutionary homeland or to work for its creation. In other words, Zionism wrongfully pitted Jew against Jew, and was therefore the Jews’ own worst enemy (Di Nola 1972: 31-35). For all that, the charge of antisemitism, made against the PCI in the early 1970s by ever-wider segments of Italian Jewry, did not have a specific foundation. Communist anti-Zionism was not a matter of positions taken against “Jews as such.”17 But as the word “Zionist” frequently came to be considered as synonymous with “Jew,” and vice versa,18 Italian Jews worried about the possible anti-Jewish repercussions of the PCI’s anti-Zionist line (Shalom 1973). In these years, the communists considered Zionism to be “an instrument of oppression in the service of the Americans.” The Italian Jewish Youth Federation (FGEI), at its convention held in the autumn after the Six-Day War, rebuffed “the historical falsification 17

18

It is worth remembering the antisemitic stereotype which equated all Jews with murderous imperialists, as in the 1970 manifesto of the Pisa section of the PCI, whose slogan was “From martyrs of racism to imperialist murderers” alongside a Star of David (Di Nola 1974: 36). In a 1971  study of 300  Italian subjects, 164  equated Zionists with Jews (Molinari 1995: 69).

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of identifying the State of Israel with imperialism in order to justify its destruction” (HaTikwa 1968: 1). What is more, the left’s clear support for anti-Zionism spurred the delegates to amend the federation’s bylaws, specifically Section 1 of Article 3. The new text pledged the FGEI to fight not only against “the ideologies of organizations that have a Fascist character,” but also those with a “totalitarian and anti-democratic [character] … that deny the Jewish people its right to exist in the Diaspora and in Eretz Israel or that deny Israel its inalienable rights as a sovereign state” (ibid.). The hypothesis of a slide into antisemitism was always rebuffed by the PCI as “blackmail that will rebound in the face of those who advance it” (L’Unita, 1974). But the notion of anti-Zionists’ underlying hostility to Jewish peoplehood was reinforced by the United Nations General Assembly resolution of October 17, 1975, which equated Zionism with racism. The motion passed thanks to the votes of the communist countries, the Arab countries, and countries associated with the Third World. Only three figures of the democratic Italian Left spoke up in condemnation of the General Assembly vote: the former deportee and socialist senator Piero Caleffi, the Social Democrat Giuseppe Saragat, and the Republican Giovanni Spadolini. They did so on the occasion of a conference on “Zionism and Israel” in Rome, held on December 2, 1975, and organized by Caleffi and the historian Aldo Garosci. By the mid-seventies, as Sergio DellaPergola wrote, the “concerted attack against the Zionist ideology and organization by political groups, and, more recently even by official government representatives at the General Assembly of the United Nation, although not directed explicitly against Judaism, intended de facto to suppress the expression of the political self-determination of the Jewish people” (DellaPergola 1976: 316). According to the Israeli-Italian demographer the meaning beyond this was “the disintegration of its most important and vital operating instrument: the sovereign [Israeli] state” (Ibid: 316 and n. 2). In this context it was natural enough for many Italian Jews to wonder whether the germ of antisemitism was harbored within the Italian left, not just on the right, and to ask whether such tendencies had appeared only after 1967. Was it somehow inherent to left-wing discourse, or was it only an effect of Soviet and Arab support for ideological anti-Zionism as a species of American imperialism? These were fairly new questions, as before 1967, anti-Zionism and antisemitism had been considered to 117

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be distinct concepts. After the Six-Day War this changed, “in the wake of various images of Israel held in the west and of the consequent transfer of the prejudice against the Jewish state to all Jews, including those in the Diaspora” (Molinari 1995: 92). With regard to the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the historian Renzo De Felice put it thus: An indirect but real consequence of the anti-Zionist discourse is that it totally destroys the distinction between Israeli and Jew. In the popular imagination, the [demeaning or sinister image of the] cloth merchant in the Rome ghetto tends to become a potential Dayan, or at least his accomplice. Even if the Roman sometimes does not always fully agree with Israeli policy, or, despite all the obvious affinities and sympathy, does not feel himself Israeli […], the day when the characteristics, real or imaginary, ascribed to the Israeli are transferred, as a mark of Cain, to all the Jews of the world, we are back to antisemitism of the old type. (De Felice 1972: 173; DellaPergola 1976).

How could the Jews salvage their affiliation with the cultural world of anti-Fascism—associated with the struggle against the deportations and the extermination—without undermining its substance? This could be accomplished only by denying that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, and by denying Israel in favor of the Diaspora. To recover one’s political poise within the constellation of European discourse, the essentially Jewish memory of the Shoah had to be affirmed as a common heritage, recognized by both the Jews and the Italian Left. Indeed, in order to prove that the anti-Zionism of the left was not antisemitic, the specific genocidal memory of the Jews had to be not only preserved but also honored in a special way within Italian cultural and political discourse. Thus, in spite of its ahistorical implications, it seemed that perpetuating the memory of the Nazi war of extermination had become a condition for perpetuating Jewish identity based on life as a minority, dispersed and polycentric, and above all, accepted. Fittingly enough, it was Primo Levi who stated that the center of gravity of the Jewish people should remain in the Diaspora, holding that the mainstream of Judaism could be better preserved there than in Israel (Lerner 1997). It was around the memory of the deportations and extermination of the Jews that there emerged in Italy, as elsewhere, the basis for transforming the Shoah from a historical event into an identity 118

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paradigm, historical and moral, serving a Diaspora that promised to restore political legitimacy to a Jewish presence outside Israel and in opposition to it. It was an identity paradigm in which, from the mid-1970s on, not only Jews would be permitted to define themselves—something that should be obvious—but even more so, non-Jews.

Conclusion At the end of the sixties, to a certain extent as a result of the Six Day War, there has been an upheaval in the image of Israel and of the Jews in the Jewish world as in the non-Jewish one. In particular for the Jews, “the world of illusory political and cultural certainties ‘was put’ completely into question, causing internal divisions destined to endure, to articulate, to resurface in difficult times” (Tas 1969: 1). The Jewish world was divided, with two definitions of being Jewish confronting each other: the Shoah and the State of Israel. In a situation of dramatic conflict Jews became bearers of cultural and political insecurity that made them become at once the elements of rupture and formation of a new paradigm of identity not only for himself, as a group, but also for the non-Jewish world. The redefinition of a new identity paradigm had at its core the memory of the deportation and extermination of Jews. The emergence of this paradigm must be understood in the context of differentiation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, resulting in condemnation of antisemitism and reaffirmation of the anti-Fascist struggle, understood as the common universal value and as a key link between the two worlds, by the Jews and non-Jews. To prove that left-wing anti-Zionism was not antisemitism, the deportation and extermination, and their memory, especially the Jewish particularism of it, had to be not only preserved but privileged in the Italian cultural and political discourse.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W. (1969). Erziehung nach Auschwitz. Stichworte. Kritische Modelle, 2, 18. Alatri, P. (1967). Paese Sera, 5 November. Ascoli, L. (1970). Sinistra e questione ebraica. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. 119

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Barbieri, G. (1962). Signal, 5 June 1962, Italian version. In A. M. Di Nola (Ed.), Antisemitismo in Italia, 1962–1972 (p. 73). Firenze: Vallecchi. Bellah, R. (1967). Civil religion in America. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96, 1. Carpi, D., and Della Seta, S. (1997). Il movimento sionistico. In Gli ebrei in Italia dall’emancipazione a oggi, vol. II (pp. 1323–1368). Turin: Einaudi. Coen, F. (1988). Italiani ed ebrei come eravamo. Rome: Marietti. Cohen, R. (Ed.). (2004). European Jews, Jewish Europeans between Two World Wars, Special Number. Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Goren-Goldstein Center. Conato, G. (1961). Adolf Eichmann fu una creatura dei ‘Konzern’ tuttora potenti. L’Unità, 12 April. Conato, G. (1961). Globke collaborò con Eichmann nello sterminio. L’Unità, 15 April. Consonni, M. (2004). Bein anti-fascism l’yahadut. Raaion im Vittorio Foa, 5  b’febraur 2000 (Between Antifascism and Judaism. Interview with Vittorio Foa, 5 February 2000). Michael, 16, 203-227. Consonni, M. (2010) Resistenza o Shoah. The memory of the Deportations and the Extermination in Italy, 1945-1985. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (Hebrew) De Felice, R. (1972). Panorama, 16 November, 173. DellaPergola, S. (1968). HaTikwa, January. DellaPergola, S. (1976). Anatomia dell’ebraismo italiano. Assisi and Rome: Carucci. Della Seta, P. (1967). Lo Stato di Israele e gli ebrei nel mondo. L’Unità, 14 June. Della Seta, P. (1969). L’Unità, 6 February. De Monte, M. (1961). Il Messaggero, 29 April. Devoto, A. (1963). Su alcuni aspetti della letteratura concentrazionaria. MdL, 71: 73–82. Di Nola, A. M. (1974). Antisemitismo in Italia 1962–1972. Firenze: Vallecchi. Fortini, F. (1967). I cani del Sinai (pp. 41, 83). Bari: De Donato. Garosci, A. (1970). Shalom, June. HaTikwa. (1968). Mozioni e Risoluzioni del XX congresso della FGEI. January. 120

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Jacoviello, A. (1969). L’Unità, 17 February. Lagrou, P. (1997). Victims of genocide and national memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands, 1945–1965. Past and Present 154/155, 181-222. Lagrou, P. (2000). The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. L’Avanti. (1967). June. Ledda, R. (1968). L’Unità, November 30. Lerner, G. (1997). Se questo è uno stato. Primo Levi. Conversazioni e Interviste, 1963–1987 (pp. 308-372). Turin: Einaudi. Levi, L. (1961a). Review in Il Ponte 7, July. Levi, L. (1961b). Review in Il Ponte, 1105-1108. Levi, P. (1961). Testimonianza per Eichmann. Il Ponte, 4, 646–650. Levi, R. (1963). La sentenza Durando. Democrazia e Diritto, 260, 264-269. Ludwig, H. (1961). Io sono Adof Eichmann. Milan: Sugar Editore. L’Unita. (1967). May-June. Luzzatto, A. (1997). Autocoscienza e identità ebraica. Gli ebrei in Italia dall’emancipazione a oggi, vol. II (pp. 1831-1900). Turin: Einaudi. Massara, M. (1972). Il Marxismo e la questione ebraica. Milan: 15. Il Messaggero. (1961). 30 March. Il Messaggero. (1961). 3 April–30 September. Millul, C. (1968). Hatikwà. May. Molinari, M. (1995). La sinistra e gli ebrei in Italia, 1967–1993, preface by Vittorio Dan Segre. Milan: Il Corbaccio. Nirenstein, A. (1967). Portico d’Ottavia, July-August. Nirenstein, A. (1968). Shalom, January. Novick, P. (1999). The Holocaust in American Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Novick, P. (2000). The Holocaust and Collective Memory. London: Bloomsbury. Pasolini, P. P. (1967). Nuovi Argomenti, 6, 273–280. Perlman, M. (1961). E lui Eichmann. Milan: Mondadori. Poliakov, L. (1961). Preface. Dossier Eichmann. Rome: Editori Riuniti. 121

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Ravenna, E. (1967a). Letter to Pupa Garriba Dello Strologo, 3 July. Ravenna, E. (1967b). Letter to Pupa Garriba Dello Strologo, 10 October. Reynolds, Q. (1961). Il ministro della morte. Milan: Bompiani. Russo, G. (1967). La Veglia per Israele al Portico d’Ottavia. Il Corriere della Sera, 30 May. Saccenti, M. (1955). Testimonianze sui campi della morte. Il Mulino, 113, 260–261. Sartre, J. P. (1982). L’antisemitismo. Milan: Edizioni di Comunità. Savioli, A. (1959). L’Unità, 24 March. Savioli, A. (1969). L’Unità, 24 June. Segre, S. (1961a). L’esecutore dei crimini nazisti di fronte ai giudici: Una lezione di storia. L’Unità, 9 April. Segre, S. (1961b). L’esecutore dei crimini nazisti. L’Unita, 15 April. Segre, S. (1961c). Review in Rinascita 5. Sereni, E. (1967a). Problemi della lotta per la coesistenza pacifica. Critica Marxista V, 3. Sereni, E. (1967b). Replica alle obiezioni. Rinascita, 29, 21 July. Shalom. (1967). February. Shalom. (1973). September. Tas, L. (1969). Gli ebrei in Italia oggi. Shalom, October, 71. Tedeschi, R. (1961a). Al processo Eichmann si ascoltano i nomi di personalità della Germania di Bonn. L’Unità, 16 April. Tedeschi, R. (1961b). Un giornale israeliano rivela che Globke ordinò la deportazione e il massacro di oltre diecimila ebrei greci. L’Unità, 18 April. Tedeschi, R. (1961c). Un nuovo documento presentato al processo Eichmann conferma la complicità del dottor Globke con Hitler. L’Unità, 20 April. Tedeschi, R. (1961d). L’Unita, 3 April; 15 October. Terracini, U. (1967). Appeal by the communist senator Umberto Terracini at the Antinazi Congress in Tel Aviv, in May 1967. HaTikwà, June. Terracini, U. (1969). Lettera aperta. L’Unita, 25 July. Toscano, M. (1988). Tra identità culturale e partecipazione politica: aspetti e momenti di vita ebraica italiana (1956–1976). Annuario di Studi Ebraici 1985–1987 (pp. 312-13). Rome: Carucci. Toscano, M. (1969). 6 February. 122

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Toscano, M. (1974). 20 October. Valabrega, G. (1980). Medio Oriente: aspetti e problemi. Milan: Marzorati. Valabrega, G. (1986). Ebrei e Sionismo. Milan: Teti. Vita, G. (1973). Quotidiano dei Lavoratori, 12 November. Wolf, J. B. (2004). Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zeiger, H. A. (1961). Ecco le prove, Adolf Eichmann. Milan: Cino Del Ducca editore. Zevi, B. (1970). Appello ai democratici italiani in difesa dello Stato d’Israele. La veglia per Israele al Portico d’Ottavia: 28 May 1967. Scritti in memoria di Enzo Sereni (pp. 371-78). Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London and New York: Verso.

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Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class: A Case Study of Legal and Medical Professionals among the Jews of France Erik H. Cohen School of Education, Bar Ilan University

Abstract This study examines Jewish migration from France to Israel (referred to by the Hebrew term aliyah).1 Specifically, this article presents a case study of the motivations for aliyah and potential obstacles against it among French Jews working in the legal and medical professions. Findings relate to issues of socialization and cultural patterning. French Jewish professionals who were actively involved with Jewish community life and tradition in France were significantly more likely to consider aliyah. Other findings alert the observer to the salience of occupational and professional distinctions. Each of the surveyed professions—physicians, dentists, and lawyers—had a distinct profile and orientation towards aliyah. Physicians were most likely to be actively considering aliyah, dentists relatively more likely to have considered but abandoned the idea, lawyers the least likely to even consider the idea. Respondents’ professional and financial concerns were the most commonly cited potential obstacles. At the same time, analysis of the data indicated that cultural issues and values impact underlying attitudes toward aliyah.

1

Throughout the research, the Hebrew term aliyah was used in place of the French word migration. This term has specific ideological connotations which are not represented by the term migration. Because this term was used in the questionnaire, it is used in this article.

