'Returning to Yerussalem': Exile, Return and Oral History

Gadi BenEzer, The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977-1985, Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative, Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0-415-27363-3, £60.

Although migration has attracted substantial historical investigation, contemporary historians have neglected the more specific study of refugees and forced migrants despite the global saliency of the phenomena and the multidisciplinary nature of the subject matter. Yet a historical perspective implicitly informs much of our understanding of the way political and social change, often over protracted periods, create the 'root causes' of persecution, violence and the humanitarian crises of refugee exodus. Similarly, development-induced, as well as war-generated, forced displacement irrevocably changes people's social world and again a historical perspective should enhance our insights into these processes. But it has usually been left to non-historians to make these connections, which regrettably leaves the history tangential to the main discourse.

Gadi BenEzer's exploration of The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977-1985, the ninth volume in Routledge's Studies in Memory and Narrative series, follows this tradition. Like many other contributions in this field, it is not an obviously 'historical' book—BenEzer's academic and professional perspectives are those of the social psychologist using the tools of a social anthropologist. Nonetheless a historical perspective enriches the meaning of this intimate study which provides much to engage the historian in its substantive content and methodological approach. The book discusses the dramatic journey to Israel undertaken by 20,000 Ethiopian Jews, between 1977 and 1985, fulfilling a centuries-old dream of 'returning to Yerussalem', in the words of one of BenEzer's narrators. More precisely, the book's originality derives from two attributes. First the journey is conceptualized as a construct by which to investigate its significance as an agency of change. Second it uses narrative accounts as the methodology to explore the significance and meaning of the journey for the individuals and the community who undertook it. Although a study of one, small, unique group of displaced migrants returning 'home', the book transcends the immediacy of the story and engages wider discourses both about the powerful and life-changing processes which affected migrants during their passage, and also about the meaning of return. For this precisely-focused case study, with its rich ethnographies based on the narratives of forty-five of those who made the journey, intersects crosscurrents of a broader research agenda in the study of forced displacement and oral history. Methodologically, its importance lies in deploying narrative interviews as the tool to investigate and understand the phenomenon of the journey.

Reviewing the book provides the opportunity to place a critique within the wider frame which seeks to show how historical research, particularly oral history, might better contribute to the study of displacement and forced migration in general, and to refugee studies more specifically. The objective here is to stimulate a closer engagement by historians with this dynamic and perplexing field of academic investigation. In order to make these connections it is necessary to sketch the contours of the development of the 'refugee regime' on the one hand, and then the academic discourse which seeks to understand and explain the phenomenon on the other. Then the review returns to Gadi BenEzer's book in to explore its significance.

Researching the World of Refugees

Whilst migration has existed for millennia, Heinrich Böll's epigraph on the twentieth century as a 'century of refugees and prisoners' captures a period of world history marked by an unprecedented level of forced migration. It was a century during which an international regime (the United Nations High Commission for Refugees - UNHCR), a concept of a refugee, and a definition in international law were insti-tutionalized under the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.¹ A large-scale international humanitarian regime now exists to assist refugees covered in my overview.² Millions of ordinary people were forcibly...