Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis has tried to construct a comprehensive analysis of a clearly defined community of Egyptian Jews in Australia and France, based on the oral history of Egyptian born migrants. Built around the conceptual framework of forced emigration, integration and acculturation, it looks at the successful experience of this particular migrant group within both Australian and French societies. Like the other Jewish communities of Arab lands, the Egyptian Jewish community no longer exists, as it was either expelled or forced into exile in the aftermath of the three Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1956, 1967). This thesis argues that the rise of an exclusively Arab-Islamic type of nationalism, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict constituted the fundamental causes for the demise of Egyptian Jewry. As a consequence, almost half of the Jewish population of Egypt went to Israel. The rest dispersed throughout the Western world, mainly in France, North and South America. In Australia, a small group of around 2,000 found a new home. Apart from those who migrated to Israel, the majority of Egyptian Jews experienced a waiting period in Europe before they were accepted by any of the countries of immigration, a period facilitated by international and local Jewish welfare agencies. My interviewees chose Australia mostly to be reunited with family members. They first had to overcome the racial discrimination of the ‘White Australia’ Immigration policy towards Jews of Middle Eastern origin, a hurdle surmounted thanks to the tireless efforts of some leaders of the Australian Jewish community. With their multiple language skills, multi-layered identity and innate ability to interact with a variety of ethnic groups, they succeeded in establishing themselves in an unfamiliar country that initially welcomed them reluctantly. As such, they can be said to have successfully acculturated and integrated into Australian society, whilst retaining their own cultural diversity. The more numerous Egyptian Jews living in France also successfully acculturated. As a larger group, they were better equipped to assert themselves within the older Jewish/French community and retain their distinctive Sephardi culture. Studies such as the present one provide insight into the process of integration and identity reconstruction, as well as the diverse strategies used to ensure a successful acculturation, and the value of a multi-layered identity.

Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis has tried to construct a comprehensive analysis of a clearly defined community of Egyptian Jews in Australia and France, based on the oral history of Egyptian born migrants. Built around the conceptual framework of forced emigration, integration and acculturation, it looks at the successful experience of this particular migrant group within both Australian and French societies. Like the other Jewish communities of Arab lands, the Egyptian Jewish community no longer exists, as it was either expelled or forced into exile in the aftermath of the three Arab-Israeli wars (1948, 1956, 1967). This thesis argues that the rise of an exclusively Arab-Islamic type of nationalism, the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict constituted the fundamental causes for the demise of Egyptian Jewry. As a consequence, almost half of the Jewish population of Egypt went to Israel. The rest dispersed throughout the Western world, mainly in France, North and South America. In Australia, a small group of around 2,000 found a new home. Apart from those who migrated to Israel, the majority of Egyptian Jews experienced a waiting period in Europe before they were accepted by any of the countries of immigration, a period facilitated by international and local Jewish welfare agencies. My interviewees chose Australia mostly to be reunited with family members. They first had to overcome the racial discrimination of the ‘White Australia’ Immigration policy towards Jews of Middle Eastern origin, a hurdle surmounted thanks to the tireless efforts of some leaders of the Australian Jewish community. With their multiple language skills, multi-layered identity and innate ability to interact with a variety of ethnic groups, they succeeded in establishing themselves in an unfamiliar country that initially welcomed them reluctantly. As such, they can be said to have successfully acculturated and integrated into Australian society, whilst retaining their own cultural diversity. The more numerous Egyptian Jews living in France also successfully acculturated. As a larger group, they were better equipped to assert themselves within the older Jewish/French community and retain their distinctive Sephardi culture. Studies such as the present one provide insight into the process of integration and identity reconstruction, as well as the diverse strategies used to ensure a successful acculturation, and the value of a multi-layered identity.

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This dissertation takes as its subjects East European Jewish women who sold sex in their homelands and/or abroad and situates their engagement in sex work within the broader structures these women navigated – labor markets, state laws on residence and migration, community and family. This project turns working-class Jewish women, who migrated within and from Eastern Europe and sold sexual services, into protagonists in their own story and writes them back into modern Eastern European Jewish economic and migration histories. Between 1870 and 1939, Eastern European Jews suffered from consistent official and unofficial anti-Jewish discrimination in the labor market. This discrimination, combined with ongoing economic changes and crises, hindered Jewish socio-economic advancement and instead drove more and more Jews into poverty. Both married and single women were pressed financially to find gainful employment but encountered a labor market with too few opportunities. In these circumstances, the state-sanctioned sex industry, which was Jewish madams and pimps had their part, provided them with economic prospects and facilitated their physical mobility, which was a privilege in this period. By 1914, Jews, especially women, found it almost impossible to leave the Russian Empire legally. After the Great War, immigration restrictions became a virtually global phenomenon, again severely limiting the options of Jews for leaving Eastern Europe. In the interwar years, anxieties about trafficking turned into laws restricting single women's movement and preventing immigration to popular destinations, such as the United States or Argentina. Despite these challenges, some Eastern European Jewish women who sold sex turned out to be particularly mobile. They moved within Eastern Europe, crossing borders between empires, and regularly circulated across seas and oceans to the Middle East and the Americas. By viewing these women as economic actors and labor migrants, this dissertation seeks to reconceptualize prostitution as one of the ways in which Eastern European Jews from the working poor navigated the transformative and increasingly challenging period between 1870 and 1939. This rewriting of Jewish prostitution as a rich social history of Eastern European Jewish women from the lower classes relies on a wide range of sources that, on the one hand, provide access to the women’s voices (though rarely unmediated) and, on the other, expose how class-biased and moralistic interpretation has been imposed on their life stories. Unlike most of the previous studies on this topic, this project looks at Jewish prostitution from the Eastern European perspective and uses materials produced by this Jewish population and the surrounding society – Jewish and non-Jewish press in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew; Habsburg, Russian, and Polish state-produced labor and prostitution reports as well as ministerial and police records.