Viola Alianov-Rautenberg. Israel Studies. Volume 26, Issue 3, Fall 2021.
The article focuses on German Jewish immigrants and their memories of encounters with the British in Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, as recorded in oral history interviews with them. Their affinity and perceived cultural similarity with the British is contextualized here using contemporary sources like newspaper articles, administrative and ego documents. The article offers new perspectives on the interaction between the British and the Jews of the era, internal conflicts within the Yishuv, and the self-perception of Central European immigrants.
Introduction
“In a way, I am a product of the Mandate—and I say this deliberately. […] The whole English way of living had a formative influence on my life.”
In these words, Ruth B. Reflects on the Ramifications of Her childhood in Mandatory Palestine. She was born into a well-to-do middle-class family in Dresden, Germany. Her mother, a singer, and her father, a dentist, had been active in Zionist organizations in Germany. In 1936, when Ruth B. was ten years old, the family immigrated from Nazi Germany to Palestine and settled in Haifa. Ruth grew up on the Carmel, in a neighborhood almost exclusively inhabited at the time by immigrants from Germany.
While most of the family’s acquaintances were fellow Central European immigrants, Ruth B’s life was influenced by the presence of the British in Haifa. Her father’s dental practice included members of the British administration, and Ruth’s family played tennis at the Haifa tennis club with British and well-to-to European families. When she turned fifteen, Ruth refused to continue studying at the Hugim School in Haifa with her German immigrant classmates, and insisted on enrolling at the Haifa English High school for Girls, where she hoped to receive a better education and an opportunity to study in Britain after graduation. The interactions of Ruth’s family with the British ran a gamut of potential encounters: professional, social, and also, eventually Ruth’s unusual choice to continue her studies in the English rather than Hebrew system of education. In her eighties at the time of my interview with her, Ruth recalled fondly, almost defiantly, the formative influence of the British Mandate on her life.
More than seven decades after the end of the Mandate, it is rare to hear Israelis cite British influence as crucial to their development during those pre-state years, let alone reminisce about leisure time spent socializing with the British colonizers. The dominant motif in Israeli collective memory about the period has been the idealized anti-British struggle in the country and the aversion of Jews in Palestine to “perfidious Albion.” Only recently has research on the subject begun to explore this narrative aspect and question the subsequent downplaying of British influence in Israeli historiography.
Over the course of my forty oral interviews with individuals who emigrated to Palestine from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1940, such memories of the British were surprising. Most of the 60,000 immigrants of this wave had belonged to the middle class before 1933 and experienced extreme downward social mobility after their immigration. In Palestine they had to struggle with occupational changes, unemployment, a new language, a different climate, different foods, and an unfamiliar culture, yet one of their greatest challenges was finding a place in the new society which consisted of the organized Jewish community, the Arab community, and the British. While some, like Ruth B. interacted with the British personally, most German immigrants of the 1930’s and 1940’s did not, though they recalled an affinity and perceived cultural similarity with the British. The article explores this phenomenon through two controversial issues: socialization with non-Jews and the reencounter between German and Eastern European Jews in their new land.
Against the background of these two issues my exploration of the German-Jewish affinity for the British offers a twofold contribution to research on the Mandate period and its legacy: firstly, by introducing into the discourse about the contributions of the German Jewish immigration to the emerging state the less-commonly considered subject of their social interactions within Mandatory Palestine. The encounter with the British, to the best of my knowledge, has not been the subject of any dedicated study yet. Secondly, it links the encounter with the British, with the research literature on Jewish-British relations in Mandatory Palestine. While political relations between the two entities have been studied exhaustively, their social encounters in leisure hours and everyday life are understudied, and overly-generalized. Rather than using my interviews with German Jewish immigrants to quantify the scope of their interactions with the British, I argue here that their affinity for the British was the result of a struggle to establish their place in the new society—as seen both in the contemporaneous discourse of the Yishuv and that of present day Israel.