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Introduction The Jews of France and Aliyah to Israel In recent years, France has emerged as one of the primary countries sending Jewish citizens to Israel as new migrants (hereafter: aliyah). Only some of the former Soviet states had higher per capita rates of aliyah. Between 2002  and 2010, almost as many Jews made aliyah from France as from the United States, whose Jewish population is at least ten times greater than that of France, about 18,000  in both cases (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2012: 32). In 2009, more immigrants came from France than from all the rest of Europe combined (Jewish Agency 2010). This trend can be expected to continue (Cohen 2011). Surveys that I have conducted recently covered a wide range of issues related to the social milieu, values, and identity of French Jews at the turn of the millennium. Among these were attitudes of participants toward Israel. In one such survey carried out among French Jews in 2002, some 6% indicated that they were actively considering aliyah (Cohen 2007). Another 15% said they were open to the idea, even if they were not considering making such a move in the near future. Therefore, about one fifth of French Jews defined themselves as potential candidates for aliyah over the long or short term. The yearly rate of aliyah (an average of 2,000  individuals between the years 2002  and 2010) represents less than half a percent of the total Jewish population of France, which as of 2002 was estimated at half a million (Cohen 2011). For the past several decades, the Jewish population of France has remained relatively stable. Emigration has been balanced by natural growth (Cohen 2011; DellaPergola 2010). The approximately 18,000 French Jews who made aliyah from 2002 to 2010 represent about 3% of the total French Jewish population. Earlier research dating from 1988  substantially demonstrated that respondents who said that they were considering aliyah “soon” usually interpreted this as an intention to move to Israel within fifteen years (Cohen 1991). Therefore, in light of the 2002  survey data, it may be reasoned that by 2017  some 30,000  French Jews will have migrated to Israel. In the eleven years between 2002  and 2013, 23,200  French Jews have migrated to Israel (averaging 2,100 per year). Moreover, in the past few years the rate of aliyah has been increasing, from 1,917 in 127

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2012 (average of 160 per month) to 3,286 in 2013 (average of 274 per month). In just the first five months of 2014 another 2,254 French Jews moved to Israel (450  per month)—an increase of 64% (Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012; Jewish Agency, 2014a, 2014b). Thus, even taking the conservative estimate of a continued average of 2,000 per year, another 10,000 may be expected to make the move in the next five years. If an increased rate of 3,000 or more per year is sustained, the number could reach 15,000 or even greater. The reasons given by French Jews for moving to Israel—or even contemplating such an option—are complex, as are the reasons many stay in France or move to other countries.2 While French Jews are well acclimated into the dominant society, culturally as well as economically, in the prevailing socio-political climate the recurrent question arises as to the extent to which Jews are subjectively secure and “at home” in France. In response to such questions (tacit or explicit), factors that are brought into French Jewish discourse include the history of antisemitism in modern France; the betrayal of the Republic’s promise of equality during the Vichy regime, which stripped migrant Jews of their French citizenship and deported thousands of French Jews to Nazi death camps; a perceived rise in anti-Jewish rhetoric and behavior among France’s large Muslim-Arab population; and the prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment in the media and public discourse. The vast majority (about 70%) of French Jews are of North African origin or native French citizens of North African family descent. They tend to present a visible and community-oriented sense of Jewish identity, compared with the more secularized members of the Jewish population. Given the French valorization of a Republican national ethic, the “communitarian” affect that characterizes many of today’s French Jews may be seen as standing in contrast to credos of “universalism,” secularism, and exclusively French national allegiance. French Jews who consider aliyah tend to cite these circumstances as “push” factors. There is, in addition, a positive “pull” exerted by Israel. The rate of French Jewish aliyah is only one indicator of the relationships 2

During the research, I collected anecdotal evidence on migration of French Jews to destinations other than Israel, such as Canada (mainly Quebec) and other countries. However, I have no specific data to report on this subject.

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between French Jews and Israel. Virtually all Jewish respondents to the 2002 survey said that they felt close to Israel and a large majority has visited Israel at least once. Many have visited on more than one occasion. Almost three quarters of French Jews have family relations in Israel, a result of the mass Jewish emigration from North Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, when many families became split between the two primary destinations of Israel and France. There is also a growing number of French Jews who are “semi-migrants” or “poly-residents,” who do not officially become Israeli citizens, but purchase apartments in Israel and live there several months of each year. Not only are French Jews proportionately more likely to move to Israel than are Jews in the rest of the western world, but the idea of aliyah also occupies a significant place in the community’s consciousness, even among those who do not actually make the move. At the same time, it is no simple thing to relocate one’s family from France to Israel. Family ties, work obligations, worry about the political situation in Israel, identification with French culture and society, and the opportunities presented by the emerging European Union may all encourage Jews to stay in France, particularly heads of households established in their professions. Clearly, aliyah from France is not motivated by a pressing need to leave, which was characteristic of Jews fleeing post-Shoah Europe, the rising Muslim nationalism in post-colonial North Africa, or the more recent collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no mass exodus, but rather a steady trickle of Jews who choose to make their homes in Israel. Normally, this follows a gradual process of repeated visits and a careful consideration of advantages and disadvantages. In his overview of Jewish migration patterns since the founding of the State of Israel, DellaPergola (1998) looked in-depth at the case of aliyah from western countries, which have low overall rates per capita of Jewish emigration. Key factors in his analysis are the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions in the home country, the characteristics of the local Jewish community, and the relative degree of ideological attraction exerted by Israel. This last consideration involves changes in Israeli society (such as the gradual rise in its standard of living), feelings of solidarity at times of crisis, and feedback from other migrants. This article looks at the motivations for and obstacles to aliyah for Jewish heads of household with professional careers in France. 129

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Jewish Identity and the Sociology of Professionals Attesting to the high level of acculturation among Jews in France, as well as their relatively high occupational status, well over half the employed household heads surveyed in 2002  worked in professional or management positions, and a sizable percentage (about 14%) work in the fields of law or medicine. The proportion of French Jews working in these professions has steadily increased over the past several decades, and the proportion of workers or trades-people has correspondingly declined (Bensimon and DellaPergola 1984; DellaPergola and Bensimon 1978). The household heads who were not employed (similar to the rate in France as a whole) were mainly students3 and retirees—that is, people not actively looking for work. The proportion of those not employed has risen over the years, but this attests to changes in the demography of the community (namely the increasing average age) rather than economic hardship. Upward socio-economic mobility among Jews in western countries has generally been associated with cultural assimilation and diminished practice of religious or cultural traditions that may have set them apart from the dominant society, as well as an erosion of community and family structures (Dershowitz 1997; Sacks 1994). Nevertheless, while Jews have acculturated, they have endured as a distinct group. In recent decades, the perseverance of minority cultures has become more accepted as western societies have embraced a multicultural model over the classic model of assimilation (Berry et al. 2002; Dashefsky and Winter 2003; Encel and Stein 2003; Kudenko and Phillips 2010). In France, there are a growing number of Jewish organizations on university and college campuses, community centers, and professional organizations that cater to Jews of middle and upper classes and those working in (or studying for) certain professions (Cohen 2011). Sociological research has documented the evolution of a professional class in many societies, and the development of a social identity and set of values associated with belonging to the professional class (Evetts et al. 2009; Sida 2006; Rhoades 2007). Further, certain professions, 3

Although it may be considered rare for students to maintain a family and household, these respondents defined themselves as head of the household and full-time student, and as with all the data (including defining self as Jewish) we are reporting their self-assessed roles.

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such as medicine and law, have distinct associated identities and values (Apesoa-Barano 2007; Hamilton 2008; Stern and Papadakis 2006). In France, research on the sociology of professions has looked at conditions of social integration in a fluctuating economic market, taking into account the impact of race, ethnicity, gender, and class (Dubar and Tripier 1998; Evetts et al. 2009). It should be noted that the “professional class” in France and elsewhere is broad and heterogeneous, with significant differences in status, income, and other social traits among those working in the same field (Glazer 1991; Weeden and Grusky 2005). One aspect of being in the legal or medical professions is the opportunity to join voluntary professional associations. In addition to functions such as overseeing standards for practicing in the field, these associations provide opportunities for members to network and meet like-minded colleagues. For some, the professional association becomes a sort of community. Among professionals who relocate permanently or temporarily to another country—an increasingly common experience as business becomes globalized—professional associations offer a network to meet colleagues and potential friends in a new country (Kennedy, 2004; Shuval, 2000). Minority groups (migrants as well as native-born) may organize specific associations for colleagues of a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group (Levinson 1993; Saxenian 2000; Waldinger, Aldrich, and War 1990) This article uses a Facet Theory approach to data analysis in order to uncover the structural perceptions of Jewish identity among the survey population. This structure then serves as a basis for comparison of various sub-populations. In looking at attitudes toward aliyah in the context of other aspects of Jewish identity among French-Jewish physicians, dentists, and lawyers, this article contributes to the study of religious, ethnic, and national identity among professionals.

Empirical Basis The Data In 2005, I conducted a survey among French Jewish medical professionals (physicians, dentists, and others in the field of health care) and lawyers, in order to explore the Jewish identity of this sub-population and, 131

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in particular, to learn how they view aliyah and its positive or negative ramifications. Two hundred eighty individuals were interviewed. This was a follow-up to a nation-wide survey, carried out in 2002, in which 1,132 Jewish household heads (both male and female) were interviewed by phone. Based on this earlier survey, it may be estimated that the sample of professionals interviewed in 2005 represents a larger class of some 15,000 to 20,000 people.

Methods In addition to standard descriptive analysis, the data were utilized through a non-metric technique known as Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA).4 (Amar 2005; Guttman 1968; 1982; Levy 1994). SSA graphically portrays the structure of data by plotting a set of variables in a cognitive map (“smallest space”) according to their correlations. In this case, the variables were first converted to binary “dummy” variables. For example, in the interview, respondents were given five possible answers to the question of whether or not they were considering aliyah. Each of the options was treated as a yes/no question. A correlation matrix is constructed for the selected variables (here, the dummy variables). The SSA computer program then plots the variables as points in a cognitive map according to their correlations. Closely correlated variables are close together and weakly or negatively correlated variables are far apart. The program simultaneously takes into account the entire correlation matrix for all the selected variables. Once the map is generated, the researcher looks for contiguous regions of semantically related variables. The regionalization of SSA maps is analogous to that of geographic maps, whose fixed features may be divided into regions according to political boundaries, natural features, population density, etc. For example, towns that span the borders of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany are in different regions according to maps divided along political boundaries but would be in the same region of a map showing natural habitat types. The divisions are determined according to the content of the variables. 4

Louis Guttman originally named this technique Smallest Space Analysis but later changed the name to Similarity Structure Analysis (Guttman and Levy 1991; Levy 1994: 67-69). In either case, the acronym SSA applies.

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Subgroups of the survey population may be compared within the context of the SSA map by introducing them as “external variables” (Cohen and Amar 2002; 2005). Correlations between each external variable and the set of primary variables are calculated. In placing each external variable, the computer program considers its correlation with all the primary variables simultaneously. The map of the primary variables is “fixed” so that its structure is not affected by the introduction of the external variables.

Results Professionals within the Population of French Jews Overall, French Jews practicing medicine or law are similar in terms of their Jewish identity to the general Jewish population of France, with a range of beliefs and practices. Compared to the Jewish population as a whole, these professionals are somewhat more likely to be part of the “core” of the community (as has been similarly noted in other western Jewish communities). They participate more frequently in the local Jewish community. Slightly more than half are members of Jewish professional organizations in France, naming half a dozen different such organizations.5 Some belong to more than one. The rate of exogamous marriage is somewhat lower among the professionals than among the general French-Jewish population. They are more likely to observe basic religious traditions such as eating kosher food. They are also strongly connected to Israel. Over 90% have visited Israel at least once. More than half visited Israel during the tense years of the second Palestinian uprising (intifada of 2001–2005), when tourism to Israel from other countries, particularly the US, dropped drastically. French Jewish professionals are somewhat more likely to be considering aliyah than the general French Jewish population. In 2002, some 5

These were: Association des Médecins Israélites de France (AMIF); Rambam Association de médecins Juifs de France; Association franco-israélienne d’ORL et de chirurgie cervico-faciale (AFIDOC); Alpha Omega Association of Jewish Dentists; Union des Patrons et Professionnels Juifs de France (UPJF); Rassemblement des Avocats Juifs de France (RAJF). Others indicated membership in Jewish professional associations but did not specify the name. 133

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one-quarter (26%) of the legal and medical professions surveyed said they intended to make aliyah eventually, compared to less than one-fifth (19%) of the general heads of household surveyed in the 2005 followup. In addition, the percentage of respondents working in these fields who said they were considering aliyah rose by 7% since the 2002 survey. However, the bulk of those considering aliyah do not see themselves as being able to do so in the near future. The percentage of those who said they would be making aliyah “soon” remained at between 4  and 5 percent. Further, based on interviews and previous surveys (Cohen 1991), we found that “soon” means within the next fifteen years; “later” implied an even longer time in the future. Almost half of the professionals who would like to move to Israel said they would be able to do so only after they retire. Another 18% said they might move their families to Israel but would seek to continue working in France, commuting between the two countries. Several hundred French professionals have already chosen this option, which has been termed “Boeing aliyah”; they spend most of the week in France and join their families for weekends, or organize their practices to spend longer periods of time in each country. Even if not all the intentions are ever manifest, the finding that so many within this population are considering aliyah tells much about their attitudes towards Israel.

Inter-professional Comparison: Differences between Physicians, Dentists, and Lawyers Taking a closer look at the various professions, we found distinct differences between physicians, dentists and lawyers. Of the three, the lawyers were by far the least likely to be considering a move to Israel; none of them intended to make aliyah “soon” and less than a fifth were considering it for the future. Almost half said clearly they had no intention of ever making aliyah. In contrast, 7% of the physicians hoped to make aliyah soon and another quarter later, while a third categorically rejected the idea. The dentists differed from both: they were the most likely to say they had considered it but changed their mind and also to say they had not considered it but were not opposed to the idea. They were the least likely to state definitively that they had no intention of ever moving to Israel. 134

Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class

Table 1. Intention to Make Aliyah, by Profession (Percentages) Physicians Dentists Yes, very soon Yes, later I considered it but changed my mind I have not considered it, but am not opposed I have no intention of making Aliyah Total

Lawyers

Total

7 25 4

1 18 15

0 18 4

4 22 7

30 34 100

37 29 100

29 49 100

32 35 100

There are several logistical and sociological reasons behind this difference. First, the medical professions are more easily “transferable” between countries and cultures. According to the Israeli Medical Association, graduates of medical schools in France (and several other countries) who become Israeli citizens may receive a temporary license to practice in Israel without taking another exam; after a trial period working in an Israeli health care institution they may apply for a permanent license from the Ministry of Health (www.ima.org.il). Beyond the need to learn some Hebrew, little or no re-training is necessary. This is not the case for lawyers. While lawyers with more than five years of experience in their home countries may be exempt from relicensing exams (www.israelbar.org.il), in order to practice law in Israel they must learn court procedures and legislation which differ from those in the legal system of France. The requirements for licensing in Israel, particularly for those with substantial professional experience in their home countries, do not fully account for the difference in intention to make aliyah, however. By looking at various indicators of Jewish identity, we discover some underlying sociological differences between lawyers and medical professionals. Lawyers were less likely to have a Jewish spouse, to have visited Israel recently, or to follow basic religious traditions such as keeping kosher. This might help to explain their relatively lower desire to move to Israel and may relate to concerns that they might not culturally acclimate easily. It is interesting to note that physicians were more likely than dentists to say the level of their profession was higher in France (most of the lawyers answered that they did not know). Therefore, physicians’ relatively greater enthusiasm for aliyah does not seem related to job 135

Erik H. Cohen

dissatisfaction in France or career aspirations in Israel. Similarly, lawyers’ opposition to aliyah does not stem directly from knowledge that their career will suffer in Israel. The most striking difference pertained to membership in a Jewish professional organization: the physicians were more than four times as likely to be members as were the lawyers. Members in these organizations tended to have a more positive attitude toward aliyah. Jewish professional organizations are strong resources for assisting aliyah, for example by providing information about licensing, certification and other issues regarding practicing their profession in Israel. Professional organizations provide social capital for members (Arnold and Kay 1995), and this may translate into greater confidence in facing the potential transition. Table 2. Jewish Identity Indicators of French Jewish Professionals (Percentages)

Jewish spouse Visited Israel in previous five years Always keep kosher Frequently participate in local Jewish community Member of Jewish professional organization

Physicians

Dentists

Lawyers

77 (81 including converts) 66 47

79 (82)

59 (63)

53 43

33 24

44

53

29

65

47

15

Table 3. Obstacles to Aliyah by Profession (Percentages) Physicians Dentists Professional integration in Israel (looking for work, passing exams, etc.) Professional success in France Family reasons Personal financial situation Hebrew Economic situation in Israel Security situation in Israel Ideological reasons 136

67 55 47 32 25 22 20 5

60 43 49 23 24 26 23 7

Lawyers

Total

81 53 47 38 25 28 37 6

68 51 47 31 25 25 24 6

Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class

The main obstacles to aliyah are professional. The prospect of leaving a successful practice for the uncertainty and difficulty of starting over again in a new country may be daunting. Very few cited ideological opposition to the idea of aliyah.

