Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

their new country, such as assimilation, integration, and acculturation.⁶ It is necessary at this point to outline the differences between the three strategies.⁷ In the words of historian Marion A. Kaplan’s gender analysis of the Jews of Imperial Germany, assimilation is “assumed to be the process engaged in by a minority whose goal is fusion with the majority”.⁸ In the Jewish context, Kaplan uses the term assimilation “to indicate the loss of a Jewish ethnic and religious identity”, the discarding of Jewish ties:⁹

Kaplan’s concept can apply to any Jewish diaspora, whether in Egypt, France, or Australia. For instance, assimilation was the policy of conformity advocated by the Australian government towards its non-British migrants of the immediate postwar period.¹¹ The understanding was that those migrants were to shed their cultures, traditions, and languages and, through socialisation away from their own ethnic group and eventually intermarriage, become undistinguishable from the host population.

Integration is also a social process engaged in by a minority—that of entering a host society, but on a more egalitarian basis. The Oxford Dictionary defines integration as “the bringing into equal membership of a common society those groups or persons previously discriminated against on racial or cultural grounds”.¹² From the mid-1960s to 1973, the Australian government policy in respect to its non-British migrant population gradually abandoned a failing assimilation strategy for the concept of integration. This new policy recognised the diverse needs of the migrant population and did not advocate the necessary loss of “any individual’s original language and customs but nevertheless, saw their principal value in their utility as a means to full participation in an integrated Australian culture”.¹³

From 1973, the notion of “multiculturalism” was introduced to foster full integration whilst allowing each ethnic group to retain its unique