History, Memory, and Historiography
When the German Jews arrived in Palestine, the relationship between the Yishuv and the British was politically cooperative. Because the Yishuv leadership assumed that the British Mandate was temporary and would eventually allow the creation of a Jewish state the British were accepted, albeit ambivalently, both as allies and occupiers. Although relations deteriorated in 1939 with the issuing of the White Paper which severely limited the immigration of Jewish refugees from Europe, and even more so when the Yishuv carried out paramilitary operations against the British, cooperation continued in many spheres.
Private contact with non-Jews, however, was limited and scrutinized. The new immigrants found themselves in an ongoing struggle to define the boundaries of the state-in-the-making. Since neither the British nor the members of the Yishuv were inclined to intermingle, contact between them was limited to professional relations. For various reasons, the British based in Palestine socialized mainly within their expatriate community. They knew their stay was temporary, there was a language barrier, and they did not necessarily view the natives as equals. Members of the Yishuv, for their part, viewed mixing with the British as undesirable given their desire to create a Jewish state with a unique Hebrew culture. Moreover, it has been claimed, there was no interest or cultural affinity between the two groups. This alleged lack of mutual interest, however, must be seen in the light of the fact that for Jews, socializing with the British had a taboo character and was therefore rejected. As Deborah Bernstein has shown, boundary-crossing with non-Jewish groups was perceived as “contested contact” in the Yishuv and a potential threat to the national project. The perception, she argues, was gendered as it was primarily women who were seen as crossing boundaries to “men on the other side.”
One place where we find depictions of friendships and even romance between the British and the Jews is Israeli literature about the Mandate period. Eitan Bar-Yosef analyzes this phenomenon as “colonial nostalgia” in post-1967 Israeli culture. According to Bar-Yosef, these fictional interactions express a longing for the Mandate as a cosmopolitan haven and must be understood in the context of the Israeli occupation and the failing peace process. They reflect therefore the Israeli present rather than actual encounters in Mandatory Palestine. But is this also true of the German Jews who relate positive memories of the British, or is their case different? Indeed, Tom Segev suggests that other than the Sephardim of the Old Yishuv, German Jews were the only members of the Yishuv who socialized with the British. However, such an assessment, not supported by sources, seems to be a stereotypical othering of the German newcomers as not fitting into Yishuv society due to their alleged bourgeois norms and culture.
How, then, can oral history be utilized to critically evaluate the encounter between the German-Jewish immigrants and the British in Mandatory Palestine? The utilization of oral history—which has the double meaning of a source group and the method of creating such sources—is controversial among historians. Interviews are of limited significance, they argue, when conducted with hindsight, since memory tends to be selective and changes over time yet, they provide access to historical data that does not exist in written form. Furthermore, they permit an assessment of the relations between the German immigrants with Jewish and non-Jewish groups in Palestine, rarely discussed in other sources, given their contested nature. The interviewees described events which had occurred 70 years earlier. Their observations of the 1930s and 1940s bear witness to their current situation but also to the past and their present reflections on it.
Finally, the reflections of the interviewees do not represent the German-Jewish immigrant group as a whole. They were divided by the circumstances of their immigration, their socio-economic backgrounds in Germany, their places of residence in Palestine (urban or rural), their ages and family statuses, occupations, and political preferences. Hence, their positions vis-a-vis the British Mandate differed as well. For example, none of the interviewees belonged to the minority of immigrants who lived on kibbutzim or were religiously observant. Like the majority in this wave, those with whom I spoke had immigrated in the early and mid-1930s and thus suffered less from the severe restrictions in British policy towards the end of the decade. What further distinguishes the interviewees is that most of them belonged to the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin, and accordingly identified strongly with a distinct German-Jewish heritage which had made a meaningful contribution to the State of Israel and was deemed worthy of preservation. What the interviewees shared with many of their fellow immigrants was a middle-class status (at least before migration), a preference for living either in the city or on agricultural settlements populated mostly by other German newcomers, and the experience of a hostile reception by the old-timers of Eastern European and Russian descent.