A Multi-dimensional Analysis To gain an overview of the attitudes toward aliyah among these Jewish professionals, SSA was conducted, as shown in Figure 1. The primary variables that form the structural basis of the map were: the respondents’ frequency of involvement in the Jewish community, the degree to which they keep kosher, whether or not they are members of a Jewish professional organization, the religion of their spouses, and their attitudes toward aliyah. This provides a structural portrayal of some key indicators of Jewish identity. A clear structure can be seen progressing from “weakest” to “strongest.” At the left side of the map are variables such as “never keeping kosher,” “not being a member of a Jewish professional organization,” “never or rarely participating in the Jewish community,” “having a nonJewish spouse,” and two negative attitudes toward aliyah: those who considered it but changed their minds and those never had any intention of making the move. Overall, this region corresponds with weaker links to Jewish community life. In the middle of the map are variables representing moderate linkages to Jewish community life and identity: “keeping kosher often [i.e., not as a regular matter of course],” “sometimes participating in activities of the Jewish community,” and two tentative attitudes toward aliyah — those who are not currently considering it but are not opposed to the idea, and those with a stated intention to make aliyah “later.” On the right side of the map are variables representing a strong link to Jewish life: frequent or very frequent participation in the community, having a Jewish spouse, always keeping kosher, being a member of a Jewish professional organization, and the most positive attitude toward aliyah: those who intend to make the move soon. The three professional sub-populations were introduced as external variables into the map. The physicians are further to the right-hand side of the map, closest to the variables representing frequent participation in the Jewish community. Compared to the others, they are closer to 137

Erik H. Cohen

positive attitudes toward aliyah: intention to make aliyah and nonopposition to it. The lawyers are toward the left-hand side, in the area of the map along with variables representing a relatively weak relationship to the Jewish community and opposition to aliyah. The dentists are at the top of the map, near the variables representing the statement that one considered making aliyah but abandoned the idea, and the intention to make aliyah at some distant time in the future. Figure 1. SSA of Attitudes toward Aliyah and Jewish Identity among French Jews with Professions as External Variables

Discussion Why are members of these professions relatively more or less likely to consider aliyah? The reasons for the differences between the professions are likely to be multiple and overlapping. All individuals are faced with the challenge of juggling multiple identities (Roccas and Brewer 2002). The interplay between various “professional identities” with nationality and religion is complex. We alluded previously to some aspects of professional life that may have an impact on the decision to emigrate. As noted, it is relatively difficult for a lawyer to be re-trained in another country, where the legal system may be quite different. Further, language skills are paramount in 138

Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class

the legal profession, making international relocation more difficult. The lawyers seem to be the most strongly assimilated into French culture: they were found to be the least involved in the local Jewish community, least observant of Jewish traditions, and least likely to be considering aliyah. It may be that the “professional identity” of those in the legal field is more closely tied to the society, its history, its political culture, and the French language, and correspondingly removed from the Jewish tradition (Levinson 1993). The very low frequency of membership in Jewish professional organizations among the lawyers seems to indicate a reluctance to publicly combine these two aspects of identity, limiting involvement in groups they perceive as incompatible. It is easier for those in the medical fields to begin practice in another country than it is for those in the legal field. International migration of physicians is not uncommon among other national populations as well. However, in other cases, the move is generally motivated by a desire for better pay or better working conditions (Hagopian et al. 2004; Lalonde and Topel 1997; Mahroun 2000). The French-Jewish physicians are not looking for better working conditions in Israel. Their consideration of aliyah seems linked to their overall stronger Jewish identity. This identity may in turn cause them to see Israel as a better home for their families. A recent analysis of international migration found that the decision to move is not simply based on prospects for increased income, but rather consideration for the whole family unit (Joly 2004). It is more difficult to understand why dentists should be less religiously traditional and less favorably disposed toward aliyah than others in the field of health care. One possible factor may relate to reasons for choosing the various professions. A study of the motivations of dentistry students in France (Jover, Doudoux, and Deveaux 2006) found that the standard of living and social prestige they expected to receive were the strongest motivators. A comparison of the motivations of medical and dental students in the UK found that medical students were much more likely to cite altruistic motives and the intellectual challenge of the profession, while those studying to be dentists were more likely to cite financial and personal incentives (Crossley and Mubarik 2002). Although a desire to work with people and interest in science are also motivations, particularly among some populations (Gallagher et al. 2007), the literature suggests that the difficult economic situation in Israel may pose a stronger disincentive for dentists than physicians. Indeed, as seen in 139

Erik H. Cohen

Table 3, the lawyers were the most likely to cite professional integration as an obstacle to aliyah. The SSA analysis graphically portrays the correlation between attitudes regarding aliyah and other aspects of Jewish identity. Those whose social identity is more strongly “French” and less strongly “Jewish,” as seems to be the case with the lawyers, are less likely to consider a move to Israel.

Conclusion This multi-dimensional data analysis revealed a typology of Jewish identity from weak through strong, with attitudes regarding aliyah clearly linked to other indicators of Jewish identity. This structure graphically portrays correlations among the data that are not easily perceived through distribution tables. The structure serves as a basis for comparison between various groups of professional French Jews in terms of their attitudes regarding a potential move to Israel. Approximately a quarter of the legal and medical professionals surveyed said they are considering making aliyah. Extrapolating from the sample, this represents somewhere between 3,500  and 5,000  French Jewish professionals interested in the possibility of moving to Israel. The primary obstacles they see as preventing or delaying their ability to make the move are logistical, not ideological. Organizations interested in assisting potential immigrants may, for example, facilitate the process of professional recertification, or provide assistance in job-seeking. This analysis looked at the link between Jewish identity and attitudes towards aliyah among the professions. Those who were most involved in the Jewish community and Jewish tradition were far more likely to be considering aliyah. Underlying barriers to aliyah are more complex than concern about finding a job—they are related to a more general alienation from the Jewish community. Additionally, we found significant differences in the likelihood that members of the various professions were considering aliyah. These differences also reflected cultural orientations and values. Lawyers, it seems, are more culturally assimilated into French society, and therefore less interested in moving into a foreign milieu. Dentists, who according to suggestions of other researchers place greater emphasis on financial success, were less likely to want to relocate to Israel. Physicians, who 140

Immigration to Israel among the Professional Class

tended to be more active in Jewish life and whose choice of profession indicates some altruistic values, emerged as the most likely to want to move to Israel. There are likely to be other factors involved, which may be explored in future research, such as job satisfaction, family-related issues and more. While aliyah rates are subject to unforeseeable events in the local and global political arenas, making caution necessary in trying to predict future trends, nevertheless past experience offers some generally suggestive implications. In almost every case of voluntary migration, the first Jews to choose to leave their home country and move to Israel have been those with the strongest ideological attachment to Israel. Even if conditions in the home country are relatively comfortable they may have other reasons for wishing to move to Israel, which would be less important to those who are more fully culturally assimilated, nor do they tend to move to other possible destinations (DellaPergola 1998). In France today, life for the Jewish population is still largely comfortable; the “push” factors are not sufficient to spark a mass emigration. Nevertheless, conditions in the dominant society and in the local Jewish community are changing and making a significant percentage of French Jews question whether they, and particularly their children, will want to continue to make France their home. While Israel, of course, is not the only possible destination, it has become a more attractive and viable option, particularly for those already interested in aliyah and Jewish communal life. The standard of living there has risen steadily, closing the gap between Israel and France (DellaPergola, Rebhun, and Tolts 2005: 68). It is no longer a pioneer state of kibbutzim and immigrant transit camps, as it may have appeared sixty years ago. Professionals may realistically look toward making a living there. Nevertheless, work-related concerns still top the list as obstacles to aliyah. Assistance in finding jobs and easing the economic barriers could help those who are considering the move but hesitating or delaying due to real or perceived professional challenges. However, the “liberal professions” cannot be viewed as a homogenous group. A more sophisticated and subtle view of attitudes towards aliyah among various populations of French Jews is needed. It is hoped that this article will contribute to our understanding of the people who are considering aliyah and the motivations and obstacles toward making that move. 141

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Acknowledgements

The raw data collection for this article was made possible by a special grant of the Department of Aliyah of the Jewish Agency, Jerusalem. Special thanks to Allison Ofanansky for her contribution in editing the manuscript. Thanks also to the reviewers for their fruitful suggestions and comments.

REFERENCES Apesoa-Barano, E. (2007). Educated caring: The emergence of professional identity among nurses. Qualitative Sociology, 30 (3), 249-74. Amar, R. (2005). HUDAP manual. Jerusalem: Hebrew University. Retrieved from http://www.facet-theory.org/files/HUDAP%20Manual.pdf Arnold, B., and Kay, F. (1995). Social capital, violations of trust and the vulnerability of isolates: The social organization of law practice and professional self-regulation. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 23 (4), 321-346. Bensimon D., and DellaPergola, S. (1984). La population juive de France: Socio démographie et identité (No. 17). Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Contemporary Jewry and Paris: and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Berry, J., Poortinga, Y. H., Segall, M. H., and Dasen, P. R. (2002). Crosscultural Psychology: Research and Applications, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, E. H. (1991). L’étude et l’éducation juive en France. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Cohen, E. H. (2005). Jews Practicing Liberal Professions in France and their Intention of Making “Aliya.” Jerusalem: Department of Aliyah of the Jewish Agency. Cohen, E. H. (2007). Heureux comme Juifs en France? Etude sociologique. Paris-Jérusalem Akadem–Elkana Editions. Cohen, E. H. (2011). Jews of France Today: Identity and Values. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Cohen, E. H., and Amar, R. (2002). External variables as points in Smallest Space Analysis: A theoretical, mathematical and computer-based contribution. Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 75, 40-56. 142

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Cohen, E. H., and Amar, R. (2005). External variables: Some novelties and applications. In W. Bilsky and D. Elizur (Eds.), Facet Theory: Design, Analysis and Applications (pp. 231-240). Rome: Facet Theory Association. Crossley, M., and Mubarik, A. (2002). A comparative investigation of dental and medical students’ motivation towards career choice. British Dental Journal, 193 (8), 471-473. Dashefsky, A., and Winter, J. (2003). American Jews: Continuity and Identity. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. DellaPergola, S. (1998). The global context of migration to Israel. In E. Leshem and J. Shuval (Eds.) Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives (pp. 51-94). New Brunswick and London Transaction Publishers. DellaPergola, S. (2010). World Jewish Population, 2010. North American Jewish Data Bank. DellaPergola, S., and Bensimon, D. (1978). Enquêtes sociodémographiques sur les Juifs de France: Nouvelles perspectives. Dispersion et Unité, 18, 190-212. DellaPergola, S., Rebhun, U., and Tolts, M. (2005). Contemporary Jewish Diaspora in global context: Human development correlates of population trends. Israel Studies, 10 (1), 61-95. Dershowitz, A. (1997). The Vanishing American Jew. New York: Little, Brown. Dubar, C., and Tripier, P. (1998). Sociologie des professions. Paris: A. Collin. Encel, S., and Stein, L. (2003). Continuity, Commitment and Survival: Jewish Communities in the Diaspora. Westport, CT: Praeger. Evetts, J., Gadea, C., Sánchez, M., and Sáez, J. (2009). Sociological theories of professions: Conflict, competition and cooperation. In A. Denis and D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology (pp. 140-154). London: Sage. Gallagher, J., Patel, R., Donaldson, N., and Wison, N. (2007). The emerging dental workforce: Why dentistry? A quantitative study of final year dental students’ views on their professional career. BMC Oral Health, 7 (7), doi:10.1186/1472-6831-7-7 Glazer, N. (1991). Women’s professional organizations in nursing and class, racial, and ethnic inequalities. Gender & Society, 5 (3), 351-72. Guttman, L. (1968). A general nonmetric technique for finding the smallest co-ordinate space for a configuration of points. Psychometrika, 33, 469–506. 143

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Guttman, L. (1982). Facet theory, Smallest Space Analysis, and factor analysis. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 54, 491–493. Guttman, L., and Levy, S. (1991). Two structural laws for intelligence tests. Intelligence, 15 (1), 79-103. Hagopian, A., Thompson, M., Fordyce, M. J., Johnson, K., and Hart, L. G. (2004). The migration of physicians from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States of America: Measures of the African brain drain. Human Resources for Health, 2 (17), doi:10.1186/1478-4491-2-17 Hamilton, N. (2008). Assessing professionalism: Measuring progress in the formation of an ethical professional identity. University of St. Thomas Law Journal, 5, 470-511. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. (2012). Immigration to Israel, 2007-2010. Jerusalem: State of Israel. Retrieved from http://www.cbs.gov.il/publications12/1483_immigration/pdf/e_print.pdf Jewish Agency. (2010). Aliyah statistics 1948-2009, selected countries. Retrieved from http://www.jewishagency.org/JewishAgency/English/ About/Press+Room/Aliyah+Statistics/jul27.htm Jewish Agency. (2014a). French aliyah by the numbers. Retrieved from http://www.jewishagency.org/blog/1/article/12881 Jewish Agency. (2014b). Global aliyah up 55%, due largely to increased immigration from France, Ukraine. Retrieved from http://www.jewishagency.org/blog/1/article/16571 Joly, D. (2004). International Migration in the New Millennium: Global Movement and Settlement. Surrey: Ashgate. Jover, M., Doudoux, D., and Deveaux, E. (2006). Representations of the dental surgery profession and the motivations given by second-year French students for applying for dental surgery. European Journal of Dental Education, 10, 2-9. Kennedy, P. (2004). Making global society: Friendship networks among transnational professionals in the building design industry. Global Networks, 4 (2), 157-179.  Kudenko, I., and Phillips, D. (2010). Multicultural narratives and the construction of identity: The British Jewish experience. Space and Polity, 14 (1), 65-80. Lalonde, R., and Topel, R. (1997). Economic impact of international migration and the economic performance of migrants. In M. Rosenzweig and 144

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O. Stark (Eds.), Handbook of Population and Family Economics (pp. 799850). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Levinson, S. (1993). Identifying the Jewish lawyer: Reflections on the construction of professional identity. Cardozo Law Review, 14, 1577-1611. Levy, S. (ed.) (1994). Louis Guttman on Theory and Methodology: Selected Writings. Aldershot: Dartmouth. Mahroum, S. (2000). Highly skilled globetrotters: The international migration of human capital. R&D Management, 30 (1), 23-32. Rhoades, G. (2007). The study of the academic profession. In P. Gumport (Ed.), Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and their Contexts (pp. 113-146). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roccas, S., and Brewer, M. (2002). Social identity complexity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 (2), 88-106. Sacks, J. (1994). Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Saxenian, A. (2000). Silicon Valley’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs. San Diego, CA: Working Papers, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego. Shuval, J. (2000). The reconstruction of professional identity among immigrant physicians in three societies. Journal of Immigrant Health, 2 (4), 191-202. Sida, L. (2006). Professional autonomy and state intervention: An overview of the sociology of professions in the western countries. Sociological Studies, 1, 197-224. Stern, D., and Papadakis, M. (2006). The developing physician: Becoming a professional. New England Journal of Medicine, 355, 1794-1799. Waldinger, R. Aldrich, H., and Ward, R. (1990). Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Immigrant Business in Industrial Societies. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Weeden, K., and Grusky, D. (2005). The case for a new class map. American Journal of Sociology, 111, 141-212.

