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Diaspora 5:3 1996 The Impossible Ethnie: Jews and Multiculturalism in Australia Jon Stratton Curtin University of Technology This article discusses the situation of Jews in the context of Australia's governmental policy of multiculturalism. It is often claimed that the assimilationist and integrationist population management policies of the era of the White Australia policy are thoroughly removed from the practices of multiculturalism. I want to suggest, rather, that there is a complex continuity between the two policies, that they rest on uncomfortably similar assumptions about "race" and about the connections between "race" and "culture ." My discussion centers on the circumstance of Jews in Australian multiculturalism. The ideology of ethnicity is central to multiculturalism. In order to become an "ethnic group," a community has to fulfill a number of criteria. Most importantly, as identified in government pamphlets concerned with multiculturalism, communities should ideally have a single language and a single national origin. Jews have neither. Are they, then, an ethnic group, or perhaps a religious group? In this way the ambivalent status of Jews replays the Enlightenment debates over whether Jews were a religious or a national grouping. I end the article with a discussion of how the Holocaust has come to stand in for a national origin, providing Jews with a common reference point outside of Australia. I could have, and but for want of space perhaps would have, gone on to discuss the preoccupation with Zionism among Australian Jews and Australian political leaders—the recent Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, is the most obvious example. Here, I can only gesture to the complex ways in which Israel serves teleologically as a pseudo-national origin for sections of the Jewish community and the rest of the Australian population alike. Race and Ethnicity and Jews Jewswere problematicallyracializedthroughtheWhiteAustralia policy. This policy was put in place in 1901, when the separate colonies federated to form Australia. The first Act passed by the new Commonwealth government was the Commonwealth Immigration 339 Diaspora 5:3 1996 Restriction Act. Using educational ability as a disguise for discrimination in terms of "race," the Act "prohibit[ed] the entry into Australia of any person who, when asked to do so, fail[ed] to write out at dictation, and sign in the presence of an officer, a passage of fifty words in length in a European language" (Willard 121). Four years later, after representations from the Japanese, the Act dropped the stipulation that the language had to be European. The irony here, and what made the Act so notorious, was that the examining officer was at liberty to choose the language in which the prospective immigrant was to take dictation. In this way, if a person applied who was considered to be of a race undesirable for settlement in Australia—that is, of a "non-white" race—then they could be given the test in a language they would be unlikely to know. Who was considered "non-white" was basically determined by an idea of an equivalence between British and "white." Hence, the further towards the Mediterranean, the more "non-white" people of European origin became. However, at the turn of the century the key use of the Act was to keep out "Asiatics," particularly Chinese, many of whom had arrived in the colonies in the nineteenth century. Within the context of the White Australia policy, Jews were ambivalently racialized. There developed a tendency, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, in Britain, to think of Jews as "Oriental," though in the main Anglo-Jews continued to the thought of as "white." In Australia, right through to the Second World War, western European Jews tended to be thought of as "white" while eastern European Jews, that is Yiddish speakers and the Sephardim, tended to be thought of as "Asian" (Stratton 1996). The ambivalence of Jewish racialization during the period of the White Australia policy provides an important deconstructive lever for understanding the role of the discourse of race in the construction of Australian national identity through the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, in historically oriented accounts of the White Australia policy, which do not problematize their usage of race, Jews are remarkably absent.1 Importantly...

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