Project Details
Projekt
Jewish Foreign Policy’ and the Exodus of the Syrian Jews: Zionism, Migration, and the Diaspora (1948–1990
Applicant
Dr. Eldad Ben Aharon, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
African, American and Oceania Studies
Modern and Contemporary History
African, American and Oceania Studies
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528814864
Recent scholarship points out that there is a gap in the study of Jewish communities in the Middle East, arising from the notion that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 somehow represents a breaking point in Jewish history which artificially put an end to the rich history of Jews in the region. As a result of this phenomenon, the literature has almost entirely ignored, amongst other things, the diplomatic competition between American Jewish organizations and the state of Israel over the humanitarian crisis facing Syrian Jews, which spanned more than four decades (1948–1990). This project matters not only because it will fill an important gap in the research puzzle of Jewish communities in the Middle East post-1948, but also because it situates the study of the Syrian Jews in a wider disciplinary context of homeland–diaspora relations, which is fruitful for peace and conflict studies. This project will close the empirical gap between the disciplines above to make a promising contribution to study how relations between the Jewish homeland, which has long been considered the global centre of Jewish gravity, and American Jewish organizations, were challenged by perceptions of liberalization and tensions between the local and the global scopes of diplomatic action. In order to establish a novel analytical perspective, this project explores the main research question: how did the humanitarian crisis of the Syrian Jews (1948–1990) undermine relations between the state of Israel and American Jews? This project utilizes archival research supplemented by semi-structured interviews to hypothesize that although it appears that in the early years of statehood (1950s/1960s) Israel and the American Jewish organizations were entities united by ‘Jewish Foreign Policy’ (JFP), the crisis of the Syrian Jews actually caused frictions and schisms in their relationship long before the more recent period of crisis identified by current research. It extends the current state of the art in three respects. Conceptually, it breaks with the hitherto dominant bottom-up cultural and social history in the study of Jews in the Middle East until 1948 and supplements it with a top-down international history. Empirically, the project focuses on a wealth of untapped archival records recently declassified in the Israeli State Archives (ISA) and several other international archives, in both Hebrew and English. Methodologically, the project links a historical research question with qualitative research methods to produce a piece of innovative scholarship with relevance for the discipline of peace and conflict studies.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Israel, Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA