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Demographic Transformations among Ex-Soviet Migrants in Israel Mark Tolts The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Introduction Between 1989  and 2009, more than 1.6  million Jews and their close relatives emigrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU). Approximately 61% (about 998,000 people) went to Israel. In this study I will compare the demographic characteristics of (post-) Soviet immigrants in Israel with those of the Soviet Jewish population as it existed at the onset of the recent mass emigration. That is, I will analyze the dynamics of marriage, fertility, and mortality and examine how these dynamics were altered among the immigrants, as compared with demographic changes that took place simultaneously among the Jews who remained in the former Soviet Union, mostly in the Russian Federation. In the interest of supplying a more general point of reference, attention will also be paid to the general demographic situation and its development in both the sending and receiving countries.

Age-Sex Structure We begin with an analysis of age-sex structure. By the end of 2001, when the great majority of the recent FSU immigrants had already arrived in Israel, their median age was 36.2 years, 13.5 years lower than that of Jews in the USSR before the onset of the recent mass migration according to the 1989 census (see Table 1). FSU emigration has been highly selective by age, as younger people are as a rule more prone to migrate, especially those emigrating to Israel (DellaPergola 1998; Tolts 2003). In 1990-2001  among the FSU immigrants to Israel, those under age fifteen constituted 20.3% (Israel CBS 2007b), whereas among Jews in the USSR the same age group accounted 146

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for only 11.6% in 1989, and their share was even less among Jews residing in the Russian Federation. Moreover, among Jews in the Russian Federation the share of children under fifteen decreased significantly from 8.4% in 1989 to just 4.9% in 2002. Table 1. Jews in the USSR and the Russian Federation, and the (Post-) Soviet Immigrant Population in Israel,a by Age Group (percentages) Group and year

All ages

0-14

65+

Median age

Jews in the USSR 1989

100.0

11.6

13.0

20.2

31.6

23.6

49.7

Jews in Russia 1989 2002

100.0 100.0

8.4 4.9

11.4 10.7

19.5 14.2

33.8 33.6

26.9 36.6

52.3 57.5

(Post-) Soviet immigrant population in Israel End of 2001 End of 2009

100.0 100.0

18.1 18.3

23.3 20.5

20.7 20.4

23.1 25.0

14.8 15.8

36.2 37.7

15-29 30-44 45-64

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Tolts 2003: 196; Tolts 2007: 291; Israel CBS data.) a FSU immigrants who arrived in Israel since 1990 and were still living there by the date noted, including children born in Israel to mothers who immigrated from the FSU in this period.

By the end of 2009, the median age of the (post-) Soviet immigrant population in Israel had increased to 37.7  years. However, that was still lower than the median age recorded for the total population in the 2010  Russian census—38.0  years (Rosstat 2012). At this preliminary stage in our discussion, suffice it to suggest that childbirth among the FSU immigrant population in Israel must be considered as one key demographic factor that has altered their population dynamics considerably. By the mid-2000s, over two-thirds of all children under fifteen in this population group were born in Israel. Among the FSU immigrant population in Israel, females outnumber males starting from age 25, and after age 40 the sex imbalance is still more pronounced: there are 85 or fewer males per 100 females (see Table 2). This imbalance contrasts with to the situation in the FSU where, in the Jewish population in general, and particularly in Russia, males outnumbered 147

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females in the most marriageable age range (i.e., age brackets most prone to marriage). The relative shortage of males among FSU immigrants in Israel is the result of a selective propensity by sex to migrate (Tolts 2009). Table 2. Sex Ratio among Immigrants from the FSU who Arrived since 1990 and Veteran Israelis, by Age Group, 2001 Number of males per 100 females in the same age group Age group 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59

Immigrants from the FSU 100 96 92 90 85 83 83 80

Veteran Israelisa 104 104 101 97 95 94 95 94

(Source: Computation based on Israel CBS data.) a Jews and non-Arab others, excluding the total of those who immigrated since 1990.

FSU immigrants and veteran Israelis are characterized by rather different sex ratios in the age brackets most prone to marriage. Among veteran Israelis, males outnumber females in all age brackets under thirty-five, and even among older people the sex imbalance was much more moderate than among FSU immigrants: 94-97 males per 100 females. These differences imply a potential demographic basis for marriages between these two groups in the Israeli population; at least in theory, female FSU immigrants should show some propensity to choose partners from outside their own group.

Marriage According to the 2002 Russian census, the mean age at first marriage reached 24.7 years for Jewish females and 27.6 for Jewish males, a substantial rise of 2.0  years for Jewish females and 2.5  years for Jewish males since the last Soviet census in 1989, at the onset of the recent mass emigration (Tolts 1992; 2006). 148

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Table 3. Percentage of Jews Currently Married in Selected Age Groups in the USSR and the Russian Federation, 1989 and 2002 Russian Federation, 2002

USSR, 1989a

Russian Federation, 1989(a)

Registered marriage

Unregistered marriage

Males 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49

29.6 68.8 82.4 85.8 86.4 86.8

28.2 67.3 81.6 86.1 86.5 87.2

14.6 40.6 56.6 66.9 70.8 74.7

4.2 6.5 7.0 6.4 5.5 4.8

Females 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49

55.1 74.4 77.0 75.7 73.4 71.6

48.9 72.2 75.3 74.0 71.9 69.8

23.9 50.3 58.6 61.0 64.3 61.0

5.0 6.1 5.9 4.7 4.2 3.2

Sex and age group

(Source: Tolts 1992: 16; Tolts 2006: 19.) a Including uncertain percentages of unregistered marriages.

It is quite likely, of course, that marriage data per se must be supplemented by referring to the popularity of cohabitation and subsequent births within relatively stable informal unions. Results of a special processing of 2002  birth certificates in Russia show that 15% of all children born to Jewish women in that year were registered by parents who were not formally married, and an additional 7% were registered by the mother alone. Thus, 22% of all births to Jewish mothers occurred outside formal marital arrangements (Tolts 2006). At the same time, this percentage was lower than that in the total urban population of the Russian Federation, where it was 28% (Tolts et al. 2006). In Israel such births are rare among the veteran Jewish population—as low as 3% in this period—and their share among the FSU immigrant population was about 10% in 2000 (Nahmias 2004). This indicator shows that FSU immigrants’ marital behavior has distanced itself from that in the sending country. 149

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In the Russian Federation the proportions of currently married Jews decreased between 1989  and 2002  for both males and females aged 20-49 (see Table 3). These proportions dropped especially among Jews under age 30, resulting from the process of marriage postponement. The 1989 Soviet census data include an uncertain percentage of unregistered marriages, whereas Israeli data cover only registered marriages, rendering any comparison between the two difficult. However, we can see that the marriage indicators of the FSU immigrant population in Israel are more favorable for fertility, despite the decrease in the percentage of currently married among them, than are those of the Jews remaining in Russia (see Table 4). Table 4. Percentage of Currently Marrieda in Selected Age Groups among all (Post-) Soviet Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990 Sex and age group

1991

1994

1997

2001

Males 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49

30.5 70.8 86.1 89.9 91.6 90.4

20.1 61.4 80.5 86.6 88.0 88.0

20.0 60.7 79.6 86.3 88.5 89.3

13.4 50.9 73.0 80.3 83.5 86.1

Females 20–24 25–29 30–34 35–39 40–44 45–49

57.8 79.9 83.6 81.5 78.6 73.9

46.0 73.1 78.4 77.9 75.4 72.6

44.1 70.4 75.4 75.7 73.6 71.1

34.4 65.7 70.4 70.7 70.8 69.5

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Israel CBS data.) a Registered marriages only.

The sex imbalance noted above among the FSU immigrant population in Israel has apparently reinforced the tendency toward “mixed” marriages, especially between immigrant females and veteran Israeli males. According to data based on the ongoing Labor Force Survey 150

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carried out by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), among the FSU immigrants who arrived in Israel in 1989-1991 and were then aged 25-35, during 1989-2009 only 10% of the male immigrants married a veteran Israeli, whereas as many as 36% of the female immigrants did so (Cohen Goldner et al. 2012: 263). At the same time, we are unable to measure the similarity of mostly non-religious FSU immigrant population’s marriage patterns to those of the non-religious Jewish veteran population, for whom we do not have the necessary information. However, such a comparison is possible for fertility.

Fertility The Israeli Jewish population represents a mix of people with very different lifestyles and values (see, e.g.: Levy et al. 2004). Therefore, the demography of its components shows great differentiations (DellaPergola 2004). The total fertility rate (TFR)1 of Jews in Israel is the highest among contemporary developed countries: in 1985-1989 it was 2.8 and after a slight decline to 2.6 in 1990-1999, it returned to the same level of 2.8 again in 2005-2009. However, that is only an average. At one end of the fertility spectrum are ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim) who have a high average fertility (TFR of about 6-7), whereas at the other end is the non-religious segment of the Jewish veteran population with a TFR of 2.0-2.2 (Friedlander 2004; DellaPergola 2009; 2011). The non-religious majority of FSU immigrants is much more similar to the latter in overall lifestyle and outlook on life. In 1988-1989, the TFR of Russia’s Jewish population was 1.49 and that of the Ukrainian Jewish population was 1.52. At that time the TFR of the Jewish population in the Soviet Union as a whole was only slightly higher at 1.56. In this period, the TFR of the total urban population of the USSR was appreciably higher than that of the Jews at 2.0 (see Table 5). At the onset of the post-1989 emigration wave only two small Jewish groups in the USSR had much higher levels of fertility. Based on the data of the last Soviet census of 1989, the TFR was estimated at 3.1 for 1

The total fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman would bear in her lifetime if current age-specific fertility rates were to remain stable. 151

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Bukharan Jews in Uzbekistan (Tolts 2008a), and it was probably not much lower among the Mountain Jews in East Caucasus (Tolts 2008b; 2013). However, their estimated numbers among the immigrants were not high: in the 1990s about 40,000 Mountain Jews from East Caucasus and 22,000 Bukharan Jews from former Soviet Central Asia emigrated to Israel (Leshem and Sicron 2004; Kaganovich 2003). A  third distinctive Jewish group, Georgian Jews, was much more similar to the Ashkenazic majority of migrants in terms of its demographic characteristics (Tolts 2014). Table 5. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Jews and Total Urban Population in the FSU, on the Eve of and during Jewish Mass Emigration of the 1990s Area

Jews

Total urban populationa

On the eve of Jewish mass emigration, 1988-1989 Entire USSR Russian Federation Ukraine

1.56 1.49 1.52

2.03 1.90 1.89

During Jewish mass emigration, 1993-1994 Russian Federation Moscow St. Petersburg

0.8 ... ...

1.20 0.97 0.91

(Source: Andreev et al. 1993: 90; Goskomstat of USSR 1989: 333-334; Interstate Statistical Committee 1995: 245; Piskunov 1997: 102; Tolts 1996: 12; Rosstat data.) a Indicators for 1988 and 1994, respectively.

For 1993-1994, the TFR of Russia’s Jewish population was estimated at about 0.8 (see Table 5); that is, from 1988-1989 it had fallen dramatically by 46%. This coincides with a pronounced general fertility reduction in the country (Zakharov 2008). The general fertility reduction in the post-Soviet period was also very pronounced outside Russia (Heleniak 2010; Vishnevsky 1999). For the FSU as a whole, we can conservatively guesstimate the TFR of the Jewish population at 0.9 in the mid-1990s, and we assume that it did not rise before the end of the decade. Analysis of birth dynamics shows that Jews and their close relatives who emigrated to Israel in the 1990s escaped the dramatic fertility 152

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Table 6. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) among FSU Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990 Of these: Year

Total

Jews

Non-Jewsa

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

1.58 1.31 1.33 1.52 1.65 1.72 1.70 1.71 1.71 1.63 1.62 1.56 1.55 1.60 1.55 1.55

… … … … … … … … … 1.69 1.73 1.69 1.70 1.78 1.76 1.75

… … … … … … … … … … … … 1.27 1.27 1.15 1.20

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Israel CBS data.) a Author’s estimate.

reduction that was characteristic of the FSU population as a whole and Jews in particular. By 2001 their TFR was 1.56 (see Table 6); that is, it stood at the same level as that of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1988-1989 and it was higher than that obtaining among the total urban population of the Russian Federation as a whole as well—in particular, the rate among the total population of Moscow and St. Petersburg (see Table 5). At the same time, the age pattern of fertility (i.e., distribution of births by age) in Israel changed noticeably: age-specific birth rates among FSU immigrants under twenty and at ages 20-24 decreased appreciably, whereas among those aged 30-45 they increased considerably, when compared with the same indicators for Jews in the Soviet Union in 1988-1989. Among (post-) Soviet immigrants in Israel, the interval of 25-29 instead of 20-24 became the highest intensity childbearing age (see Table 7 and Figure 1). 153

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Table 7. Age-specific Birth Rates of the Jewish Population in the Soviet Union in 1988-1989, and all (Post-) Soviet Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990, per 1,000 Females Year in Israel Under 20 20-24

Age 25-29

30-34

35-39

40-44

45-49a

TFR

Jewish Population in the Soviet Union, 1988-1989 X

24.9

125.6

90.6

50.7

17.8

3.2

0.1

1.56

All (post-) Soviet immigrants who arrived in Israel since 1990 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

37.5 32.9 27.6 30.9 26.9 25.9 24.1 22.8 19.9 16.3 15.3 12.9

167.8 119.0 108.2 105.0 111.0 105.6 102.3 98.7 96.7 88.7 83.9 76.2

66.3 65.2 73.9 92.3 96.8 112.3 108.9 107.4 112.3 107.0 108.0 108.0

30,6 29.6 38.9 52.3 64.5 66.5 71.8 73.9 73.0 72.9 75.2 72.4

12.3 11.0 14.6 19.9 25.8 27.8 28.4 32.6 33.9 33.3 34.4 34.6

2.1 3.4 2.5 3.6 5.0 5.0 5.2 6.5 6.2 5.8 6.7 7.5

0.0 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.1

1.58 1.31 1.33 1.52 1.65 1.72 1.70 1.71 1.71 1.63 1.62 1.56

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Darsky 2005: Appendix, Table 1; Israel CBS data ) a Computation based on a low number of births.