In their pre-Yishuv histories, the two groups had shared a conflict over assimilation to the Christian West versus adherence to Eastern European Judaism. With the immigration of Eastern European Jews to Germany, especially after WW I, many German Jews had evinced feelings of superiority towards their eastern brethren, expressed in the highly pejorative term “Ostjuden.” Many of them carried this attitude over to Palestine, where Eastern European Jews constituted the political elite. This apprehension of the East became enmeshed in the perception of the new homeland and its inhabitants as unreliable, unprofessional, and ultimately inferior. In Mandatory Palestine, all groups with whom they interacted, whether Arabs, “Oriental Jews,” or Eastern European Jews, belonged in varying degrees to the “East,”—except, that is, for the British.
“They were all such gentlemen”—Interactions, Observations, and Interpretations
Officially, the Association of Immigrants from Germany (HOG) was cooperative and loyal to the Mandate. This was also brought to bear in practical term. For example, contrary to the practice of the Histadrut, the HOG employment services tried to find jobs for immigrants in the non-Jewish sector, in the British administration and British owned companies, or as domestic workers with British families in Palestine and the surrounding countries. German physicians treated British personnel and German immigrants worked as waiters in cafes frequented by British officers. From 1939 onwards, German Jews also enlisted in the British Army. The HOG’s official policies may have added somewhat to the positive attitude of its German immigrant members.
For some interviewees, the appreciation for the British was a political decision. As Rafael T. put it, the British Mandate era was the best time for the Jews of Palestine: “We never had it so good as we did under the British.” Hilde S., who had worked with many Englishmen professionally, shared this sentiment, adding that unlike most of inhabitants of the Yishuv, “I did not dance in the streets when the Mandate ended.” For these interviewees, the British guaranteed peace and stability. Such remarks should be viewed in terms of the ongoing security issues these interviewees had known throughout their lives. However, praise for the British as the guarantors of peace and stability might also be understood in the context of their dramatic immigration to Palestine; the forced removal from Germany, their experience of drastic downward social mobility and anti-Jewish violence in Palestine, and their misgivings about the Yishuv leadership—all these made the British seem to them a force of reason and civility. For most, however, appreciating the British seems to have been a matter of culture rather than politics.
Interviewees spoke more often about their encounters with the British during leisure activities than they did about those that occurred in the professional or political sphere. Among the memorable venues that brought German immigrants and British officials together were sports clubs. The Haifa Rowing Club, founded by German immigrants who had brought their row boats and the sport of rowing with them, was deemed necessary for the training of rowers by British officials, who also practiced rowing. At a Jerusalem equestrian club, established by a former lawyer from Hannover, German Jews and British personnel trained together. The Haifa tennis club, where Ruth B. and her family played, was used both by the British and well-to-to German families. Encounters at such sports venues in Palestine were the result of shared cultural practices, enjoyed in Great Britain as well as Germany by members of the middle class. The clubs required a certain socio-economic standing among their German Jewish members, middle class immigrants of means or those who had not yet lost their capital and British officials perceived as educated and cultured, never simple soldiers.
Unlike the regular mixing that occurred at such venues, coffee shops and restaurants were places of spontaneous encounters in the public sphere between the staff of waiters and the patrons of the same establishments. In general, British soldiers on leave were desirable customers at the cafes, and owners sometimes asked waitresses to socialize with them to boost consumption. Some up-scale venues in the cities also had afternoon dances attended by well-to-do Jews, British officers, and wealthy Arabs. Interviewees recall the good manners and polite behavior of the British, their education, cultural interests, and neat appearance, leading to their omnipresent perception as “gentlemen.” While interviewees generalized them as “the British,” it seems they were referring to a certain group of British personnel in Palestine: white, middle-class, and educated. For some German Jews, the presence of such British soldiers at cafes was evocative of a more sophisticated culture. For Ruth M., then a teenager, these men were more attractive than the locals she met in Haifa, “where everything was red, communist or socialist” and represented class and quality, education and culture.
