At a moment when the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are increasingly invoked and contested in global debates about forced displacement, this course asks how histories of migration can illuminate the present. Since the final decades of the nineteenth century, mobility shaped Jewish life and the development of Jewish communities with unprecedented intensity: the mass migration movements from Eastern Europe and the Russian Pale of Settlement towards larger regional cities and the metropolises of Europe and the Americas, waves of refugees during the First World War, successive emigration movements to Palestine and later Israel, flight from National Socialist persecution, and the painstaking reconstruction of Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Equally significant, yet long underrepresented in mainstream historiography, are the mass displacements of Jewish communities from the MENA region after 1945 — from Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, or Yemen — as well as lesser-known migration trajectories across Asia, among them the intricate networks of Sephardic and Iraqi Jewish communities that established themselves in India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, weaving transnational webs of trade, kinship, and belonging that rarely feature in conventional accounts of modern Jewish history. At the heart of this course lies the question of (in)visibility — whose migrations are counted, commemorated, and archived, and whose remain obscured. We pay particular attention to the gendered and generational dimensions of forced mobility — the experiences of women, children, and unaccompanied minors — and to the ways in which these trajectories intersected with human trafficking and other forms of coerced movement, ensuring that such entangled and often silenced histories are accorded the scholarly attention they deserve. Drawing on cutting-edge research in migration and refugee studies, Jewish history, and global history, the course invites students from across disciplines to engage with these questions through a range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks. While Jewish migration serves as the central lens, the course consistently situates these histories within broader comparative and transnational contexts, making it equally relevant for students interested in refugee law, human rights, postcolonial mobilities, and the politics of memory.
- Instructor: Susanne Korbel