Figure 1. Age-specific Birth Rates of Jews in the USSR in 1988-1989, and FSU Immigrants in Israel in 2001, per 1,000 Females

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In 1999-2005, the TFR among (post-) Soviet immigrants registered as Jews was rather stable, remaining at about 1.7-1.8 (see Table 6); that is, it was almost double the post-Soviet level of Jewish fertility in the FSU and approached the TFR level of Israeli non-religious veteran Jews (2.0-2.2), as noted above. At the same time, according to our estimate, this indicator for (post-) Soviet immigrants registered as non-Jews in 2002-2005  was also steady, but lower: approximately 1.2-1.3 (see Table 6); thus, it was similar to the low level of post-Soviet Slavic populations in their home countries.2 In that sense, Jewish immigrants appear to have adapted more readily to overall fertility norms of the Israeli Table 8. Age-specific Birth Rates of Jewish and Non-Jewish (Post‑) Soviet Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990, per 1,000 Females Year in Israel Under 20 20-24

Age 25-29

30-34

35-39

40-44

45-49a

TFR

All (post-) Soviet Immigrants 2002 2003 2004 2005

11.9 10.3 10.2 9.9

71.9 67.7 61.9 57.9

108.1 115.4 111.1 112.0

76.6 78.6 79.8 83.2

33.6 38.8 38.2 37.8

6.7 8.5 7.8 8.7

0.4 0.3 0.6 0.6

1.55 1.60 1.55 1.55

0.6 0.4 0.6 0.5

1.70 1.78 1.76 1.75

(Post-) Soviet immigrants registered as Jews 2002 2003 2004 2005

11.1 10.4 9.8 10.5

78.4 75.1 70.3 65.5

122.7 130.6 129.9 126.9

83.5 88.8 91.2 95.6

36.5 41.8 41.9 40.9

6.9 8.6 8.6 9.7

(Post-) Soviet immigrants registered as non- Jewsb 2002 2003 2004 2005

13.6 10.2 11.0 8.6

57.6 51.7 43.9 41.3

82.9 88.8 76.4 82.9

65.0 61.9 61.5 64.5

27.6 33.1 31.7 35.2

6.3 8.1 5.9 6.7

0.3 0.1 0.3 0.8

1.27 1.27 1.15 1.20

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Israel CBS data.) a Computation based on a low number of births. b Author’s estimate. 2

In 2005, TFR was 1.21 in Ukraine, 1.25 in Belarus, and 1.29 in Russia. 155

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non-religious Jewish population, while non-Jewish immigrants did not follow the same path. However, the data also clearly show a similarity in age-specific fertility schedules for both segments of (post-) Soviet immigrants. In 2002-2005, not only was the age of the highest intensity of childbearing 25-29 for both groups, but the birth rates at ages 30-34 were higher than those for ages 20-24 (see Table 8 and Figure 2). These similarities between FSU immigrants—Jews and non-Jews alike—show the usual peculiarities of the of non-religious female life cycle in Israel, dictated inter alia by army service between ages 18 and 20, which strongly and identically influence the postponement of marriage and childbearing. Figure 2.Age-specific Birth Rates of Jewish and Other Immigrants from the FSU in Israel in 2005, per 1,000

Mortality At the onset of the post-1989 emigration wave, Jewish males had a much higher life expectancy than the average for total Soviet males, whereas Jewish females in the USSR had no such advantage. Life expectancy at birth for Soviet Jews in 1988-1989 was 70.1 for males and 73.7 for females, and these indicators were very similar to those in the two republics where most of them were concentrated—the Russian Federation and Ukraine (see Table 9). At the same time, in Soviet Central Asia, life 156

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expectancy for both Jewish males and females was lower than that of the total Jewish population in the USSR. The most acute demographic problem in most of the contemporary FSU countries, especially in Russia, is mortality; the total Russian population has exhibited in recent years the lowest life expectancy for males among all the developed countries (see e.g.: Shkolnikov et al. 2004b). Between 1988 and 1994 the life expectancy of males in the total Russian urban population fell precipitously by 7.7  years from 65.4  to 57.7, and was 59.0 in 2003 (Rosstat 2005). However, the life expectancy of Russian male Jews has been estimated for 1993-1994 at 69.6, which is about the same level as at the end of the 1980s (69.7 years). Thus, there was a great gap of about twelve years between the life expectancies of Jewish and non-Jewish urban males in Russia. Given the demographic situation of contemporary Russia, the life expectancy of Jewish males appears relatively very good. Table 9. Life Expectancy at Birth for Jews and Total Urban Population in the FSU, on the Eve of and during Jewish Mass Emigration of the 1990s Males Area

Jews

Females

Total urban populationa

Jews

Total urban populationa

On the eve of Jewish mass emigration, 1988-1989 Entire USSR Russian Federation Ukraine Central Asia

70.1 69.7 70.3 65.7

65.6 65.4 67.1 …

73.7 73.5b 73.5 71.6

73.9 74.2 74.7 …

During Jewish mass emigration, mid-1990sc Russian Federation Moscow

69.6 72.2

57.7 57.7

73.2 76.0

71.2 71.5

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Andreev et al. 1993: 102; Goskomstat of USSR 1989: 495; Interstate Statistical Committee 1995: 256-257; Piskunov 1996: 115; Shkolnikov et al. 2004a: 320; Tolts 1996: 12; Tolts 2001: 126; Rosstat data.) a Indicators for 1988 and 1994, respectively. b According to alternative estimate: 73.3 (Bogoyavlensky et al. 2000: 53). c For Jews in the Russian Federation and Moscow, indicators for 1993-1994 and 1993-1995, respectively. 157

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From these figures we see that the Jewish population—the most highly educated ethnic group—has adapted better than the rest of the population to the recent economic transition in Russia. Nor were the dynamics of Jewish life expectancy adversely affected by the selective character of mass emigration as one might have supposed. Although people who are unwell usually have a lower tendency to migrate and this could have been expected to raise Jewish mortality somewhat, this factor was offset by successful Jewish socioeconomic adaptation in postSoviet Russia. At the same time, the life expectancy for both Jewish males and females was higher in Moscow than the country averages for Jews. Thus, we can conclude that by the mid-1990s the life expectancy for both Jewish males and females was lower outside Moscow. However, we do not know when this discrepancy arose within Russian Jewry, or how it was linked to the recent mass emigration. A comparison of Jewish life expectancy at age 15 in the Soviet Union (56.8 years for males and 60.1 years for females) and Israel (60.1 years for males and 63.6 years for females) at the onset of the post-1989 emigration shows a sizable differentiation between them: the discrepancy for both males and females was more than three years (see Table 10). However, in 1990-1994 in Israel the standardized rates of female mortality were lower for the new immigrants from the FSU than for the veteran Jewish population of Israel, while the indicators for males of both groups were rather close (Rotem 1998). Table 10. L  ife Expectancy at Age 15 for Jews in the USSR and Israel, and all (post-) Soviet Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990 Group and period

Males

Females

On the eve of (post-) Soviet Jewish mass emigration Jews in the USSR, 1988-1989 Jews in Israel, 1985-1989

56.8 60.1

60.1 63.6

On arrival in Israel (post-) Soviet mass emigration of the 1990s All (post-) Soviet immigrants, 2000-2003 Jews in Israel, 2000-2004a

61.0 63.5

67.0 67.4

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Goskomstat of USSR data; Israel CBS data; Ott et al. 2009: 24.) a Including immigrants. 158

Demographic Transformations among Ex-Soviet Migrants in Israel

In 2000-2003, life expectancy at the same age for FSU immigrants in Israel reached 61.0 for males and 67.0 for females (see Table 10). This indicator for FSU immigrant females was very close to all Jewish females in the country (67.4 years in 2000-2004). However, for FSU immigrant males, despite the pronounced increase, it was still considerably lower than for all Jewish males (63.5 years in the same period). The great majority of all deaths occur at age 45 and over. By the end of the 1990s, the decline of death rates for FSU immigrants in Israel was very pronounced for both sexes over age 45 in comparison with the indicators for Jews in the USSR on the eve of (post-) Soviet Jewish mass emigration (see Table 11). Table 11. A  ge-specific Death Rates of the Jews in the USSR in 1988-1989, and FSU Immigrants in 1998-1999, by Age Group for Ages 45 and Over, per 1,000 Males and Females Jews in the USSR, 1988-1989

FSU immigrants in Israel,a 1998-1999

Age group

Males

Females

Males

Females

45-49 50-54 55-59 60-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 80-84 85+

5.3 7.9 15.1 23.4 35.6 57.6 90.2 134.3 219.7

3.2 5.4 9.6 15.3 25.5 44.2 74.2 122.8 220.7

4.3 5.7 9.9 13.8 23.7 36.1 51.9 85.5 176.7

1.8 3.1 5.2 7.8 13.3 22.5 38.5 69.4 153.3

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Goskomstat of USSR data; Israel CBS data.) a Who arrived in Israel since 1990.

By 2007-2009, death rates for female FSU immigrants in Israel between ages 45 and 85 were closely approaching the averages of the group labeled “Jews and others” (i.e., not including Arabs). However, despite the continued decline of death rates for male FSU immigrants in Israel these indicators between ages 45 and 70 were still sizably higher than the averages of “Jews and others” (see Table 12). However, over two decades the improvement in mortality rates among FSU immigrants in 159

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Israel had been very pronounced for both sexes in comparison with the situation of Jews in the USSR on the eve of the (post-) Soviet Jewish mass emigration (see Figures 3-4). Table 12. A  ge-specific Death Rates of FSU Immigrants, and Jews and Others in Israel Aged 45 and Over in 2007-2009, by Age Group, per 1,000 Males and Females FSU Immigrantsa

Jews and othersb

Age group

Males

Females

Males

Females

45-49 50-54 55-59 60-64 65-69 70-74 75-79 80-84 85+

3.8 5.4 7.5 10.9 18.7 27.4 46.0 73.9 158.5

1.6 2.4 4.1 5.9 9.5 16.7 31.6 58.0 139.5

2.8 4.3 6.5 9.7 17.0 27.3 46.2 75.5 157.5

1.6 2.3 3.9 5.9 9.8 17.1 32.4 59.6 148.3

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Israel CBS data. a Who arrived in Israel since 1990. b Including immigrants.

Figure 3. Age-specific Death Rates of Jews in the USSR in 1988-1989, and FSU Immigrants in Israel in 2007-2009, per 1,000 Males

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Figure 4. Age-specific Death Rates of Jews in the USSR in 1988-1989, and FSU Immigrants in Israel in 2007-2009, per 1,000 Females

It is interesting to note that (post-) Soviet immigrants constitute a very sizable portion of the medical profession in contemporary Israel: according to the data for the first part of the 2000s, almost half of all doctors under age 45 and one-quarter of those between 45 and 65 were from the FSU (Remennick 2007). We suppose that the existence of this huge pool of Russian-speakers (including nurses) renders the Israeli health system unusually user-friendly for FSU immigrants.

Vital Balance Even before the first stage of large-scale Soviet Jewish emigration, which took place in the 1970s, the balance of births to at least one Jewish parent and Jewish deaths had become negative in Russia and Ukraine. By the end of the 1980s, this balance was decidedly unfavorable in all the republics of the European part of the Soviet Union (Tolts 2003). In the 1990s, as a result of the mass emigration and the abovenoted reduction in the fertility rate, the number of births in the Jewish population of the FSU dropped dramatically. In the FSU as a whole the 161

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estimated number of births to at least one Jewish parent fell from 21,100 in 1988 to 3,000 in 2001. In the Russian Federation, between 1988 and 1998, the decline in the number of births to at least one Jewish parent was much faster than that of Jewish deaths, and as a result the estimated negative balance of these vital events increased by 1,100, from about 5,800 to 6,900 (Table 13). Table 13. B  alance of Births and Deaths among Jews in the FSU and the Russian Federation, 1988-2001, Thousands Year

Birthsa

Deaths

Balance

FSU 1988 1998 2001

21.1 3.9 3.0b

31.7 … …

-10.6 … …

8.0 2.2 1.8c

13.8 9.1 …

-5.8 -6.9 …

Russian Federation 1988 1998 2001

(Source: Tolts 2001: 138; Tolts 2007: 299, 301.) a Children born to at least one Jewish parent, assuming the (unknown) number of children born to non-Jewish mothers and Jewish fathers was twice the (known) number of children born to Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers. b Guesstimate corresponding to the percentage of Jews in the Russian Federation among the entire FSU Jewish population. c The percentage of children born to non-Jewish fathers and the rate of children born to Jewish mothers per 1,000 “core” Jews as in 1998 were applied to this estimate.

Positive fertility and mortality dynamics coupled with the favorable age structure of the FSU immigrants to Israel (see above) led to a decisively positive balance of births and deaths. Among all FSU immigrants who arrived in Israel since 1990, 166,400  births and 113,300  deaths were recorded, which resulted in a positive balance of 53,100 in 19902009. By 2009, the last year for which we have data, the positive annual balance of births and deaths among them was as high as 4,100 (see Table 14). 162

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Table 14. B  alance of Births and Deaths among FSU Immigrants who Arrived in Israel since 1990, Thousands Year

Births

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

0.7 2.4 3.4 4.6 5.8 6.75 7.5 8.2 8.9 9.3 10.1 10.3 10.6 11.1 10.9 11.0 11.2 10.3 11.6 11.7

1990-2009

166.4

Deaths 0.4 1.85 2.7 3.3 4.0 4.6 5.0 5.4 5.9 6.3 6.7 6.9 7.2 7.25 7.4 7.6 7.6 7.8 7.8 7.6 113.3

Balance 0.3 0.55 0.7 1.3 1.8 2.15 2.5 2.8 3.0 3.0 3.4 3.4 3.4 3.85 3.5 3.4 3.6 2.5 3.8 4.1 53.1

(Source: Compiled on the basis of Israel CBS data.)

Final Remark Our study demonstrates demographic revitalization of ex-Soviet Jews in Israel. Despite initial adaptation difficulties among FSU immigrants,3 who had originated from a segment of Soviet society with long-time low fertility, they avoided post-Soviet fertility reduction and approached the higher level of fertility of the non-religious sector of Israel’s veteran 3

Socio-economic adaptation of FSU immigrants in Israel is generally successful; see e.g.: Cohen Goldner et al. 2012; Leshem 2008; Remennick 2007, especially chapter 2; Sicron 2007. 163

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Jewish population. The life expectancy of post-Soviet immigrants in Israel increased rapidly and noticeably. The post-Soviet mass exodus led to many additional births among those Jews who immigrated to Israel, and the deaths of many FSU immigrants have been postponed. By inference, had they not moved to Israel when they did, they would have had a decisively negative balance of births and deaths. Our findings concerning the demographic changes among FSU immigrants in Israel are important also for the evaluation of the demographic situation in the post-Soviet countries. The analysis of demographic transformation of the Jews who migrated to Israel shows that the long-time low fertility trend could be substantially reversed. At the same time, as noted above the life expectancy of (post-) Soviet immigrants in Israel also increased rapidly and noticeably. Therefore, we may suppose based on the results of our study that the severe FSU mortality problems are not caused mostly by people or by their behavior, but rather by their place of residence and the level of medical service available.

