Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936–1946

How and when did it become “self-evident” and “inevitable” to the international community that the surviving Jews of postwar Europe belonged elsewhere, and that elsewhere could only be Palestine/later Israel? Sarah Cramsey's determined and meticulous book, Uprooting the Diaspora, confronts this fraught question on a journey that takes us deep into the social, political, and intellectual processes that shaped, in both long-term and immediate ways, Europe's mid-twentieth-century “ethnic revolution.” While continuously relevant since the decade covered by this study, 1936 through 1946, the question has become fiercely so since October 7, 2023, and its aftermath in a way the author could not have predicted. Yet the current state of affairs only heightens the value of Cramsey's frank engagement with the weighty subject of destruction and displacement and demographic reconfiguration.We understand from Cramsey's approach, including her addition of the term “empirical Zionism”—or a logistical, practical Zionism of population transfer in response to the postwar “Jewish Question”—to the already well-stocked pantry of Zionism's colorful varieties, that she personally challenges the “self-evidence” of the conclusion that the Jewish diaspora belonged elsewhere. Getting to that point, she argues, required a thoroughgoing “revolution in thinking about Jewish belonging, a sweeping change in international norms, and accelerated, deliberate work” (p. 3). Her book carefully traces the slow then fast movement toward that conclusion through examination of the set of people directly connected with the ethnic revolution working in East Central European governments-in-exile, government administrators in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and the World Jewish Congress (WJC). She conducted oral histories along with her study of archival materials, newspapers, letters, memoirs in Polish, Czech, English, German, and Yiddish to get at the evolving plans for the postwar world. In her work, Cramsey presents the historian with an imperative to question that “which appears self-evident or obvious, especially if their questioning probes ancestral inheritance, sensitive emotions, and collective memories that organize how we see history and position our own sense of belonging within it” (p. 266). Such forthright historical questioning is best undertaken in an open society committed to the free pursuit of thinking, research, and scholarship.Cramsey's first five words in the book are “I have something to say” (p. xi) She does, and she says it. She lays out an argument asserting that Jews became tragically torn from their rooted existence in Poland and Czechoslovakia through “total war, genocide, changing international norms, and the unexpected transcendence of monolithic nation-states in Europe, the Middle East, and around the world” (p. 259). Further, that uprooting was used to provide justification for other postwar population transfers creating nearly homogenous ethnonational polities in postwar Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is an intertwined story of peoples and territorial belonging, ideological and historical exigency. It captures the overwhelming idea of ethnic unmixing that gripped the world in the wake of World War II, impressed so starkly and easily on the mental map of the international community. It shows how minority rights protections sank into the death pits covered with lime as the ethnoterritorial state ascended.Cramsey pauses at a crucial turning point in the narrative between plans for the Jewish population in the postwar world and their abrupt implementation so that we may join Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, as he contemplatively eats his lunch among the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto after the war when he worked for the Central Committee of Polish Jews. He found hope amid the despair in the realization that tens of thousands of the three million strong prewar Polish Jewish population had survived the war in the Soviet Union. And that they would come back. When they did, he became involved in the Bricha network, a “semilegal and semiorganized” movement of Jews out of East Central Europe to Mandate Palestine (pp. 203–204). Here, Cramsey pivots from her analysis of the intellectual, ideological, and social debates before and during the war about Jewish belonging in Poland and Czechoslovakia to practical plans for rebuilding elsewhere in its bleak aftermath.Her discussion of wartime plans for minority evacuation from East Central Europe bring Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovak president-in-exile, sharply into focus as a key force in propagating and realizing the goal of minority population transfer, German and Jewish, in a way that may overestimate his real influence on the great powers and their decision-making processes for the shape of the postwar world. Beneš, Cramsey shows, stunned the leadership of the WJC, who still advocated for the doikayt (“hereness,” “rootedness”) of the Jews in East Central Europe in the early 1940s, even as they learned of the unfolding tragedy, with his views on “the erasure of minority rights, population transfers, and the idea of Palestinian-based citizenship for ‘national’ Jews” (p. 54) She presents recent scholarship on Beneš and the Allied Powers and concludes that he indeed was at the forefront of the change in international minority rights norms, which found echo in the influential journal Foreign Affairs (p. 61).The situation on the ground changed dramatically after the Kielce pogrom in the first week of July 1946 from troubled debates over Jewish territorial belonging in Europe to the urgent international conviction that Polish Jews must be transferred to Palestine at once for their survival. Cramsey's vivid description of the pogrom, the shock and speed and overwhelming sense of peril that propelled migration of the “100.000” with explicit government support brings us to the compelling implementation of “empirical Zionism” (p. 239). Kielce was the trigger for immediate exodus.Cramsey's rich and multi-faceted study brings new attention to the complex process by which the postwar system of ethnoterritorial states took shape. It forms a significant contribution to the scholarship on Jewish belonging in Europe, diaspora studies, the transformation of international norms surrounding minority rights, the intersection of East Central European and global history, war and social change, the shared and particular institutions and diplomacy of twentieth-century Europe. There is much to discuss in these pages about Zionism's many forms against a backdrop of wartime rupture, displacement, population movement, and Jews’ survival. I look forward to these discussions in my upcoming graduate seminar in human rights’ history. The book has taken on a life of its own since publication, adding heightened importance to open engagement with it.