Gur Alroey opens the book with a personal story of growing up in an Israel that recognizes his Ashkenazic kibbutznik grandparents as the mythical Zionists, the “new Jews,” while ignoring the contribution of his urban Sephardic grandparents, who lived in Tel Aviv. While the former represented pioneers tilling the Land of Israel's soil, the latter were more traditional and represented lower-class, menial laborers.
In this book, Alroey sets out to break this binary Zionist narrative—one that emphasizes the pioneering Ashkenazic Jews while excluding the much more populous urban petty bourgeoisie and lower middle classes—by examining “the majority population that arrived in Palestine (together with the pioneers)” (xii), specifically looking at what is known as the beginning of modern Jewish migration to Palestine, from 1881 up until the breakout of the World War I in 1914.
The author's choice to challenge the existing Israeli narrative is reiterated once again in the introduction, where he argues that research on Jewish immigration to Palestine, known by the Hebrew word Aliyah, is treated as “different from all other forms of [Jewish] immigration” (25), such as to the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. However, through primary sources, such as records of immigration information bureaus, immigrants’ letters, steamships’ passenger lists, and newspapers, Alroey breaks down the perceived uniqueness of Aliyah by comparing it to the migration of much larger masses of Jews arriving to the Americas.
The book is divided into six chapters, which set up a narrative often missed in stories of migration. The first two chapters do not start with the arrival of immigrants to Palestine, but rather document their lives in the places they were born and raised. In the first chapter, the reader is able to understand firsthand the motivations of immigration through the story of one family, the Kohelets, who suffered from severe economic hardships and growing antisemitism.
This family, like thousands of others, did not merely get up and leave due to persecution and pogroms. Rather, its choice to leave Russia was the result of a social transformation set off by “three revolutions,” which occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century: the demographic revolution, the Industrial Revolution and urbanization, and the revolution in mass transportation. However, the author does note that following the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, a greater urgency was added to the trends of immigration set in motion in 1881.
In the next two chapters, the author provides examples of the practical reasons migrants chose Palestine, which greatly mirrored the concerns of Jews heading to the United States. However, that is not to say there were no differences; for example, immigrants coming to Palestine were considerably less educated and included a higher percentage of women and children. Importantly, whether serving those going to the United States or Palestine, immigration bureaus opened in the major Jewish centers facilitated their migration. In fact, the Zionist bureaus seemed to have been modeled after those of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), which directed the emigres to the United States.
The last three chapters bring the reader on the journey to Palestine, which was no easy feat, entailing long boat trips, which included layovers in cities such as Istanbul and Alexandria. In these cities, as well as in their final port in Jaffa, the immigrants were subjected to swindlers who often cheated them out of the little money they had. In addition, we learn that some women arrived because of the white slave trade and were forced into prostitution, which also became the fate of other Jewish immigrant women arriving to their final destinations. There is no doubt that these stories have been lost—or removed—from stories of Aliyah.
Placing the extreme case of prostitution aside, in this book we see that most immigrants coming to Palestine had no dreams of working the land and transforming into the “new Jews.” In fact, while there were those who did aspire to this goal, quite a few ended up in the Jewish colonies only as a last resort, after they failed to secure employment in the cities. In fact, for the majority, who do not comprise a part of the nationalist narrative, it was the city that attracted them, and they ended up working as petty tradesmen, artisans, and providers of services.
While within the Israeli national narrative there are brief references to the immigrants who did not succeed in establishing their lives in the new land, this book dedicates the last chapter, entitled “Leaving Palestine,” to them. This group of Jews, who left Palestine and returned to their former lands or moved on to new destinations, perhaps surprisingly, was actually made up of a large percent of ideologues. In other words, many who remained in Palestine were not fervent Zionists but rather Jews who lived in the urban sphere and were able to make a living and support their families, either from small businesses or menial labor.
This book provides a refreshing look and is an important contribution to the growing field of history dedicated to the field of Palestinian and Israeli studies. It provides a story much different from the narrative of the young pioneers, who arrived to Palestine “to build and to be built” (livnot u-lehibanot). When placed in the context of Jewish studies, this book is central in explaining how similar eastern European Jews were and how World War I was an important junction in Jewish history, with American Jews and future Israeli Jews developing a completely different sense of identity.
Having thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, I should point out that at times I had wished there was more dedicated to the book's main topic, namely migration to Palestine. In other words, while the comparison of immigrants going to Palestine with those arriving to other places in the world is central to the author's work, at times it seemed that this turned into the main focus of the book. For example, as a historian of late Ottoman Palestine, I would have liked to hear more about how Ottoman restrictions on Jewish immigration—even if it was unable to completely stop it—played a role in the decision of Jews to come and settle in their spiritual homeland and affected their daily life in the Yishuv.
In short, this book opens the path of study in a new direction, one that challenges the dominant Israeli national narrative. Alroey is right to do so, and at times even seems to tone down one of his main contributions—that is, chiseling away at an outdated nationalist narrative, which was propped up by the Labor movement in Mandate Palestine and was eventually adopted during the first decades of the state as the official state history. His turn towards looking at the “majority” of the Yishuv's Jewish residents and not just the “pioneers,” is well timed and necessary.