Acknowledgements This article is part of a broader research project being carried out by the author at the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics, the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Some of the interim findings were presented in different forms at the European Population Conference (Barcelona, July 2008) and the Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, August 2009). This study could not have been done without the ongoing encouragement, advice, and guidance of Sergio DellaPergola over the years since the author’s move to Israel in 1991. The author is grateful to Evgueni Andreev, Ari Paltiel, Rafi Pizov, Marina Sheps, Emma Trahtenberg, and Sergei Zakharov for providing materials, information, and suggestions. The author wishes also to thank Judith Even for reading and editing an earlier draft. Responsibility for the content of the article is, of course, the author’s alone.

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Heleniak, T. (2010). Causes and demographic consequences of fertility decline in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. Marriage & Family Review, 46 (1), 79-106. Interstate Statistical Committee. (1995). Demograficheskii ezhegodnik, 1993/ Demographic yearbook, 1993. Moscow: Interstate Statistical Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Israel CBS. (2006a). Immigrant Population from the Former Soviet Union: Demographic Trends, 1990-2001. Jerusalem. Retrieved from http:// www.cbs.gov.il/publications/migration_ussr01/migration_ussr_e.htm. Israel CBS. (2007b). Immigration to Israel, 2000-2001. Jerusalem. Retrieved from http://www1.cbs.gov.il/webpub/pub/text_page_eng.html?publ=1 8&CYear=2001&CMonth=1. Israel CBS. (2000-2011c). Statistical Abstract of Israel. Jerusalem. Kaganovich, A. (2003). The Bukharan Jews at the threshold of the third millennium. Central Asia and Caucasus, 22 (4), 149-153. Leshem, E. (2008). Being an Israeli: Immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel, Fifteen years later. The Journal of Israeli History, 27 (1), 29–49. Leshem, E., and Sicron, M. (2004). The Soviet immigrant community in Israel. In U. Rebhun and Ch. I. Waxman (Eds.), Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns (pp. 81-117). Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press. Levy, S., Levinsohn, H., and Katz, E. (2004). The many faces of Jewishness in Israel. In U. Rebhun and Ch. I. Waxman (Eds.), Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns (pp. 265-284). Hanover, NH and London: Brandeis University Press. Nahmias, P. (2004). Fertility behaviour of recent immigrants to Israel: A  comparative analysis of immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. Demographic Research, 10 (4), 83-120. Ott, J. J., Paltiel, A. M., and Becher, H. (2009). Noncommunicable disease, mortality, and life expectancy in immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union: Country of origin compared with host country. WHO Bulletin, 87 (1), 20-29. Piskunov, S. (1996). Etnichni osoblivosti smertnosti i trivalosti zhittya v Ukrayni u 1959-1989 rr. (Ethnic peculiarities of mortality and life expectancy in Ukraine, 1959-1989). Demografichni doslidzhennya, 18, 99-116. 166

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Piskunov, S. (1997). Etnichna diferentsiatsiya narodzhuvanosti i plidnosti v Ukrayni v 1959-1989 rr. (Ethnic differentiation of birth rates and fertility in Ukraine, 1959-1989). Demografichni doslidzhennya, 19, 95-117. Remennick, L. (2007). Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction. Rosstat. (2005). Demograficheskii ezhegodnik Rossii/The demographic yearbook of Russia. Moscow. Rosstat. (2012). Itogi Vserossiiskoi perepisi naseleniia 2010  goda (The Results of the 2010  All-Russian population census), vol. 2. Moscow. Retrieved from http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/ croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm. Rotem, N. (1998). Mortality among Immigrants from Former USSR, 19901994. Jerusalem (Israel CBS, Current briefings in statistics, No. 8). Shkolnikov, V. M., Andreev, E. M., Anson, J., and Meslé, F. (2004a). The peculiar pattern of mortality of Jews in Moscow, 1993-1995. Population Studies, 58 (3), 311-329. Shkolnikov, V. M., Andreev, E. M., Leon, D. A., McKee, M., Mesle, Fr., and Vallin, J. (2004b). Mortality reversal in Russia: The story so far. Hygiea Internationalis (Electronic journal), 4 (4), 29-80. Available at http:// www.ep.liu.se/ej/hygiea/. Sicron, M. (2007). Immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the Israeli population and labor force. In Z. Gitelman and Y. Ro’i (Eds.), Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience (pp. 363-377). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tolts, M. (1992). Jewish marriages in the USSR: A demographic analysis. East European Jewish Affairs, 22 (2), 3-19. Tolts, M. (1996). The Jewish population of Russia, 1989-1995. Jews in Eastern Europe, 31 (3), 5-19. Tolts, M. (2001). Jewish demography of the former Soviet Union. In S. DellaPergola and J. Even (Eds.), Papers in Jewish demography 1997 (pp. 109-139). Jerusalem: Hebrew University. Tolts, M. (2003). Demography of the Jews in the former Soviet Union: Yesterday and Today. In Z. Gitelman with M. Glants and M. I. Goldman (Eds.), Jewish Life after the USSR (pp. 173-206). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 167

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Tolts, M. (2006). Contemporary trends in family formation among the Jews in Russia. Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, 57 (2), 5-23. Tolts, M. (2007). Post-Soviet Jewish demography, 1989-2004. In Z. Gitelman and Y. Ro’i (Eds.), Revolution, Repression and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience (pp. 283-311). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tolts, M. (2008a). The demographic profile of the Bukharan Jews in the late Soviet period. In I. Baldauf, M. Gammer, and T. Loy (Eds.), Bukharan Jews in the 20th Century: History, Experience and Narration (pp. 77-90). Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Tolts, M. (2008b). Demography of North Caucasian Jewry: A note on population dynamics and shifting identity. In M. Gammer (Ed.), Ethnonationalism, Islam and the State in the Caucasus: Post-Soviet Disorder (pp. 212-224). London and New York: Routledge. Tolts, M. (2009). Mixed marriage and post-Soviet aliyah. In Sh. Reinharz and S. DellaPergola (Eds.), Jewish Intermarriage around the World (pp. 89104). New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction. Tolts, M. (2013). Demograficheskii portret evreev Azerbaidzhana, 19591989 (The demographic profile of the Jews in Azerbaidzhan, 19591989). Diaspory/Diasporas, 14 (1), 131-157. Tolts, M. (2014). The Jews in Georgia in the late Soviet period: A demographic profile. In G. Akhiezer, R. Enoch, and S. Weinstein (Eds.), Studies in Bukharan, Georgian, and Caucasian Jewry: Historical, Sociological, and Cultural Aspects (pp. 102-116). Ariel: Ariel University. Tolts, M., Antonova, O., and Andreev, E. (2006). Extra-marital Conceptions in Contemporary Russia’s Fertility. (Research note prepared for the European population conference, Liverpool, UK, 21-24 June 2006). Retrieved from http://epc2006.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=60155. Vishnevsky, A. (1999). Demographic processes in the post-Soviet states. In V. Stankuniene, P. Eglite, and V. Kanopiene (Eds.), Demographic Development of the Countries in Transition (Revue Baltique, 13), 23-37. Zakharov S. (2008). Russian Federation: From the first to second demographic Transition. Demographic Research, 19, Article 24 (Special Collection 7: Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe), 907-972.

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The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010 Viacheslav Konstantinov Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute

Introduction Generally, new immigrants at the beginning of their absorption in a new country go through a stage of downward mobility (relative to their status in country of origin), caused by their lack of language skills and work experience in their new home. However, in the next stage (with acquisition of new language and professional training), the process of upward mobility begins (U-imaged trend), including transition from blue-collar to white-collar jobs (Borjas 2006; Papademetriou et al 2009; Cohen and Eckstein 2002). The pace of this process depends on many factors, such as the general economic situation in the country, government policies regarding new immigrants, including training and benefits in addition to the demographic structure of the immigrant population (including gender, age and family status), the country where they received their education, the field(s) in which they were trained, their ethno-cultural traditions, and their individual motivation to preserve or improve their social status (Semyonov et al. 2009). Usually, for younger immigrants, the stage of upward mobility begins with first generation, while for older and some middle-aged immigrants upward mobility proves difficult to achieve, and may occur only in the second generation (Papademetriou et al. 2009). Given this general framework, the emigration from FSU to Israel has two important features influencing its professional mobility. On the one hand, the pre-emigration social profile of FSU Jews featured a relatively high percentage of persons with academic and post-secondary education and white-collar workers. These Jewish immigrants (although there 169

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is some percentage of non-Jewish family members among them) appear advantaged in terms of their prior training and they also exhibit higher motivation to restore their social status (Kuznets 1972; DellaPergola 2012). On the other hand, acceptance of new immigrants in Israel is selective by ethnic origin (according to the Law of Return, Israel admits any Jewish immigrant or person related to a Jew by family connection), but not by socio-economic characteristics, unlike immigration to the US, Canada, and other countries (Chiswick and Wenz 2005; Semyonov et al. 2009). Moreover, instead of “government” selection, there is a self-selection of potential immigrants, often not “positive.” Therefore, the basic educational and socio-economic status (abroad) of immigrants to Israel was usually lower than that of Jewish immigrants to western countries (DellaPergola 1986; 2012), although it was still higher when compared to that of the Jewish population in Israel as a whole. These aspects must be taken into account in any analysis of socio-professional mobility of FSU immigrants in Israel. Many of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) who arrived in Israel from 1989 onward possessed high academic achievements and professional backgrounds, yet they frequently encountered serious problems when attempting to find suitable employment in Israel. This inability to transfer human capital directly from one society to another probably stemmed from several factors. Some of the immigrants arrived in Israel at relatively advanced ages, which made them less attractive to employers. Others faced difficulties due to their poor command of Hebrew and English, or inadequate computer skills (although that was true only at the beginning of the FSU migration wave). Perhaps just as important, as newcomers they initially lacked personal connections in Israel, which put them at a social disadvantage. Furthermore, immigrants who encountered difficulties finding work or who had heard of such difficulties through the experience of friends and acquaintances sometimes did not attempt to find work in their previous field, nor did they seek training or Hebrew-language studies. Rather, many opted for unskilled work, which was more readily available. This bred a vicious cycle: Their lack of on-the-job practice in speaking Hebrew (in most cases they were working with fellow immigrants) and lack of time to look for another job perpetuated their lower employment status. 170

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The incompatibility of the immigrants’ professional backgrounds with the demands of the labor market in Israel is often noted as an objective factor, taking into account the general socioeconomic situation in Israel. Yet, important as this may be, its impact should not be overgeneralized. It is worth considering the special conditions obtaining in Israel, which influenced employment in the higher professional grades after the mid1980s. In Israel, a large proportion of the positions requiring higher education were historically concentrated in the public sector and were state-funded (science, education, health, central and local government). However, at the time the FSU migration wave began, following attempts to halt inflation, the Israeli government followed a policy of curbing the expansion of the public sector. That reduced employment opportunities and increased competition in these fields among non-immigrants as well as immigrants. Another problem has been the increased cost of housing, particularly in the central parts of the country, which tended to force immigrants toward more peripheral areas. There, the chances of finding high-salaried work were rather low. Finally, the policy of steadily reducing unemployment benefits must also be taken into account. The policy was aimed at encouraging the unemployed to find work, which (it was believed) would also enable the reduction of Israel’s dependence on foreign workers in such sectors as construction and agricultural labor. Yet, the new guidelines for unemployment benefits limited the flexibility of individuals who might have continued looking for work commensurate with their skills and training. Consequently, many immigrants who were not self-sufficient did not have the time to look for work in their own professions, and thus were apt to take whatever was available, which was often unskilled labor. There were, however, some circumstances that impacted favorably on the professional integration of FSU immigrants. First, concomitant with their arrival, there was a hi-tech boom in Israel (particularly computers, Internet, and cellular communications) and many immigrants, after appropriate training, found work in that field. Second, the magnitude of the migration wave generated a new demand for Russianspeaking employees in a range of fields (including highly skilled work in health, education, banking, tourism, etc.). During the years that followed this trend continued with the creation of companies aimed 171

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specifically at Russian speakers. In addition, partnerships were formed between companies in Israel and the CIS, which required employees conversant in current affairs in both Israel and the CIS countries. Third, the age structure of the FSU immigrants was relatively young (the median age of FSU immigrants from 1990  was about 34).1 This contributed to the success with which many immigrants learned Hebrew, underwent vocational training, and eventually managed to find suitable employment. Furthermore, in the twenty years following the start of the mass immigration, the younger generation has replaced the older generation. Older immigrants (most of whom did not work in their own professions) are reaching retirement age and are being replaced by the younger generation, who have served in the IDF and studied at colleges and universities in Israel. Thus, notwithstanding all the above-mentioned difficulties, a significant proportion of the FSU immigrants have indeed managed to find themselves in positions that are entirely or at least partially commensurate with their high levels of education. Since the influx of immigrants began, many studies on their absorption in Israel (including employment) have been published.2 These studies gathered a great volume of information concerning the trends and factors that contributed to the status of FSU immigrants, including data regarding their professional employment. However, some of these studies relate to a specific point in time or to a relatively short period, which does not allow for the monitoring of trends over an extended period, while others are based on samples that are not large enough to enable in-depth analysis. The goal of this study, therefore, was to analyze trends of professional mobility in Israel among FSU immigrants, particularly among those with higher education, and the main factors that have affected this process over the past two decades (based on national data from the Central Bureau of Statistics [CBS]). Professional mobility among the FSU immigrant population was analyzed in terms of two aspects: 1. Changes in the occupational composition of all employed FSU immigrants; 2. Changes 1 2

Sources: CBS 2004: table 31; CBS 2009: table 17; Tolts 2011, table 4. See e.g.: Naveh et al. 1995; Cohen and Eckstein 2002; Eckstein et al. 2006; King and Wolde-Tsadick 2006; Leshem 2009 (Hebrew).

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The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

in the percentage of those employed in professional3 positions among immigrants with a higher education.4 Particular attention was paid to the professional mobility of the immigrant population over time, distinguishing between the impact of the number of years in Israel and the impact of the year of immigration. The first reflects the changes that the immigrant him/herself has undergone pursuant to his/her experience of life in Israel, such as Hebrew study, vocational training, active job search, etc., while the second has more to do with objective factors that prevailed in Israel at one time or another, such as the economy (recession or boom), job availability, government employment policy, etc. For example, five years after their arrival (i.e., in 2005) the professional employment status of the immigrants who had arrived in 2000 was not the same as that of the 1990 immigrants in 1995 (despite the equal number of years they had spent living in the country). When studies are conducted at a specific point in time, it is impossible to separate these two factors, and therefore data covering a relatively long period are required. In addition to the year of arrival, the number of years spent in Israel, and the level of education, I also examined gender, age, place of residence in Israel, family status, occupational status of spouse, region of origin (European or Asian republic), and religious-ethnic identity (Jewish or non-Jewish). Where possible, I also took accounts of immigrants’ The group of professionals included the following: 1. Those in academic and scientific positions: life and natural sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), engineers and architects, physicians and dentists, pharmacists, veterinarians, jurists, social and human scientists (economists, sociologists, psychologists, etc.), university/college lecturers; 2. Those in the liberal and technical professions: technicians, programmers, accountants, paramedical professionals (paramedics, nurses, lab technicians, etc.), schoolteachers and preschool teachers, journalists, those in the fields of the arts, culture, and sport; 3. Managers (in all fields). 4 For the purposes of this article, higher education indicates a degree (bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate) from an academic institution in Israel or abroad (university, institute, academic college). It does not include graduates of posthigh-school institutions (technical colleges, teacher training colleges, nursing school, seminars, non-academic colleges) who do not have academic degrees, or persons who studied at academic institutions but did not complete their studies or earn degrees. 3

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command of Hebrew or English, vocational training courses, and occupation in country of origin or (optionally) field and country of education received. In addition, I compared the professional status of the FSU immigrants with the total Jewish population in Israel and with the FSU immigrants in the United States.

