Zwischen ‚Staatsbürgertreue’ und dem Gefühl jüdischer Zusammengehörigkeit: Schwedische Juden in den 1930er Jahren

This article examines the position of the Stockholm Jewish community within Swedish society as it relates to the requests of Jewish refugees for immigration to Sweden in the 1930s. How far was the commitment for the Jewish immigrants sustained by a feeling of ‘Jewish unity’ or in how far dominated the decidedly Swedish self-understanding of many Stockholm Jews the self-image to such a degree, that no necessity was seen to risk ones own secure position for the fate of ‘others’, i.e. foreign Jews? While the community representative called out for support of the threatened ‘Jewish brothers in faith’ very soon after Hitlers takeover, it nonetheless accepted the restrictive immigration guidelines of the Swedish government by and large. Only after many community members had received desperate letters from German relatives after the progroms of November 1938, did they press their representative to stand up for increased immigration. The consistent, albeit extremely careful, conflict-avoiding efforts of the community representatives thus seem to have reached their limits as soon as their own integration in Swedish society threatened to be questioned