Germans or Jews? German-speaking Jews in post-war Europe: an introduction

Historians have devoted increasing attention in the past decade to the aftermath of the Shoah, focusing in particular on the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the American, British, and French occupation zones of Germany and Austria. A number of important studies have brought the crucial topic of migration to the fore, examining the £ight of Jewish DPs and their frustration at being denied entry to their chosen destinationsçmostly to Palestine, but also to the United States and elsewhere. For the most part these studies deal with Yiddish-speaking eastern European (primarily Polish) Jews who saw no future in a Europe awash with antisemitism; the overwhelming majority dreamt of joining the ranks of theJewish state-in-the-making in Palestine. In this reading the DP camps constitute an important part both of European and Israeli history, and slot comfortably into Zionist and cold war narratives on Europe, and especially on eastern Europeç that rejected any future for Jews in post-war Europe and instead valorized Palestine as the appropriate national project. The following articles complicate this perspective in a number of ways. Appearing in this and the next volume of the Year Book, they are drawn from a workshop on ‘Germans or Jews? German-Speaking Jews in Post-War Central Europe’ organized by the Leo Baeck Institute in London in cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and the Institute of Contemporary History (Czech Academy of Sciences), and held at the Center for Jewish History in New York in the summer of 2017. Many German-speaking Jews experienced discrimination and feared violence in the post-war months and years not because they were Jewish, but rather because they were German. Some became Zionists after the war, but this did not necessarily entail a loss of emotional ties to German culture and language. Moreover, even though many eventually settled in the United States and Israel, a considerable number opted to remain in Europe. Some even settled in Germany and endeavoured to re-establish Jewish communities in the face of stinging criticism from the new centres of the Jewish world in Israel and the United States. Three central themes emerge from the complex story recounted at the workshop and in the articles.