Beyond flight and rescue: the migration setting of German Jewry before 1938

The article portrays and analyzes the choices and challenges for German Jews regarding the question of emigration in the 1930s against the background of the global migration regime at that time. The main argument is that in the 1930s migration questions for German Jews were more complex than many studies on the subject have been suggested until today. In order to understand the predicaments of the Germany Jews, the topic of German-Jewish migration is analyzed within a larger setting of international migration problems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In a first step, the German-Jewish situation of the 1930s is presented as part of an even bigger crisis which affected Jewish centers as Poland, Palestine or the United States. In a second step, the responses of the German Jews to the Nazi onslaught are analyzed within the framework of the entire emancipation era. The argument is substantiated by 1. a cross-reading of secondary sources on Jewish history in different regions; 2. debates of the German-Jewish public as published in articles, books and pamphlets and 3. memoirs of German Jews