British soldiers regularly patronized the cafes and restaurants established by German immigrants in more remote settlements as well. For example, German-Jewish entrepreneurs opened a cafes in Gan HaShamron and Kfar Shmaryahu catering especially to British soldiers. A small hotel called the “Dolphin House” was opened in Shavey Zion for a mainly British clientele, and the nearby town of Nahariya with its distinctive European air became a popular tourist resort that drew many British soldiers. Nahariya was decidedly pro-British under its first mayor, Oskar Mayer-Wolf, and maintained excellent relations with the British administration; the local youth purportedly began to emulate the looks and lifestyle of the British soldiers. The relative geographical isolation of Nahariya and other secluded agricultural villages founded by German Jews might have further strengthened this tendency, though a similar phenomenon was also prevalent in Haifa, where German bus drivers dressed British-style, as Gad Granach recalls in his autobiography: “…wearing nicely pressed khaki shirts and khaki shorts with wool stockings and a pipe stuck down the side.”
The tendency to emulate the British was discussed in contemporary documents. Gabriele Tergit, for example, observed ironically that German Jew go outdoors “dressed in a tuxedo, in 40 degree Celsius heat because the British wear tuxedos.” The British were ridiculed in much the same way that German Jews were for allegedly wearing suits and even gloves in the intense heat of Palestine. The dress culture of the Yishuv was famously informal and the adherence to formal attire by German Jews made them the butt of many jokes—even though they were not the only ones who dressed this way and not all of them continued to do so.
Impressions based on personal observation are instructive: the newcomers categorized their fellow citizens according to their outward appearances and tried to make sense of their sense of kinship and affinity and the social parameters of their new homeland. As Anat Helman writes, “in a society where people are strangers to each other, they judge each other by what they see.” Newspaper articles and letters from the 1930s abound with physical descriptions of the various groups in the host society.
While most of the published materials focus on the “inferior” dress and hygiene of both Arabs and “oriental Jews,” many interviewees express similar apprehensions regarding those identified as “Ostjuden” in the Yishuv. Classical stereotypes of the backward, unaesthetic, and inferior “Ostjuden”—phrased in typically orientalist terms—had been imported to Palestine. The fact that many members of the Yishuv elite of Eastern European origin had studied at German universities and may themselves dressed in the European style did not invariably change this perception.
It is also against this background that the interviewees’ admiration for British attire should be understood, which—in their view—stood out from the style of the “Ostjuden” they observed daily. As they point out, their attraction to the British did not go unnoticed by veteran residents. Avraham M., who attended horseback-riding classes in Jerusalem as a boy, recalls how this was received at his school. Horseback riding was deemed an attempt to “lehitangles” a. slang term meaning to cozy up to the British. “[…] That was painful to hear, but I really did enjoy the horseback riding. […] The fact that the riding school was used by the English did not bother me at that time.” Lehitangles, literally, to make oneself English, refers here not only to socializing with the British but also to adopting a bourgeois lifestyle associated with the British, for example, by engaging in sports like rowing, tennis, horseback riding, ballroom dancing, and a specific style, but also to the purchasing of British (i.e., non-kosher) food at Spinneys, the British import supermarket. Lehitangles highlighted a set of allegedly alien dispositions brought into the Yishuv—elements that were not in line with the desired national culture of the state in the making. Criticizing the new immigrants for imitating the British was part of a broader criticism of German Jews for their bourgeois norms. It was a common trope in the Yishuv to denounce the newcomers from Germany for subverting the pioneer spirit, the Zionist ideals, and socialist ethic of the Yishuv with their urbanism, hedonism, and materialism and fondness for luxury shops, bourgeois lifestyle, and sophisticated clothes.
