»Erwartungen an Évian.« Jüdische Positionen zur Flüchtlingspolitik 1938

Under the title »Erwartungen an Évian« a study on Jewish positions on refugee policy in 1938 has been published in the in the »Studies of the Dubnow Institute« series. The monograph is now available free of charge as an open access publication on the website of the publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and is also being published in book form.

The Évian Conference in July 1938 was a significant diplomatic event. On the basis of contemporary documents of Jewish organizations, Martin Jost opens a new perspective on this international refugee conference and the expectations it engendered: Initially, the Jewish emissaries regarded the negotiations that took place at Lake Geneva and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees as a hope-inspiring prelude and as a realistic means of enabling emigration for those being persecuted under National Socialism. Only once the war broke out and in the face of the unprecedented politics of annihilation that followed did their assessment change. Évian would go down in historical memory as a missed opportunity to save Europe’s Jews.

The series »Studies of the Dubnow Institute« features dissertations and habilitations completed at or in close cooperation with the institute. These monographs therefore reflect the profile of the research conducted at the Dubnow Institute on Jewish lifeworlds in Central and Eastern Europe in the context of general and pan-European history, from a transnational perspective, and incorporating various disciplines. The series focuses on culturally mixed historical spaces, interactions between Jews and the non-Jewish world, the diversity of Jewish lifeworlds, and the reciprocal relationships between Jewries in East and West.