Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

cultural identity. Thus, the term has come to describe the cultural and linguistic diversity of Australian society. As noted by Suzanne Rutland, in a multicultural society “newcomers are encouraged to maintain and promote their ethnic heritage” because “a pluralistic approach will enrich the Australian way of life and cultural heritage”.¹⁴ For migrants such as the Jews from Egypt, considering the intrinsic multicultural and multilayered aspect of their identity, it is clear that this new policy promoted an even greater sense of comfort and belonging in Australian society. The acceptance of diversity leads to the next step in the process of socialisation of minority groups, which is acculturation. Acculturation refers to the concept of mutual contribution of both minority migrant groups and the dominant host society to the makeup of a common national identity.¹⁵ Kaplan defined acculturation as:

Thus, Jews in Imperial Germany acculturated by accepting the standards of the dominant culture while recognising and maintaining ethnic separateness. It is the same process by which Egyptian Jews became Australian or French or Brazilian and remained Jewish at the same time.

This research and the subsequent evaluation of the collected data have been conducted keeping in mind those definitions of the conceptual framework. The themes of assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, and acculturation are central to postwar Australian history. This book aims to shed more light on the macrosituation through a microstudy of Egyptian Jews in Australia.

The first chapter reviews the various publications referring to Egyptian Jews after their dispersion throughout the Western world, particularly Australia and France. Although their “second exodus” has been the subject of a number of academic monographs and theses in Israel, Europe, and the Americas, the specific character of their dispersion after 1948 has interested only a handful of scholars of Jewish history.