This critique, however, was seen by the new immigrants as biased. They understood it almost unequivocally as a direct response to the way they themselves had treated Eastern European Jews in Germany, and thus as the settling of an old score. Given the criticism the German immigrants faced in the 1930s and 1940s, their praise for the British may be seen in hindsight as a reaction to this. In the interviews, not only does their affinity for the British serve as a foil for their apprehension of the “Ostjuden” but it also refutes the criticism levelled at them for emulating and socializing with the British. The very fact that interviewees continued to identify veteran residents of Eastern European descent in Palestine as “Ostjuden” can be seen as a rejection of the latter’s claim to cultural superiority in the Yishuv and as an act of defiance under the circumstances: they, of all people, had a right to criticize them now.
While it appears that such an affinity for the British was characterized by at least a partial (if not an overriding) ignorance of the attempts at boundary construction, there was one exception. In the concluding part of this article, we shall address the limits of the affinity; romantic and sexual encounters—and therefore, its clearly gendered aspect. The perception of the British as gentlemen in interviews went beyond attire and polite manners and was often connected with masculinity.
The constant reference of the British being “absolute gentlemen” expresses respect for the polite and gentle way they treated girls and women and simultaneously, a criticism of the allegedly ruder behavior of the local Jewish population. However, there was another dimension at issue: the socializing of British men with Jewish women. The wish for companionship of some form was understandable to many interviewees: “Of course, these Englishmen, they had no girls, they came and looked around, and when they liked a girl, they asked her for a dance,” remembers Ruth M. She and her friends were among those who danced with British soldiers, “gentlemen per se,” as she, too, emphasizes. When describing their socialization with British soldiers, remarks such as that everything was harmless become a topos.
This is also true of contemporary documents. Hedwig Lehmann, for instance, who stayed at the famous “Haus Cohen” during a vacation in Nahariya, and danced there at a reception with a charming British soldier (“everybody’s Darling”), writes: “Everything was joyful and harmless and the young men were thankful and happy. Here one really makes an effort to be on good terms with the soldiers, often organizing musical performances and dances for them and they are always a thankful audience.” Rafael T. described the British visiting the Cafe in Can HaShomron as “extraordinary men,” adding, “they never touched a woman.” Alisa E. reflects the same sentiment for British soldiers she met in Kfar Shmaryahu, “great fellows and extraordinailry polite,” as she recalls.
However, not everyone was under the impression that everything was harmless, and not all British soldiers were perfect gentlemen. Miriam R. remembers how a drunken British soldier tried to sexually harass her and a friend in a lonely Haifa neighborhood at night. Both girls had been trained in combat sport by the Haganah, and managed to defend themselves. Tere were likely more attempted assaults by British soldiers against women, especially given the fact that they famously imported their habit of heavy drinking. However, they were not remembered as drunk or violent in other interviews, nor do such men fit the notion of kindred spirits. Moreover, sexual harassment by the British remains a taboo, both in memory and in contemporary discourse.
While appreciation for the British, emulation of their style, socializing and even dancing and flirting with them was one thing—romantic or sexual encounters were another. Despite their general sympathy, as one interviewee put it, the German immigrants were well aware that “the audience was not fond of such relationships.” It is important to understand such statements in light of the contemporary debates on the subject. Public opinion objected to socializing and did not differentiate between shared leisure time, romantic relations, and prostitution, which were all perceived as equally illegitimate.
However, the attitude of the official Yishuv regarding socializing was not unequivocal. As Motti Golani and Daniela Reich and have demonstrated, the Yishuv establishment did facilitate various encounters between the Jews and the British, such as hosting soldiers in Jewish homes, visits to hospitals, lectures, cultural events, as well as dances. Despite the potentially transgressive nature of such encounters, women were regarded as better suited for hosting and catering activities and therefore sent to the forefront of this endeavor. Crucially though, such organized events took place in a controlled environment and hence were not comparable to spontaneous or privately initiated encounters. The recurring references to the socializing of British men and German women as harmless indicate that the new immigrants were aware of the discourse on boundary construction within the Yishuv and the attempt to prohibit transgressive behavior by Jewish women.
