The front cover of The Unchosen Ones shows a family of smiling Moroccan Jews upon their arrival in Israel in 1954, about to complete their Aliyah. However, as Jannis Panagiotidis shows in this stimulating book, many of their compatriots were prevented from doing the same, on grounds dressed up in bureaucratic complexity, but which derived essentially from their origin in a North African state. In short, the Israeli authorities considered them “backward,” “primitive,” “violent,” and “lazy” (110), compared to the “desirable” Jewish migrants from Europe and North America.

Yet Israel is not the only case of “co-ethnic” migration discussed in this book. The other standout example—and Panagiotidis fully acknowledges the irony—is Germany, or at least the Federal Republic of Germany, which initiated a long-running scheme to integrate “ethnic Germans” (Aussiedler) scattered across communist Eastern Europe over a time period almost exactly coterminous with its Israeli counterpart. Panagiotidis takes full advantage of the potential for comparison, delving into the minutiae of legislation, political disputes, and individual case studies. His conclusions are as insightful as they are startling.

Co-ethnic migration is based on the notion of shared ethnicity—that one has the right to live in a particular nation-state based on one's ethnic “belonging” to it. Yet Israel's and Germany's claims to be open to all their co-ethnics were frequently tested. After all, how does one define who is a German and who is a Jew? It fell to politicians, lawmakers, and civil servants to do the sifting, with mixed results. Unlike Israel, Germany did not have a religious definition to fall back on, and its politicians were also anxious to avoid the racial classifications the Nazis had used. So, they formulated a new concept—“people-belonging” (Volkszugehörigkeit). This had overtones of the old völkisch terminology, but was presented as an exclusively cultural category. One therefore had to “affirm” that one belonged to the German people through one's actions. In practical terms, this meant language (how well one spoke German), along with cultural habits, even the names one gave one's children.

Inevitably, though, this cultural definition of “Germanness” was extremely fuzzy around the edges and open to interpretation by the “gatekeepers” as well as by applicants themselves. Former Nazi collaborators—SS volunteers from places like Yugoslavia—were often treated preferentially to those who had fought against the Nazi occupiers: after all, they had enthusiastically affirmed their “people-belonging” in the most dramatic of circumstances. Jewish applicants, by contrast, often found themselves in a difficult situation. Although West Germany's Federal Expellee Law stipulated that being Jewish did not preclude one's belonging to the German people, as it was careful to define Jewishness as a purely religious category, in reality, Jewish applicants were often suspected of dual loyalties. A prior attempt to migrate to Israel, for example, or indeed anywhere based on one's persecution as a Jew, was enough to thwart one's prospects of being let into the Federal Republic. Why? Because in doing so you had affirmed your Jewish “people-belonging,” and you could only belong, following the logic, to one people.

Panagiotidis scrutinizes a handful of rejected applications to both Germany and Israel —the eponymous “unchosen ones”—and argues that it was these exceptions or outliers that exposed “the limits of each country's co-ethnic commitment” (4). It is a bold claim for such a small sample, which by its very nature can hardly be described as representative. But because these cases were so often borderline, they forced the “gatekeepers,” politicians and lawmakers, to define precisely what they meant when they spoke of the Jewish or German people. Where did the boundaries lie?

Sometimes they jagged around one particular applicant. Brother Daniel is probably the most famous example: a Polish Jew (born Oswald Rufeisen) who converted to Catholicism—and then became a monk—to facilitate his hiding in wartime Poland. Despite cast-iron ethnic Jewish credentials, he was barred from making Aliyah in 1962 on the grounds that, as a Catholic convert, it was not possible for him to be a Jew (1–2). He had renounced his Jewish “people-belonging,” in other words, even though Israel claimed to be open to all the world's Jews and required no “affirmation” of belonging, as West Germany did.

Israel and Germany's co-ethnic migrations, which ran parallel to each other for four decades, converged for the final time in the late 1980s and 1990s around the collapsing Soviet Union and the states that emerged from it. By this point, Germany had become reluctant to receive further co-ethnics. It now had enough of them in the form of sixteen million East Germans, who had suddenly joined the fold in October 1990. The German federal government actively discouraged “Russian Germans” from migrating and instead funnelled money to the regions where they lived in an (ultimately futile) bid to persuade them to stay there (243–44). Israel, on the other hand, was at the same time upping its efforts to persuade Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union to make Aliyah, going so far as to place diplomatic pressure on the United States to make it more difficult for them to migrate there (280–81). To complicate matters, Germany had also started accepting Soviet Jews as so-called “quota refugees” in 1991 and, for a brief period in the early 2000s, the numbers of these Russian-speaking Jews arriving in Germany outstripped those going to Israel, prompting the German government to rescind its invitation to them in 2005. Since then, the waves of co-ethnic migration to both states have dwindled to just a trickle.

Panagiotidis concludes by contending that only a generous admission policy for migrants can avoid the complications Germany and Israel faced in the twentieth century's second half. I can only agree. The parsimonious hair-splitting over a handful of inconsequential cases may have helped each country to define the boundaries of its “people-belonging,” but it was not a good look for two nascent liberal democracies that could afford to be more magnanimous toward people who at least considered themselves to be co-ethnics.