this is a tremendously illuminating book and a major historiographical intervention that will surely inform many of us working on the history of migration, the history of human rights, and/or European foreign relations. Fein has given us a nuanced understanding of the Quai’s inner workings during the late-1930s and has shown how ideology, idealism, and politics can simultaneously inform and disrupt policy making. Fein has also shown how individual and institutional activism can help move political entities and interests, which, given the nature of contemporary politics regarding refuges around the world, is a welcome reminder.
— French History
Julius Fein has produced a meticulously researched, balanced, and authoritative analysis of French policy towards refugees from Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. He also tells a moving story, not least because of his examination of the refugees themselves.
— David Stevenson, London School of Economics and Political Science
This book has excellent internal insight on how the French state reacted towards the influx of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Fein shows us that the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs was an important actor not only in protecting refugees in France, but also in securing an international refugee regime—a regime which left us with concepts, such as country of first settlement and non-refoulement, essential to contemporary refugee policy.
— Frank Caestecker, University of Ghent
Fein has written an extraordinary book on an extraordinary subject: the willingness of the French alone among the Western democracies to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s. It is a book that not only examines a vital episode in the history of migrants and the judicial, racial, ideological and economic reactions to them, but also casts interwar France in a better light than is usual in history books covering this period. Fein is to be congratulated for producing a highly original, superbly researched, and well-written study.
— Alan Sked, professor emeritus, London School of Economics and Political Science
How to resolve the migrant problem? This question, current today, had already arisen in the 1930s in connection with the German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime. Thanks to a vast amount of well-mastered documentation, Fein describes the attitude of France, and in particular of the Quai d’Orsay, to the arrival of these immigrants between 1933 and 1938. This original approach to a delicate problem—how to reconcile the ideals of human rights with the political reality—is handled with skill and common sense. It is a success.
— Maurice Vaïsse, professor emeritus, Paris Institute of Political Studies
Comprehensively researched and perceptively analyzed, this is an impressive new book on France’s response to the refugees from Nazi Germany. It highlights the role of the Foreign Ministry, which, caught between international relations, France’s republican traditions, and crises in domestic politics, struggled to find a compromise between hospitality and xenophobia. While bureaucrats worked assiduously in developing policy, foreign ministers and their governments disclosed their timidity in the face of one stark choice: could the refugees stay or be asked to leave? This dilemma, Fein argues, exposes fundamental weaknesses in the French polity of the 1930s.
— Greg Burgess, University of Melbourne; author of The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany: James G. McDonald and Hitler's Victims
Astonishingly this is the first scholarly study of the response of the Quai d’Orsay to Jewish immigration into France in the interwar years, and in particular after Hitler’s arrival to power in 1933. It is a meticulously documented monograph with conclusions that are finely nuanced. All this makes it an important contribution to this difficult and controversial period of France’s twentieth-century history.
— Julian Jackson, University of London
My family immigrated to Argentina in 1893 as part of the colonization project financed by Baron Hirsch’s JCA. They left Russia, its pogroms, and precarious existence to go to a country interested in absorbing as many immigrants as possible. The saga described in detail by Julius Fein takes place some forty years later when Jews need to emigrate from Germany. Where will they go? There are plenty of discussions where many nations show goodwill. JCA is still a player but this time there is no country ready to receive a massive inflow of immigrants...
— Daniel Furman, honorary fellow, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
I was delighted to be able to give Fein access to my great-grandfather Louis Oungre’s archives and to be able to contribute to this duty of remembrance which seems essential to me. Immigration is at the heart of Europe's concerns today, proof that history is repeating itself and that it is important to be aware of it. Congratulations to Fein for his accomplished work.
— Virginie Tissinié, great-granddaughter of Louis Oungre