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142 SHOFAR Fa111997 Vol. 16, No.1 misguided ideas, and the failure of outside powers, including the United States, to acknowledge the urgency and desperation of the situation facing the Jews. Overall, The Holocaust and the Jews ofMarseille is an excellent addition to the growing scholarly literature on the treatment of the Jews in Vichy France. Ryan's research is exceptionally rich and her argument is compelling. The reader who wishes to know how the discriminatory actions of the Vichy government affected ordinary Jewish citizens and the foreign Jews who vainly sought refuge from Nazi Germany in France will fmd no better general introduction in English than this book. John F. Sweets Department of History University of Kansas False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust, edited by Paul R. Bartrop. Lanham, MD: University Press ofAmerica, 1995. 293 pp. $49.00. False Havens is a useful book. It is the only convenient source I know of that records and analyzes the response of the various member nations of the British Empire to the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s. And not surprisingly the response was uniform: everywhere Jews were not welcome, thank you very much. In every country of the British Commonwealth, in every colony in the Empire, there was some sympathy for the plight of the Jews of Germany and Austria, but not much else. Only apathy. It was this indifference throughout the Western world which ultimately doomed the Jews of Europe. European Jewry was not so much trapped in a whirlwind of systematic mass murder as they were abandoned to it. The Nazis may have planned and executed the Holocaust, but the rest of the world was complicit. The nations of the world were put to the test ofcivilization and were found wanting. Not one nation showed generosity of spirit, not one made the Jewish plight a priority, and not one opened wide its doors to the hunted European Jewish community. Rescue required sanctuary, and there was none. Amongst the most niggardly in providing sanctuary were those countries and colonies that are the subject of this book. Edited by Paul Bartrop, an Australian historian, False Havens examines the behavior and attitude of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and Newfoundland, which was a British Crown Colony until it joined Canada in 1949. And though there is very little that is new in this book, the bringing together under one cover of the story of Commonwealth venality and bigotry makes this a valuable addition to the literature of the Holocaust. What stands out about these Commonwealth countries is that, aside from Ireland, Book Reviews 143 all had a long tradition of welcoming immigrants, so long as they were white and of European origin. And with the exception of Newfoundland all had relatively tolerant migration policies. Yet when it came to Jews, undoubtedly the most desperate immigrants of the twentieth century, all outdid one another in devising excuses why Jews were unacceptable. Each produced public opinion polls, or argued the need for national unity, or pleaded poverty or lack of employment possibilities, or the need to follow the example of the Mother Country to rationalize the clanging shut of their immigration gates. But what united them was a consuming antisemitism that permeated

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