The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WW II (review)

This edited collection consists of papers that were presented at an international conference held in May 2001 at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. As its title indicates, the book undertakes to explore the reception, after the war, of Jews returning to their home countries. Some of the essays expand on this task to include deported and displaced Jews seeking to settle in Western Europe. The naïve reader hopes to learn that the special suffering of deported European Jews was recognized, if not by governments distracted by postwar politics, then at least by former neighbors, colleagues, or schoolmates. But, arranged to permit comparison of policies in Western Europe with those in Eastern Europe, the essays document a pattern of antisemitism even in the aftermath of the Shoah—particularly during the immediate postwar period (1945–1947).

The West European countries analyzed in this work are France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. As these nations emerged from German occupation, they committed themselves to a return to liberal republican traditions, according to which all citizens were equal and none enjoyed privileges by reason of birth. Thus conferral of special status on Jewish returnees among all victims of fascism, or even recognition of Jews' particular suffering, would violate the principles of liberalism. This political stance had ironic and sometimes tragic results for returning Jews. As Frank Caestecker informs us, Belgian authorities labeled all Germans in their country—whether persecuted Jews, former Nazis, or ordinary citizens—suspect foreigners subject to internment. Far from grasping the inappropriateness of housing former SS guards with former death camp inmates, Belgian authorities considered surviving Jews likely collaborators (p. 84). In Renée Poznanski's analysis, France applied the label of "returnee" primarily to labor conscripts and prisoners of war, overlooking or suppressing the experience of returning Jews (p. 26).

The nations to which the Jews were returning thus faced a dilemma: they wanted to reject decisively the Nazi ideological classifications that had led to lethal discrimination against Jews, while at the same recognizing Jewish suffering as special. Indeed, as Bankier points out in his introduction, European governments-in-exile repealed anti-Jewish measures imposed by the Nazis even as the war continued (p. viii). The rapid dismantlement of segregating regulations imposed by the Nazi occupiers implied a return to a status quo ante, with full citizenship rights for returning deportees. But governments (and individuals) faced with the burdens inherent in recovering from the war often were loath to allocate their scant resources to a particular victim group. Further, returning Jews frequently faced difficulties in recovering lost property. The new inhabitants of "aryanized" apartments were reluctant to give them up; in many cases neighbors and friends who were holding family property for safekeeping refused to return it. Government policy leaned so far toward eliminating social discrimination that it also eliminated certain protections, leaving Jews without state support in their property claim cases.

Likewise, in East European countries, ideological concerns prevented the categorization of returning Jews as a class deserving particular assistance. Groups that might identify as separate national units could not be permitted within communist states. In the Soviet Union, an unexpected result of this stance was that Jewish life centered increasingly around formal religious communities. This was the only state-sanctioned way for Soviet Jews (who before the war had been largely secular) to organize. In his contribution, Yaacov Ro'i details the reconstruction of Jewish communities and the rich fabric of postwar Jewish life during 1944–1947. Jewish communities found that when they condemned fascism expressly, they could commemorate the victims of the Shoah without provoking official reaction (p. 200).

The same could not be said for the other East European nations presented in this collection: Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary. Here, a virulent antisemitism continued unabated through the war years and into the postwar period. In...