Study Population and Data The study population consisted of FSU immigrants who arrived in Israel during and after 1990  and were working in Israel for some time in a given year (even if not for the entire year). The analysis did not include groups that were not in the labor force: pensioners, students and schoolchildren, homemakers, people with disabilities who had not worked for an entire year, and immigrants who never worked in Israel. Within this population, I made a particular distinction for immigrants with higher education, since this is the largest and most skilled group within the population of FSU immigrants. The main source of information for our analysis was the CBS’s quarterly Labor Force Survey. Each respondent participated in the survey for 1.5  years (during the first, second, fifth, and sixth quarter) and some new participants replace previous respondents during every quarter. Every year, this survey covers some 100,000 persons aged fifteen and over from all social strata in Israel, of whom some 12,500 are FSU immigrants who had arrived during or after 1990 according to the 2010 survey. This survey includes socio-demographic information about the respondents (gender, age, Jewish/non-Jewish, country of origin of the respondents and their parents, date of immigration, family composition, education, place of residence) and about their current employment (or, for the unemployed, last employment in Israel), such as economic sector, occupation, work hours, etc. Also included in the survey are spouses’ occupations, and in the case of the unemployed, information about job hunting. The advantages of using the Labor Force Survey were as follows: the large sample (which reduces the possibility of sampling error to a minimum); the possibility of monitoring changes in professional status over an extended period (albeit at the group rather than at the individual level); the large amount of information about every respondent; and, in 174

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our case, the possibility of comparing the data on FSU immigrants with other population groups in Israel. However, for our purposes, the Labor Force Survey also had its drawbacks. For example, data on academic degrees appear only in the 2001 survey and later. The data in the earlier surveys relate only to the number of years of schooling and the type of school last attended (but not completion of studies), making it impossible to obtain an accurate picture of the respondents’ level and type of education. This is particularly important, since we were primarily interested in the professional mobility of immigrants with higher education. For this reason, I also used data from Israel’s 1995 census (Census of Population and Housing, 1995), which includes data on individuals’ academic degrees, employment, and other socio-demographic characteristics of interest to us. Combining the data from the 1995  census with the Labor Force Survey from 2001 onward made it possible to monitor changes over a relatively long period in the professional employment of the immigrants with higher education, with a cross-section of characteristics (gender, age, year of immigration, academic degree, family status, republic of origin, place of residence in Israel, Jewish/non-Jewish). However, since both the above publications intended for the entire population of Israel and not for just immigrants, and although both contain information about the respondents’ occupations in Israel, they lack information about immigrants’ former occupations in their countries of origin. Consequently, they did not provide enough data for an analysis of the percentage of those working in their professions by specific field (e.g., engineers, physicians, teachers, etc.). I therefore used an additional source of information—the annual reports by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the CBS on the occupational composition of immigrants in their countries of origin. Until 1999, these reports were published by the CBS in its Immigration to Israel series; since 2000, they have appeared as special publications. Comparing these data with those in the Labor Force Survey (as noted, at group, not individual level) allowed me to assess the level of occupational employment of immigrants in Israel by specific occupational groups. For the purpose of the required analysis, I also took data from the Social Surveys conducted by the CBS since 2002  among the Israeli population (aged twenty and over), which cover a broad range of items, 175

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including ones that are not contained in the Labor Force Survey. For example, these surveys include command of Hebrew and English, completion of vocational courses, and field of higher education (enabling an estimate of those employed in particular occupations). However, the sample size of the Social Surveys is much smaller. For example, in 2010, it comprised just 7,500 out of the total population of Israel, of whom about 1,000 were FSU immigrants who arrived in or after 1990. Bearing in mind that we are interested in immigrants with higher education who are working in Israel, the sample size becomes even smaller (some 300  individuals only), increasing the possibility of sampling error. I therefore used the Social Surveys only for those aspects that could not be analyzed using the Labor Force Survey (and in such cases, in order to reduce the sampling error, I used an average for several years). Finally, in order to compare the professional status of FSU immigrants in Israel and those living in the United States, I used the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) conducted in the United States in 2000-2001.

Changes in the Professional Composition of FSU Immigrants in Israel Data from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the CBS on the professional composition of FSU immigrants in their countries of origin indicate that about a third of them had held scientific and academic positions, while another third were employed in liberal and technical professions (Table 1). Note the almost total absence of managers among the immigrants (while the percentage of managers among Soviet Jewry in the 1989 census was over 10%).5 This is not only because fewer managers immigrated to Israel, but also because those who actually held managerial positions in the FSU registered their profession according to their qualifications (i.e., “engineer” rather than “manager,” “teacher” rather than “school principal,” etc.). One in six immigrants was a skilled worker in industry. The percentage of clerical workers, sales and service staff, and unskilled workers among the immigrants was rather low (Table 1). 5

Source: CIS Statistical Committee, 1989, t. 36ba.

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Table 1. Occupational Structure of FSU Immigrants (1990+) Abroad and in Israel, All Israeli Jews, and FSU Jewish Immigrants in USA (Percentage of all Employed) FSU Immigrants (1990+):

FSU Abroada Jewish immi(last All 2 years Israeli grants in Israelb: in USA before Jews aliyah) 1991 2000 2010 (2010)b (2000/1)c Total employed Scientific & academic professions Thereof: Natural sciences Engineers & architects Physicians & pharmacists Human & social sciences Lecturers in higher education Liberal & technical professions Thereof : Technicians & programmers Teachersd & tutors Literature & art workers Nurses & paramedics Managers Clerical workers Sales & service workers Skilled industry workers Unskilled workers

100

100

100

100

100

100

31.7 1.6 19.2 4.6 5.5

9.1 0.5 4.4 2.0 1.7

8.8 0.7 3.9 2.6 1.3

10.6 1.2 4.8 2.5 1.8

12.6 1.4 3.5 1.9 5.0

25.0 2.8 10.1 4.8 6.0

0.7

0.5

0.3

0.3

0.8

1.3

33.2

9.5

14.5

14.4

18.3

30.1

15.5 9.5 3.7 4.5

4.6 1.1 0.6 3.2

6.5 3.3 1.6 3.1

6.2 3.0 1.3 3.9

5.5 8.4 2.4 2.0

12.8 5.3 2.9 9.1

0.3 5.0 7.3 16.0 6.5

0.0 3.4 10.0 40.8 27.2

1.4 9.7 18.3 29.0 18.3

2.0 12.6 22.7 23.1 14.6

7.5 17.7 21.7 14.7 7.5

6.1 3.7 19.8 15.3 0.0

According to data from the Israeli CBS and Ministry of Immigrant Absorption. According to Labor Force Surveys of Israeli CBS for corresponding years. c Jewish immigrants from FSU 1990 and later, according to National Jewish Population Survey, 2000-2001. d According to the Standard Classification of Occupations of the Israeli CBS (1994), teachers in primary schools are included in the liberal and technical professions, while teachers at intermediate and secondary schools—in scientific and academic professions. However, in the data about the occupations of the FSU immigrants abroad, all schoolteachers are included in liberal and technical professions. For occupations in Israel, we therefore included all schoolteachers in this group. a

b

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In Israel, there was a dramatic decline in the occupational status of FSU immigrants (as noted at the outset). For example, in 1991, the total rate of employment in scientific and academic professions and in liberal and technical professions among FSU immigrants was one-third of the rate in their country of origin, whereas the percentage of skilled workers in industry and construction more than doubled, and the percentage of unskilled workers quadrupled (Table 1). Later on, the situation changed considerably. In the course of two decades (1991–2010), the percentage of unskilled workers among all employed FSU immigrants declined from 27% to 15% and that of skilled workers in industry and construction from 41% to 23% (albeit in 2010, these two percentages remained higher among employed immigrants than among the total Jewish population of Israel). At the same time, there was an increase in the percentages of those working in sales and services (from 10% to 23%), clerical work (from 3% to 13%), liberal and technical professions (from 10% to 14%), and scientific and academic professions (from 9% to 11%). Note that in 2010  the overall percentage of those working in scientific and academic professions and in liberal and technical professions among FSU immigrants was lower than among total Jews employed in Israel (Table 1). In certain professions (engineers, physicians, technicians, programmers, and nurses), the percentage among the immigrants was higher (Table 1). About 2% of the FSU immigrants employed in 2010 (compared with 7.5% in the total Israeli Jewish population) held managerial positions. A comparison of the professional composition of FSU immigrants in Israel and that of FSU Jewish immigrants in the United States in 2000 (data from the Labor Force Survey and NJPS) indicates that about a quarter of the Jewish immigrants in the USA were employed in scientific and academic professions—three times more than among FSU immigrants in Israel in the same year (see Table 1). The percentage of those employed in liberal and technical professions (particularly technicians/programmers and paramedical professionals) among the Jewish immigrants to the USA was twice as high as among FSU immigrants in Israel. The percentages of those working in services and sales among those in the USA and in Israel in 2000 were similar, while the percentage of skilled labor in industry and construction in the USA was half as 178

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high as in Israel (15% and 29%, respectively). Moreover, there were no unskilled workers among the Jewish immigrants to the United States (at least not among those interviewed), compared with 18% among the FSU immigrants in Israel in the same year. Two reasons can be given for this: 1. The higher level of education among those in the USA (65% of the Jewish immigrants to America from the FSU in 2000 had a higher education, compared with 38% of the FSU immigrants to Israel); 2. There is a much greater likelihood of finding work in one’s profession in a large country such as the United States.

Professional Mobility in Israel of FSU Immigrants with Higher Education and Its Main Factors Note that the data in Table 1 include the total population of employed FSU immigrants, regardless of their level of education. In principle, immigrants cannot hold positions in Israel if they do not meet the required educational criteria. We therefore now examine the changes in the percentage of FSU immigrants employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial positions (hereafter, the professionals) among employed immigrants with higher education (Table 2).6 We see that from 1995–2010, the percentage increased from 40% to 50%; in other words, half of the employed FSU immigrants with higher education were already working in professions more or less commensurate with their levels of education. However, this percentage is still lower than that for the total college-educated Jewish population, 73% of whom were working in appropriate professions. We now turn to the main factors that have affected the professional employment of FSU immigrants with a higher education. 6

Although this is not an altogether accurate percentage of those working in their professions (e.g., it includes former university lecturers working as high-school teachers, former engineers who have become computer technicians, etc.), such a change in professional status is logical for newcomers to a country, unlike situations in which such lecturers or engineers are forced to seek employment as security guards or simple factory workers, reflecting an absolute loss of professional status. 179

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Table 2. Percentage of FSU Immigrants (1990+) Employed as Professionalsa and All Israeli Jews with Higher Education, by Academic Degree     Higher Education total Thereof: First degree (BA, BEd, BSc, etc.) Second degree (MA, MSc, etc.) Third degree (PhD, etc.)

FSU Immigrants in Israel (1990+)b All Israeli Jews 1995 2001 2005 2010 (2010)c 40.2

43.4

44.8

24.6 43.0 76.1

31.1 48.2 83.4

35.9 49.6 77.4

49.6   41.1 55.2 87.7

72.8   68.3 78.0 96.0

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial professions. Data for 1995—according to the population census; for 2001-2010—according to Labor Force Surveys for corresponding years. c According to Labor Force Survey, 2010. a

b

Academic Degree The data on the percentage of immigrants employed as professionals, according to their academic degree (Table 2), reveal three trends: 1. The higher the degree, the greater the percentage of immigrants employed in professional positions. 2. Among the immigrants with any given degree, there is a steady increase in the percentage of those employed in professional positions. 3. Despite that increase, in 2010 the percentage of immigrants with any given degree who were employed in professional positions was lower than the percentage of those with the same degree in the total Jewish population of Israel. For example, among the immigrants with a bachelor’s degree, 41% were working as professionals, compared with 68% of the total Jewish population of Israel; among those with a master’s degree, 55% vs. 78%, respectively; among those with a doctorate, 88% vs. 96%, respectively.

Occupation in the Country of Origin and Field of Higher Education As noted above, neither the Israeli population census nor the Labor Force Surveys included information about respondents’ occupations in their countries of origin. It is possible to estimate the situation based on the percentage of those employed in each professional group in the country 180

The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

of origin (with data from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the CBS)7 and in Israel (Labor Force Survey). However, this comparison does not take further education and professional training in Israel into account. We calculated the professional employment index (see Table 3) for certain scientific, academic, liberal, and technical professions as the percentage of FSU immigrants employed in these professions in Israel in 2010, divided by the percentage of those employed in the same profession in their country of origin. This index shows that those who managed best in Israel were nurses and para-medical workers (87%) and those in the natural and exact sciences (75%). Less successful (according to this index) were physicians (54%),8 although some of them were able to find work in para-medical professions. Less than half of the technicians and lecturers in higher education and post-secondary institutes, and about a third of teachers (including preschool teachers), artists and performers, social scientists, and those in the humanities were working in their professions (according to this index). The lowest percentage (25%) was found among the most common profession among Soviet Jewry: engineers. However, some engineers had been able to find work as technicians and programmers.9 Another source of information was the CBS Social Surveys for 2007–2010, which contain data on employment in Israel as well as the field of higher education (acquired in Israel and abroad). In the latter case, the surveys also indicate employment in the country of origin. We took the average data for 4 years in order to reduce possible sampling errors. These data show a similar—albeit not identical—picture to that presented above (see Table 3). Among the FSU immigrants with a higher education who arrived in or after 1990, the highest percentage of those employed as professionals was among those with medical or para-medical training (86%-88%). This was followed by mathematicians and computer experts (76%) and then by scientists in physics, chemistry, and biology (54%). According to the Social Surveys, about half of the immigrant engineers, architects and teachers were working as professionals, as were about a third of those These data were published in the annual Immigration to Israel until 1999. Since then they have appeared as special publications of the CBS. 8 On the employment of physicians from the FSU, see also Nirel 1999. 9 On the employment of immigrant engineers, see also Naveh 1999. 7

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Table 3. Percentage of FSU Immigrants (1990+) Employed as Professionals,a by Occupation Abroad and Field and Country of Education Receivedb

Fields of Specialization: Medicine and pharmacy Paramedical professions Mathematics and computers Natural sciences e Engineering and architecture Technical professions Primary and secondary education Higher education Humanities and social sciencesf

By Thereof: by country occupation of education abroad — By field of received:d index education (2010)b (2007-2010)c in Israel Abroad 54.3 86.7 75.0 25.0 40.0 31.6 40.6 33.3

85.7 88.1 76.1 54.0 47.5 ... 41.7 ... 33.2

88.2 95.5 94.7 90.3 80.5 ... 76.0 ... 59.3

86.2 79.0 72.0 43.8 44.0 ... 34.6 ... 23.3

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial professions. Ratio between percentages of FSU immigrants employed in this profession in Israel (according to Labor Force Survey, 2010) and abroad (according to Ministry of Absorption and CBS Data). c According to Social Surveys of Israeli CBS (average for 2007-2010); persons aged 20+ who received higher education (abroad or in Israel). d Meaning for highest degree received (first, second, or third). e Physics, chemistry, biology, and related fields. f Including law, literature, and arts. a

b

specializing in the human and social sciences. The differences between information from the Social Surveys and the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the CBS on employment in the country of origin could have to do with the fact that the data from the Social Surveys include only those with a higher education (and not non-academic post-secondary education) and also take into account education acquired in Israel. The two sources may also classify the professions slightly differently. Data from the Social Surveys of 2007-2010 also show considerable differences in the percentage of immigrants working as professionals, depending on whether they received their higher education abroad or in Israel. Usually, those who arrived at younger ages were most likely to have received their training in Israel. Thus, 76% of FSU immigrants who 182

The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

received their last academic degree in Israel were employed as professionals (even slightly more than among the entire Israeli Jewish population with higher education), whereas only 43% of those who received their last degree abroad were similarly employed. Similar differences were also seen in certain fields (see Table 3). For example, 90% of immigrants who graduated from faculties of natural sciences in Israel were employed as professionals, compared with only 44% among graduates of the same faculties abroad; faculties of education—76% versus 35%; humanities and social sciences—59% versus 23% respectively. Only for medical and pharmacy faculties was the difference between immigrants’ received degrees in Israel and abroad not significant (see Table 3).

