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I would like to thank Anne Betten, Laura Hobson Faure, special guest editor Thomas Kühne, Editor-in-Chief Andrew Port, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of this article. The research for this article was made possible thanks to the generous help of the German Academic Exchange Service, the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (Technische Universität Berlin), the Minerva Institute for German History (Tel Aviv University), and the Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust (Tel Aviv University).
Between 1933 and 1941, nearly 55,000 Jews from Germany migrated to the British Mandate of Palestine as a result of Nazi persecution. Another 9,500 Jews from Austria migrated to Palestine after the so-called Anschluss of March 1938; 11,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia followed after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, some of whom were German-speaking. In total, 90,000 German-speaking Jews found refuge in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, thus representing nearly 15 percent of the yishuv (i.e., the Jewish settlement in Palestine).1 The yishuv was a community of immigrants, but it did not easily absorb this influx. Before 1933, only a few thousand German-speaking Jews had migrated to Palestine. And, though this migration has been labeled the “Fifth (or German) Aliyah” in Zionist historiography, a majority of the German-speaking Jews had not planned on “ascending” to the Promised Land. Most of them emigrated out of necessity and would have stayed in Europe, had the Nazis not come to power. Consequently, Jews in the yishuv reproached the German Jews—called Yekkes—for their reluctance to integrate. The term Yekke brings to mind the stereotype of highly cultured urban intellectuals: it connotes cultural difference and formal stiffness. According to the dominant etymology, the word derives from the Yiddish word for “jacket.” The pun allegedly plays on the Yekkes’ inadequate clothing choices (i.e., wearing a jacket, or sports coat, in desert conditions) as a trace of their bourgeois past. It was meant to ridicule German-speaking Jews and mock their deeply habitualized formal manners. Yet, over time, the term lost its pejorative connotations.2
Though German-Jewish emigration to Palestine has been researched widely, not all aspects have received the same attention.3 Numerous studies have stressed the Yekkes’ “great intellectual contribution” to...