If you were to visit the estate of notorious Nazi propagandist and war criminal Julius Streicher in 1946, you may have been surprised to see that the property had become the home of a group of Jewish teens and young adults. The estate had been transformed into Kibbutz Nili, a Zionist training farm meant to provide young Jewish DPs with the skills necessary to settle in Israel (or Palestine, as it remained at the time). Kibbutz Nili was one of a number of kibbutzim formed after WWII in Germany to build Zionist communities and to teach said agricultural skills. Kibbutz Buchenwald was the first of these projects, named after the concentration camp which its members had survived.
After World War II nearly 200,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) found themselves living in Allied camps in Germany. Most would spend year in these camps before being relocated. Some were repatriated to their home countries, other immigrated to Britain or the US, but a significant number would end up resettling in Israel.
In Jewish historian Avinoam J. Patt’s, “Living in Landsberg, Dreaming of Deganiah: Jewish Displaced Youths and Zionism after the Holocaust” from “We Are Here” he focuses on kibbutzim created by Jewish DPs in Europe and their significance in the rebuilding of a Jewish identity. Patt argues that the direct connection between DPs and the formation of Israel is over stated and that, “Zionism filled a crucial function for the Jewish DPs and proved appealing to a number of groups in postwar Germany, who all supported the Zionist project for different reasons. This support would lead to the creation of a flourishing Zionist network in the American zone of Germany whereby survivor youths could continue the process of Zionist immersion within the framework of kibbutzim and hakhsharot, and this did in fact ultimately aid in the creation of the State of Israel.”(p. 102)
Historian Gerald Cohen also questions the ubiquity of the Zionist movement and offers the argument that international humanitarianism was “crucial” in the formation of a Jewish nation. In “Extraterritorial Jews: Humanitarianism, Philosemitism, and the Advent of Jewish Statehood” he focusses on Jewish DPs living in Germany and the ways that international organizations were involved in defining a Jewish nation as a distinct entity and their role in the emigration of Jewish people to Palestine. Cohen concludes that, “As much as the historical agency claimed by the survivors of the Final Solution, the skillful determination of the Zionist movement, or the political backing of the Western and Eastern blocs, refugee humanitarianism enabled the reterritorialization of the Jews, a formidable rise from catastrophe to power sadly accompanied by the deterritorialization of another people.” (p. 149)
While Patt and Cohen focus on Jewish DPs and their migration to Palestine in the postwar period, there were Jews in Europe who had already begun an exodus to Palestine in the years leading up to WWII. Israeli historian Tom Segev challenges some of the common perceptions about the immigration of Jews to Israel in a 1993 journal article, “The Streets are Paved with Money.” This article specifically looks at German Jews and the haavara agreement, which allowed German Jews to transfer funds and themselves to Palestine. The negotiations for this agreement began in the early 1930s, as the situation for Jews in Germany grew increasingly difficult. This article argues that not all Jews were ideologically homogenous, and in particular that the motivation of German Jews in negotiating their immigration to Israel was not firmly rooted in Zionist ideology. “Though most of the immigrants from Germany, and their children after them, stayed in Israel, most did indeed come against their will, as refugees; they were not Zionists.” (p. 34)
Postwar Zionism is often presented as a primarily political or even spiritual movement, however, many of those who supported the emigration of Jews to Israel did so for more pragmatic reasons. These three historians present arguments which challenge traditional narratives about the application of Zionism and the extent to which the movement alone was responsible for the relocation of Jewish DPs to Israel.
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I think you did a really good job of summarizing and comparing the historiographical arguments of the different historians. This issue, I think, really highlighted the evolution of the perspective of historical events. How historians continue to be influenced by modern events.