Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

cation to migrate, security and other assessments, travel arrangements, etc.”.⁶⁴ Chapter 4 offers a representative sampling of series related to the naturalisation records of non-British Jewish immigrants, and other sections dealt with different aspects of Jewish life in Australia, including a select bibliography and a list of Jewish research sites on the Internet.

Australian scholarship directly related to the topic of Egyptian Jewry was found to be very limited. Because of the tragic circumstances that befell European Jewry pre- and post-World War II, any study of Jewish migration has largely focused on the Jewish refugees from Europe. Small subgroups, such as the Jews from Egypt, have not attracted the attention of migration researchers, although they were also refugees when they arrived in this country. Their numbers were too small and their migration appeared too uneventful to attract the attention of people outside a restricted inner circle. Nevertheless, their immigration experience is a part, however small, of the broader picture of the history of postwar migration to Australia.

Postwar Migration to Australia

The consultation of specific publications by historians—for instance, Janis Wilton, Richard Bosworth,⁶⁵ and James Jupp, all eminent experts on Australian immigration history—was critical in providing understanding of the implementation of the White Australia Policy in the postwar period and how it applied to non-British migrants, particularly non-Europeans.⁶⁶ For instance, in his book Immigration, Jupp reminded his readers that it was the Chifley Labor Government that introduced for the first time “mass non-British immigration in 1947 and began the process that changed Australia from a monocultural to a multicultural society”.⁶⁷ The extensive recruiting program from the Displaced Persons (DP) camps of Europe, which were full of refugees looking for new homes, was not inclusive of all ethnic groups; Jupp stated that Jewish refugees “were actively discouraged in the early postwar stages, reflecting a fear of anti-Semitism in Australia”.⁶⁸ Suzanne Rutland, a specialist historian on Australian Jewish migration, pointed out in The Edge of