This outstanding monograph casts new light on “co-ethnic migration,” defined by Jannis Panagiotidis as a process in which “coming from a diasporic situation abroad, co-ethnic migrants seek admission to a country and/or its citizenship on the basis of their purported ethnicity … which is identical to that of the titular nation in the country of their destination” (2). Empirically, the study focuses on two states whose immigration policies are generally seen to give heavy preference to co-ethnics: Israel and (West) Germany. A comparative pairing of these two countries may be unusual, perhaps even surprising, but in Panagiotidis's capable hands it proves highly illuminating, not only about Israel and Germany but also about much broader transnational patterns evident in migration regimes and the processes of definition and identification inherent in them.

Throughout the book, Panagiotidis combines three methodological approaches—the “praxeological, comparative, and transnational” (314)—into a convincing and seamless whole. Transnational perspectives feature mostly in the background. As the author points out, in “delineating nations” out of particular population groups, migration regimes are necessarily “border-transcending” and therefore “transnational by definition” (5). More specifically, attempts to define Germans and Jews in Germany and Israel also illustrate certain aspects of the broader “historical entanglement between the two nations” (6). Panagiotidis stresses that the formation of modern Jewish and German national identities was a long and mutually interwoven process. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jews and Germans lived side by side as minorities across multi-ethnic central and eastern Europe, and the compatibility of Jewishness and Germanness was a contested issue on both sides, even as Jewish religion frequently overlapped with German language and culture. Nazi rule and genocide brutally disrupted these patterns, of course, but “the question of whether a Jew could be ethnically German” (11) continued to feature in deliberations and decisions about co-ethnic migration cases in the post–World War II era too.

The comparative approach forms the backbone of the monograph. Panagiotidis systematically compares the ethnicity-based admission of immigrants into Germany and Israel from the 1940s to the 2010s. The perspective is both synchronic, tracing similarities and differences in the two countries’ policies and practices, and diachronic, identifying continuities and changes over time. Panagiotidis's findings are rich, complex, and intriguing, and only a few can be highlighted here.

A prominent point concerns the fundamental differences in the underlying rationales and objectives of the two countries’ ethnic migration regimes. Whereas Germany's attempts to bring home at least some of its East European diaspora were rooted in defeated expansionism and tempered by a continued interest in the presence of a German minority in the region as a justification for potential territorial claims there, Israel's objective, as expressed in the 1950 Law of Return, was to regather diasporic Jews to the homeland after a two-thousand-year absence. These contrasting premises translated into different legal and bureaucratic institutions: an “inward-looking domestic framework” (20) centered on integration issues in (West) Germany and a much more outward-looking set-up focused on the ambitious recruitment and resettlement of co-ethnic migrants in Israel. Despite these contrasts, from the mid-1960s and particularly the early 1970s, the Israeli and (West) German migration regimes began to converge, as both moved toward more flexible definitions of ethnic belonging, driven by international détente abroad and generational change at home. Such transformations, in turn, paved the way for the notable openness of both countries to co-ethnic mass immigration in the late 1980s, particularly from the Soviet Union. The convergence proved to be only temporary, however, as longer term trends and priorities on the national level soon reasserted themselves, with the result that in the 1990s Germany moved to curb immigration from the East, whereas Israel continued to recruit large numbers of post-Soviet immigrants whose Jewishness was often interpreted rather loosely.

The most interesting contributions of Panagiotidis's monograph arise from its praxeological approach to the details of ethnic screening within the German and Israeli migration regimes. Here the author challenges head-on the widely accepted view that co-ethnic migration policies result from preexisting ethno-cultural conceptions of nationhood and asks instead “how practices of recognizing co-ethnic migrants shape conceptions of ethnicity, ethno-national belonging, and state citizenship” (6). In other words, he views ethnic screening as “a dynamic and relational process” (316) in which categories are produced and redefined through “the interplay of state gatekeepers, civil society actors, migrants, and the migrants’ countries of origin” (7). Panagiotidis pays close attention to dynamics on the grassroots level, including the agency of individual migrants, which is highlighted through a series of case studies. Four detailed vignettes in particular—each built around an individual whose complicated life history caused considerable difficulty for the gatekeepers of co-ethnicity in Germany or Israel—illuminate the shifting boundaries of belonging very effectively. To quote Panagiotidis: “By deciding who did not belong, it also became clearer who did as a matter of course. It was the unchosen ones who defined the chosen ones” (4).

This is a highly important study, with wide relevance beyond just the German and Israeli national cases. Solidly researched, convincingly argued, and fluently written, it should be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary migration history.