Refugees in an Age of Genocide

Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century

Katharine Knox, Tony Kushner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780714647838
• eBook ISBN: 9781136313264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a study of the history of global refugee movements over the 20th century, ranging from east European Jews fleeing Tsarist oppression at the turn of the century to asylum seekers from the former Zaire and Yugoslavia. Recognizing that the problem of refugees is a universal one, the authors emphasize the human element which should be at the forefront of both the study of refugees and responses to them.

PART 1

The Closing of Asylum, 1900–1932

1

Refugees in the Age of Mass Immigration: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the First World War

THE ORIGINS OF THE JEWISH REFUGEE MOVEMENT

From 1881 (the year of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II) to the outbreak of the First World War, some 2.5 million Jews left the Russian Empire, part of the massive shift of population from eastern and southern Europe. The Jews had lived in Russia for many centuries, developing their own distinctive religious and cultural life, but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century they were largely confined to the Tale of Settlement’ (15 provinces in the north-west and south-west of Russia – Belorussia, Lithuania, the Ukraine and New Russia), totalling nearly three million people. An additional one million Jews lived in the Kingdom of Poland. Of the Jews of the Pale, it has been estimated that just over 80 per cent lived in towns or shtetlekh. The uneven pattern of modernisation in the Russian and Russian Jewish economy and culture, alongside restrictions on freedom and substantial population growth, led to an increasin3ly impoverished and dislocated Jewish community ripe for emigration. The United States was the biggest recipient of this global movement, with a minimum of 200,000 and a maximum of one million immigrants of all types and from all countries per annum in this period. But if the United States was the dominant place of settlement, other countries, particularly Britain, also experienced an inflow. Statistics in this area are notoriously unreliable, but Lloyd Gartner has estimated that some half a million Jews from the Russian Empire spent at least two years in Britain during the era of mass immigration.¹

Jews from eastern Europe were no strangers to Britain before 1881; the movement of large numbers of Jews from the Russian Empire began in the 1840s, starting the transformation of British Jewry from its previous domination by those from Germany and Holland. The expansion of Manchester Jewry in the nineteenth century, for example, soon to emerge as the largest provincial community in Britain, was based on this new east European influx.² In classic mythology, the Jewish tide of immigration began after the pogroms which affected all Jews following the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. That the Jewish exodus preceded this event and was actually far more pronounced in the 1890s than in the 1880s indicates that the situation was far more complex than is often assumed. Indeed, many of those leaving the Russian Empire came from areas that were not directly affected by antisemitic violence. Nevertheless, the fear as well as the reality of violence was of great importance. Although every fresh outbreak of disturbances in the period up to the First World War created a new peak of Jewish refugees, the pressures experienced by the Jews of the Russian Empire were multifarious and extended beyond the experience of extreme collective violence.³

None of the factors encouraging Jewish emigration can be seen in isolation. For many, however, economic and other discrimination proved to be intolerable. In short, although the Jewish population of the Russian Empire grew throughout the age of mass immigration – in spite of the millions leaving – the opportunities to make a living and to enjoy a free existence constantly diminished. The drastic limitations on their freedom were illustrated by a five page list of discriminatory legislation gathered in a report by the Russo-Jewish and Jewish Board of Guardians Conjoint Committee (formed in Britain in 1891 to help the victims of Russian persecution) covering the years 1882 to 1908.⁴ It highlighted 44 sets of restrictions on the rights of Russian Jews, especially the so-called May Laws of 1882 which prohibited

attesting leases of real estate, situate outside the Jewish Pale and the prohibition of granting power for the administration thereof by Jews. The prohibition for Jews to settle in the Governments constituting the Jewish Pale outside the towns and villages. The prohibition to make contracts of sale and mortgage in the name of Jews, relating to real estate situate outside the Jewish Pale.⁵

With parallels to the Nazi regime before the Second World War, the Tsarist state encouraged Jewish emigration yet made it difficult and dangerous for Jews to leave. The situation of the Jews worsened at the turn of the century as the Russian economy and political situation deteriorated rapidly. The most infamous massacre of Jews occurred in the city of Kishinev in Bessarabia in 1903. The pogrom left 47 Jews dead and hundreds more seriously injured much to the outrage of international opinion. Although there were other, more murderous pogroms, Kishinev made a particularly deep impact.⁶ Its memory was most famously preserved in ‘The City of Slaughter’ by the Russian Jewish poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Its opening lines:

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead

were resonant in east European Jewish life throughout the inter-war period and into the Holocaust years.⁷

The misery and suffering of Russian Jews was increased by the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 leading to a new wave of pogroms. Medieval accusations of ritual murder combined with other forms of religious prejudice, rampant nationalism and more contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories, made Jews vulnerable to attack from large sections of the populace. The Tsarist state, while not directly involved in planning the pogroms as was once widely believed, even so proved incapable of dealing adequately with the appalling violence and loss of life.⁸

The Russian revolution of 1905 proved to be the stimulus for a fresh outbreak of violence with close on 50 pogroms in that year alone. Russian right-wingers, most notoriously the Black Hundreds, blamed Jews for spreading socialist and radical politics. Although Jews increasingly mobilised themselves against attack and liberal and radical Russians added their voice of protest, many more took what opportunity there was to leave the land of their oppression. Jack Myers was a British Jew who went to Russia in November 1905 as part of a team allocating relief funding. Some Jewish communal figures in the Western democracies were opposed to the Jews of Russia leaving en masse, believing pessimistically that the receiving societies would be unable to cope and optimistically that Russia might yet be persuaded to treat the Jews as equal citizens with full rights.⁹ On witnessing the reality of the Russian Empire Myers recognised how the flow was unstoppable. As he wrote in his diary on 29 November 1905:

The scene at Kieff station was indescribable [over a hundred people had been killed in the pogrom in the town]. The station is an open one – crowded with people. One sees the haggard care-worn Jews and Jewesses presumably leaving the land of their birth for one where security for life and property will be greater … The confusion is bewildering … We learn something of the character and extent of the damage done in the town during the recent excesses. Eight thousand families numbering at least 40,000 souls were affected and the damage done amounted to some 8 million roubles (nearly one million pounds). Shops and houses were plundered and destroyed, the schools were wrecked, men killed and wounded…. One is not surprised, indeed I wonder greatly that more who can do not express their desire to leave this hapless and cursed land.¹⁰

Adding to this immense movement were those Jews escaping the intense poverty and discrimination of Galicia, in the eastern province of Austria from where 120,000 Jews out of 900,000 left during the 1890s. An even greater proportion abandoned Romania: some 30 per cent of the country’s 270,000 Jews emigrated to the USA alone in the years from 1881 to 1914, having experienced profound antisemitism from state and populace as well as the economic problems affecting east European society as a whole.¹¹ Cheap steerage tickets on steamships and the growth of mass international communications eased this enormous shift in population, but emigration was not straightforward. The millions attempting to leave faced a Western world that was increasingly hostile to their arrival and settlement. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the prospect of immigration control, formal or informal, and based increasingly on racialised criteria biased against non-‘Nordics’ (essentially those from eastern and southern Europe as well as Asia), loomed larger. In 1891 the United States Congress passed legislation that enabled immigrants to be rejected on grounds that they were paupers or likely to become public charges.¹² In Britain, the first anti-immigrant organisation was created in the 1880s and attempts were made to pass anti-alien legislation on several occasions in the following decade. Trade improvements in the second half of the 1890s weakened anti-alienism, but it was given fresh impetus by the rampant nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia and antisemitism linked to the Boer War.¹³

The Jewish population of South Africa had increased from roughly 10,000 in 1891 to 24,000 at the start of the Boer War in 1899, largely through the influx of Lithuanian Jews, the so-called ‘Peruvians’. The South African census of 1904 recorded over 38,000 Jews but this near-doubling of the Jewish population in five years hides the fact that although many Jewish immigrants were entering South Africa, others were being encouraged or forced to depart.¹⁴ Indeed, the fluidity of Jewish migration patterns was very much part and parcel of the age of mass movement. Transmigrancy, the settling in one country for a limited period before moving on to another, and the return – forced or voluntary – to eastern Europe were integral to the story as a whole. Settled communities made up of east European Jews were formed in this period, or more commonly transformed existing Jewish communities, but alongside such settlements were those still on the move.¹⁵ Britain and its ports played an important role in the complex shifting of populations. The next section will explore the local, national and global aspects of one group of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain during February 1900 – a vivid case history of the fluidity of Jewish immigrant life at the turn of the century.

