Integration through Distinction: German‐Jewish Immigrants, the Legal Profession and Patterns of Bourgeois Culture in British‐ruled Jewish Palestine1

Abstract

This article examines the encounter of the German Jewish immigrants with the crystallizing of local Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that their accepted image as cultural aliens, based on their allegedly incompatible European-like bourgeois life-style, was propagated by both parties in this encounter, causing their marginalization and at the same time serving them as an important socio-cultural resource. Focusing on the field of the legal profession, it analyses the 1930's and the already emerging and highly- accepted patterns of a local middle-class civic culture (despite its rejection by the political discourse), which facilitated the advancement of an elite group of German- born lawyers in this field. ***** The status of the German Jewish immigrants (known under the popular nickname Yekkes) in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s has always been viewed as an exceptional case to the accepted "melting-pot" narrative of the formation of pre-State Jewish - later to become Israeli - society and culture. Although much has already been said about their peculiar cultural identity, their encounter with the local Jewish community (the Yishuv) and their role in the shaping of the emerging local Hebrew culture are still intriguing matters. This encounter still raises questions about their retention tendency as immigrants, the conditions, strategies and consequences of sustaining their old-country culture, and its possible dissemination in the destination society, and about how this cultural tendency related to their prospects of social assimi- lation (Gans 1997). As is widely accepted by students of im- migration, the identity of immigrant groups is (re)constructed and transformed under the conditions of their new social environment. Accordingly, their tendency to retain their distinctive old-country sense of identity may often be situational and depending on their chances to capitalize on it in the context of their relations with other groups within the new environment. In other words, the intensity of their "ethnic commitment," expressed in their willful perpetuation of old-country cultural patterns (such as language use, everyday practices, sentiments and values) hinges on the possibility that these cultural elements be "seen as a positive