Gender and Age As shown in Table 4, the percentage of immigrants with a higher education working as professionals had been greater among the men than among the women, but by 2010 this difference had declined. This indicates more rapid progress among the female immigrants with a higher education than among the men. Two trends emerge (see Table 4): 1. From 1995–2010, there was an increase in the percentage of immigrants with higher education employed as professionals in all age groups. 2. Among the younger groups, the percentages were higher. Thus, in 2010, almost two-thirds of the immigrants with a higher education aged 25–34 were employed as professionals: many of these had arrived in Israel as children or teenagers and obtained their higher education in this country, while among those in the 55–64 age group, only 38% were employed as professionals, but in this group too, the percentage had increased since 1995.

Year of Immigration and Duration As noted, an analysis of data over a relatively long period makes it possible to distinguish between the impact of the year of immigration and the impact of the number of years spent living in the country. Indeed, the analysis shows that both factors affected the professional employment of the immigrants. On the one hand, those who arrived in Israel earlier managed better than those who came later (even after the same number of years spent living in the country). This could have to do with budgetary cuts in science and education as well as the tightening of conditions for unemployment benefits (which meant that the later arrivals had less time 183

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Table 4. Percentage of FSU Immigrants with Higher Education, 1990+ Employed as Professionalsa by Gender, Age, Year of Immigration, District of Residence, Ethnic-Religious Group, and Republics of Originb  

1995

2001

2005

Gender:

 

Males Females

43.1 37.5

46.5 40.8

48.1 42.0

51.7 48.0

44.3 44.0 36.2 28.9

52.9 47.3 40.8 29.7

56.8 49.7 42.3 33.0

62.0 53.1 51.4 38.0

Age:

 

25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 Year of Immigration: 1990-1991 1992-1995 1996-1999 2000+

  44.6 28.8 ... ...

54.1 42.2 26.1 13.9

56.0 41.8 36.1 26.1

District of Residence: Jerusalem, Judea & Samaria Tel Aviv & Central Haifa & Northern Southern Jews Others

48.1 40.7 39.5 36.6

56.2 42.1 41.0 42.7

49.5 45.7 44.1 41.3

56.1 51.8 47.4 44.7  

41.1 32.2

46.1 24.8

46.8 31.8

Republics of Origin: c

58.8 52.6 41.4 30.9  

Ethnic-Religious Group:

European Republics Asian Republicsd

2010

52.1 32.2  

41.0 34.3

44.1 38.2

46.0 35.5

49.8 47.8

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial professions. Data for 1995—according to population census; for 2001-2010—according to Labor Force Surveys for corresponding years. c Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. d Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. a

b

184

The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

to look for work in their professions). Yet, it could also be that the earlier arrivals (primarily 1990–1991) were more motivated to find work in their professions. Other than that, the mass immigration of the early 1990s increased competition in the labor market, although at the same time it led to economic growth, which in turn increased the number of jobs in general, particularly for those with higher education. Nevertheless, the impact of the number of years in Israel per se cannot be ignored, because in each wave of immigration, the percentage of immigrants with higher education employed as professionals has increased (Table 4).

Place of Residence Comparison of the percentage of FSU immigrants with higher education employed as professionals by place of residence in Israel reveals that it is highest in the Jerusalem district (here including the West Bank areas of Judea and Samaria)—56% in 2010—even though the percentage of immigrants living in this area was not so high (approximately 7%). This has to do with the fact that Jerusalem is the home of many government, scientific, academic, and cultural institutions, while the possibilities of finding non-professional/unskilled work are limited. As a result, the first immigrants to settle in Jerusalem and its vicinity (among those of working age) were those who expected to find work in their professions and who were highly motivated. Next highest is Tel-Aviv and the Central district (52%), followed by Haifa and the North (47%), and last, the Southern district (45%). The percentages in all the districts increased between 1995 and 2010 (Table 4).

Jewish/Non-Jewish It is noteworthy that the percentage of FSU immigrants with higher education employed as professionals was greater among those who defined themselves as Jewish than it was among those who defined themselves otherwise. Moreover, the gap between Jews and non-Jews rose to 20% in 2010 (see Table 4). This can be partially explained by the fact that the percentage of Jews was higher in the earlier waves of immigration,10 10

According to CBS data, over 90% of those who immigrated from the FSU in 1990–1991 were Jewish according to Jewish law; 80% in 1992–1995; 57% in 1996–1999; less than half of those who arrived in 2000 and later were Jewish according to Jewish law. (CBS 2004; Tolts 2011, table 11). 185

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which managed better professionally in Israel. On the other hand, among the FSU immigrants, Jews were on average not as young as the “others” (since there were more mixed marriages among younger age groups). At first sight, this should have had the opposite effect (because younger immigrants usually manage better). However, the multivariate analysis shows that being Jewish has a separate positive impact on professional mobility (see below). This may not necessarily indicate discrimination against non-Jewish immigrants. One alternative explanation may lie in the socially accepted Jewish motivation to gravitate toward liberal, scientific, and academic professions. Another line of explanation might indicate a higher propensity or determination among the Jewish immigrants to remain permanently in Israel, which caused them to make greater efforts to find work in their fields. It is also possible that FSU immigrants who employed as professionals more often reported themselves as Jews (even if not registered as Jews by the Ministry of Interior).11

Republic of Origin The percentage of FSU immigrants with higher education employed as professionals is greater among those from the European republics than among those from the Caucasus and Asian Republics, although in 2010  this difference declined significantly. However, in the fifteen years 1995–2010, the percentage rose in both groups (Table 4). Unfortunately, the Labor Force Survey does not identify the republics of origin specifically.

Family Status and Employment of Spouse A comparison of the percentage of immigrants with higher education who are employed in professional positions, both married and unmarried, reveals different trends among men and women (Table 5). Among married men, the percentage of those employed as professionals in 2010 was slightly lower than among unmarried men (51% versus 53% 11

It must be stated that the question about religion in the Labor Force Survey is based not on official data, but on self-reporting. As a result, the percentage of non-Jews among FSU immigrants reported by LFS 2010 is only half of the number given by Census 2008 (based on official data of religion): 14% versus 28% respectively.

186

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respectively), whereas the opposite was true for women—the percentage was higher among those who were married than those who were not (49% versus 45% respectively). It may be speculated that married men felt the need to provide for their families and were, therefore, under social pressure to take any job, while married women sometimes could continue seeking work in their professions while their husbands maintained a secure income. It is also possible that married men are somewhat older than unmarried men, and that they experienced more difficulties in professional employment, while for married women their spouse’s support predominates over age factor.12 Nevertheless, the difference between married and unmarried immigrants (both men and women) was not particularly high (Table 5). The picture changes, however, when we take into account not only marital status, but also the occupation of the spouse in Israel (using data from the 1995 Census and the Labor Force Surveys from 2001 onwards). Among both men and women there were distinct differences between those whose spouses were also employed as professionals and those whose spouses were employed in other occupations or were not working at all (Table 5). For example, among immigrant men with higher education whose spouses were employed as professionals, some two-thirds (64%) were also employed as such, compared with only 44% of those whose wives were not working as professionals or were not working at all. A similar trend was found among married women, depending on the work of their spouses (65% versus 39% respectively). This indicates that the professional integration of married FSU immigrants is family-based. This could be partially explained by the fact that both spouses may generally belong to the same or similar age group, have the same (or equivalent) level of education, came to Israel at the same time (unless they met in Israel), and live in the same locality. In other words, the factors that affect one spouse generally will also affect the other. However, the multivariate analysis (see below) shows that the employment of the respondents’ spouses affects the employment of the respondents themselves over and above the other factors noted. First, when one spouse finds work in his/her profession, he/she can continue 12

Separate regressions for men and women (controlling by age) show slight positive impact or marital status (married or unmarried) on professional employment for both sexes. 187

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to support the other for a certain amount of time, allowing the latter to find professional work or to study rather than to take any job. Second, the first to find work can take advantage of contacts through colleagues to help find suitable employment for the other. Third, moral support and personal example are very important to successful employment. In this context, note that the professional employment status of those whose spouses are not employed in their professions (or are not employed at all) is even worse than those who are not married, particularly among the men (see Table 5). Table 5. Percentage of FSU Immigrants with Higher Education, 1990+ Employed as Professionalsa by Gender, Marital Status, and Spouse’s Occupationb   Males: Unmarried Married Thereof by spouse’s occupation: Not working or non-professional Professional Females: Unmarried Married Thereof by spouse’s occupation: Not working or non-professional Professional

1995

2001

2005

47.3 42.5

49.6 45.9

49.1 47.9

36.0 60.6

34.8 66.9

38.3 63.5

37.0 37.6

35.4 42.9

38.2 43.7

29.3 53.5

32.1 59.8

33.6 61.3

2010   52.7 51.4   44.0 64.2   45.4 49.3   39.1 64.9

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial professions. Data for 1995—according to population census; for 2001-2010—according to Labor Force Surveys for corresponding years.

a

b

Proficiency in Hebrew and English and Vocational Training Unfortunately, the Labor Force Surveys do not include data on language skills and professional courses and we therefore had to use the Social Surveys. The Social Surveys present three aspects of language ability: speaking, reading, and writing. We chose reading ability, because the ability to read English and Hebrew (above all to read professional 188

The Professional Mobility of FSU Immigrants in Israel, 1990-2010

literature) largely reflects the respondents’ readiness to work in their profession. According to the averaged data from the Social Surveys for 2003– 2006  and 2007–2010, among FSU immigrants with higher education who could read Hebrew “very well,” about three-quarters were employed as professionals, compared with only 7% of those who could not read Hebrew at all (Table 6). Table 6. Percentage of FSU Immigrants 1990+ Aged 20+ with Higher Education Employed as Professionalsa by Ability to Read Hebrew and Englishb Hebrew Ability to read: Very well Well Average Weak Not at all

English

2003-2006

2007-2010

2003-2006

71.7 56.3 38.5 22.3 6.7

74.9 60.1 44.1 25.1 6.9

72.4 64.5 48.6 34.9 21.0

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical and managerial professions. According to Social Surveys of Israeli CBS (average for 2003-2006  and 20072010); data for English not available after 2006.

a

b

Only the Social Surveys for 2003–2006 include data concerning the respondents’ command of English. Here, too, there was a statistically significant correlation between the ability to read English and professional employment among those with higher education, albeit slightly lower than in the case of Hebrew. Among those who could read English “very well,” 72% were employed as professionals, while among those who could not read English at all, only 21% were employed as professionals (see Table 6). It is logical to assume that there is a strong correlation between the ability to read English and Hebrew and the age of the respondents, and in the case of Hebrew, the number of years spent living in Israel. However, the examination of the “net impact” of the command of the languages on professional employment in Israel (i.e., controlling for age and years in Israel) based on the Social Surveys was problematic, due to the relatively small sample size. In addition, “reverse correlation” should also be taken into account—it is possible that those 189

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immigrants with higher education who were working in their profession had improved their Hebrew and English at their workplace. As the Social Survey data for 2007–2010  show, among FSU immigrants who had completed vocational training courses, the percentage of those employed as professionals was slightly higher than those who had not completed such courses (53% versus 47% respectively). Although the difference was not particularly great, it is significantly greater for men and for those who arrived in Israel after 1996 (Table 7), indicating that the courses had a considerable impact on the immigrants’ professional employment. Table 7. Percentage of FSU Immigrants 1990+ Aged 20+ with Higher Education Employed as Professionalsa by Gender, Year of Immigration, and Vocational Training Coursesb    

2007-2010 Studied

Did not study

Total Immigrants

52.6

46.8

Gender: Males Females

58.7 48.5

48.8 45.1

Year of immigration: 1990-1995 1996 and later

57.3 42.8

54.7 35.9

Employed in scientific, academic, liberal, technical, and managerial professions. According to Social Surveys of Israeli CBS (average for 2007-2010).

a

b

Professional Mobility in Israel among FSU Immigrants with Higher Education: Multivariate Analysis Since various factors affecting the professional mobility of FSU immigrants are mutually dependent, in order to measure the impact of each of them more accurately, we conducted a logistic regression multivariate analysis (Table 8). The source of the data was the Labor Force Surveys for 2001–2010 (surveys for earlier years do not include all the necessary information). 190

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Table 8. Main Determinants of Employment as Professionalsa in Israel for FSU Immigrants, 1990+, Aged 25-64 with Higher Education (Results of Logistic Regression)b

Gender (vs. Males): Females Age (vs. 25-34): 35-44 45-54 55-64 Year of Immigration (vs. 1990-1991): 1992-1995 1996-1999 2000 + Years in Israel (vs. 2 years or less): 3-5 years 6-9 years 10-14 years 15 years and more Academic Degree (vs. first degree—BA, BEd, BSc): Second degree (MA, MSc) Third degree (PhD) District of Residence (vs. Tel-Aviv & Central): Jerusalem, Judea & Samaria Haifa & Northern Southern Marital Status/Spouse’s Occupation (vs. unmarried): Married and spouse employed as Professional Married and spouse employed in other occupation/ not employed Ethnic-Religious Group (vs. Non-Jews): Jews Republics of Origin (vs. European Republicsc): Asian Republicsd Goodness of Fit (Cox & Shnell R Square), %

Odds’ Ratio

S.E.

  0.88*

0.004

0.43* 0.27* 0.16*   0.86* 0.68* 0.59*   1.94* 3.27* 4.82* 6.70*   2.21* 14.79*   1.20* 0.85* 0.89*   1.76* 0.84*     1.33*   0.83* 18.1 

0.005 0.005 0.006 0.005 0.006 0.009 0.016 0.015 0.016 0.016 0.004 0.014 0.006 0.004 0.005 0.005 0.005

0.006 0.006

* P