THE GROWTH OF ANTI-ALIENISM IN BRITAIN AND BEYOND

Considering the scale of shipping movements between Britain and South Africa throughout the Boer War, it is remarkable how much attention the transport Cheshire, carrying just 600 passengers, received before its arrival. It can only be explained by the antisemitism that had intensified in British culture and politics during the Anglo-Boer conflict. Accusations were levelled that the war was being fought for Jewish financial interests and the equally false claim was made that Jews were not supporting or contributing to the British war effort.¹⁶ The first indication of trouble came in a telegram sent by Sir Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner in South Africa. Widely reported in the British press, it warned that 350 foreign Jews on board the Cheshire had been allowed to leave South Africa but stressed that they had sufficient funds for further passage once arriving in Britain: ‘No help should be given to them on their arrival as anyone asking for it would be an imposter’.¹⁷ In fact, many of the refugees arrived almost penniless and money had to be raised through the Jewish Board of Guardians (via the Lord Mayor of London’s fund) to help them on their way. Rather than imposters, the refugees were in an appalling state and took the opportunity of free passage to leave the poverty and increasing hostility of South African society.¹⁸ The responses in Britain to those on board the Cheshire ranged from antagonism with barely disguised antisemitism through to sympathy and kindness. Indeed, the terminology used to describe these Jews revealed changing contemporary attitudes with major implications for the century ahead. They were labelled as either unwanted aliens and dangerous foreigners (especially in contrast to the ‘honest’ Englishmen on board) or refugees deserving pity and support.

The coverage in the Daily Mail, a conservative popular newspaper founded in 1896, which had a circulation of over 1.25 million and a theme of anti-alienism throughout its history, was the most hostile. Its sensationalist report, significantly entitled ‘So-Called Refugees’, was almost totally inaccurate but exposed the mechanisms used at the turn of the century to create a popular Englishness standing in stark contrast to the ‘alien Jew’:

There landed yesterday at Southampton from the transport Cheshire over 600 so-called refugees, their passages having been paid out of the Lord Mayor’s Fund; and, upon the unanimous testimony of the ship’s officers, there was scarce a hundred of them that had, by right, deserved such help, and these were the Englishmen of the party. The rest were Jews. The ship seemed alive with them. There were Russian Jews, Polish Jews, German Jews, Peruvian Jews, all kinds of Jews, all manner of Jews. They fought and jostled for the foremost places at the gang-ways; they rushed and pushed and struggled into the troop-shed, where the Mayor of Southampton … had provided free refreshments…. They fought for places on the train … the women and children were left to take their chances unaided … Then, incredible as it may seem, the moment they were in the carriages THEY BEGAN TO GAMBLE … [t]hese were the penniless refugees and when the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare.

There were a few quiet, sad-faced Englishmen – men who had gone to South Africa, who had made a little money, who had lost their all through the war. One man, with scarcely a rag of warm clothing on him, whose only asset was a tin of sandwiches, admitted he was dead broke, but refused to take a half-penny. These men stood by each other in a proud, shame-faced sort of way, and looked on in silence…¹⁹

The viciousness of this article, and the refusal of the Daily Mail to publish a rebuttal, forced the Jewish Chronicle into a major defence of those on board and the care that had been provided for them. The Jewish community would have been far happier had no publicity been received at all regarding the Cheshire, but the accusations were so powerful that they could not remain unanswered. Moreover, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle realised that this specific attack on foreign Jews was part of a much broader antipathy to aliens:

We are sorry to see that the Daily Mail has seen fit to indulge in a very wild tirade against the Jews on the ‘Cheshire’, to represent them a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Sir Herman Ouseley, Commission for Racial Equality
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Afterword: Kosovo
• INTRODUCTION: Refugees, Place and Memory
• PART 1 THE CLOSING OF ASYLUM, 1900–1932
• PART 2 THE FASCIST ERA, 1933–1945
• PART 3 REFUGEES FROM THE COLD WAR
• PART 4 GOVERNMENT ENFORCED DISPERSAL DURING THE 1970s AND 1980s
• PART 5 WORLD ASYLUM SEEKERS AT THE END OF THE CENTURY: CLOSING THE DOORS
• CONCLUSION: Asylum, Refugees and ‘Home’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index