In the case of the new immigrants from Germany, this suspicion was also expressed by the immigrant absorption authorities . Documents and reports show that social workers were concerned that isolation and distress over housing difficulties and job availability would drive single female immigrants from Germany to become prostitutes. In general, prostitution was regarded as a threat to the individual and collective reputations of these women in the Yishuv. At the center of this discussion were the port cities of Tel Aviv-Yafo and Haifa which were seen as dangerous mixing grounds for young and inexperienced women and British soldiers on leave as well as Arab men. In Haifa, for example, a complaint lambasted prostitution among new female immigrants from Germany, citing the female immigrants’ love of luxury as the reason for their activities.
Following these accusations, a report on the “state of morals” in the city was commissioned by the HOG. In keeping with the Yishuv position, this report did not differentiate either conceptually or linguistically between prostitution and other forms of relations between German female immigrants and British men. As cafes and bars had become places for encounters, the author of the report visited some of the most famous venues frequented by British and Arab men and Jewish women. Despite the thorough investigation, however, only two “dubious” cases were found among the German women in Haifa. Both were categorized as women who would provide sexual favors in return for money and had been involved in “relationships of this kind” before their immigration: “Influencing such characters seems futile; these are women who came to the country used to such a life and are determined to continue like this.” In this example, the alleged “love of luxury” and unwillingness to give up a certain standard of life were seen as the reason for sexual relationships with British men.
Characteristically in such discussions, the report expresses a paternalistic attitude towards women in general and immigrant women in particular. While German men, too, were mocked for their imitation and emulation of the British, German women were at the center of the debate over the contested character of socializing in the 1930s. However, the newcomers from Germany—like the rest of the Yishuv residents—were aware of the contested character of such liaisons, the disapproval of the public, the gloating cautionary tales published on the eventual failures of such relationships, as well as sometimes violent responses to actual or presumed interactions between British men and Jewish women. Even those who had an outspoken affinity for the British rarely established romantic relationships with them.
Conclusion
The German Jews were the largest immigrant group to enter Palestine during the Mandate period. As newcomers with a distinct socio-economic profile—unlike the well-integrated veteran residents—their observations provide an intriguing lens on Mandatory society. Seeing the Mandate years through their eyes sheds new light on crucial debates about this period.
The article discusses a multi-faceted affinity for the British expressed in interviews with Israelis of German origin. Using these interviews in correlation with contemporary sources, it locates their affinity with the British against a background of their conflictual re-encounter with Eastern European Jews and the contested view of socialization with non-Jews in the Yishuv. The article suggests that for the interviewees, the attraction for the British can be read as a means of orientation and self-identification with the “West” and a simultaneous rejection of the dominant eastern European role-model in their new homeland. The perceived cultural similarities between Germany and Britain led to an appreciation for the “civilized manners” of the latter and a perception of their being kindred spirits in the Levant.
The self-conception of German Jews as the Westerners of the Yishuv continued into statehood and was strengthened in the wake of the post-1948 mass immigration of Jews from Arab countries to the new State of Israel. The praises of the British particularly more than 70 years after they left the country—might be read as self-praise by the German immigrants for the influence they had—or should have had—on the State of Israel.
Despite the limited number of actual relationships entered into, contemporary discourse focused on women as possible transgressors. This focus on women as transgressors has also been perpetuated in Israeli literature, theatre, and film since the foundation of the State. While the discourse on Jewish—British encounters was (and is) gendered, the affinity of German immigrants for the British was expressed by both men and women, this affinity may have included romantic interest, however, that was not the sole or even the most crucial element of it. Although their focus has shifted, the East-West conflict and the contested nature of relations between Jews and non-Jews remain central issues in Israeli discourse.
Whether or not the British perception of the German Jews was any different from their view of other groups in Palestine has not yet been the subject of research. The cultural similarities between the two countries of origin might have facilitated a different approach by the British, who appreciated the politeness, “civilized manners,” and the cultural contributions of the German Jews as opposed to other groups. Likewise, it is not clear whether German Jews were indeed the only group to held an affinity for the British—whether in hindsight or during the Mandate era. After all, despite its generalizing and collectivist ethos, the Yishuv was not a monolithic society.