Project overview
- Project Lead: Professor Shirli Gilbert (UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies)
- Project name: Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe in British colonial Africa, 1933-1965
- Funding: Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Grant
About the project:
This project follows Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe into British colonial Africa, where between 1933 and 1945 almost 10,000 found haven. Funnelled to Africa in part to prevent their arrival in the UK or Palestine, the refugees’ whiteness was precarious and contested, unsettling prevailing concepts and hierarchies.
The project explores how persecuted Jews’ encounters with racialised African societies impacted their own understandings of and responses to racism, and how their prolonged presence impacted social dynamics, race-thinking, and politics. It integrates political and social history approaches, drawing on a diverse base of institutional and personal sources from archives, newspapers, and family collections across Africa, the United States, Europe, and Israel.
Jewish refugees’ ambiguous positioning in colonial society makes them a crucial case for studying the complex workings of racism and exclusion. But historiographies of Jews, colonialism, and racism remain largely siloed. The project emphasises their entanglement, setting an ambitious agenda for research across these fields and insisting on the necessity of thinking colonial and Jewish histories together.
Image attribution: Members of a Jewish refugee family pose with an African assistant on their farm in Kenya. Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Provenance: Ruth Weyl. Source Record ID: Collections: 2004.478