This talk focuses on the world of empires that shaped the administration and experiences of Jewish refugees through the twentieth century. It adopts the perspectives of two groups of people “Other-ed” in the racial hierarchy of empire. First, it highlights the ways in which Jewish refugees responded to and participated in their changing categorizations prior to and following the start of the Second World War. Thinking from the perspective of women and children, it brings forward the different stakes for different groups of refugees in the categorizations they could not change. Second, it reads government records against the grain to put forward the perspective of Indians encountering these new “Europeans.” In doing so, I show that scholars ought to account for an expanded conception of Britain which includes in its “domestic” sphere its imperial boundaries when analyzing refugee movements in the Empire. This allows us not only to ask new questions on the Holocaust but also, of the archives that allow us to study them and the perspectives they represent.

This event is in cooperation with Feminist History Group and the proposed Centre for Global Jewish Studies

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Pragya Kaul is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History and a Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Y. Gitelman Fellow at Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. From 2020-2021, she was a Leo Baeck International Dissertation Fellow.

“Close-up portrait of Jewish refugee, Esther Weeg, wearing a sari while living in India.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives, Photograph Number: 77107, copyright of USHMM.