At the end of the Second World War, thousands of visa-less Jewish refugees desperate to escape the horrors of Nazism, embarked on clandestine journeys to the British Mandate of Palestine. In response, the British government continued to uphold its restrictive immigration measures by transhipping Jewish refugees to detention camps in the colonial territory of Cyprus. From 1947, across the Mediterranean in East Africa, Jewish political detainees from Palestine were imprisoned in camps in Kenya. These groups, although different and thousands of miles apart, were intricately related.
In this talk, Eliana Hadjisavvas will focus on the history of these sites for Jewish refugees and political detainees, their role as political platforms, and spaces of anti-British activity where ambitions for independent, postcolonial futures in Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya played out. Such narratives reveal the complexities of questions of race and migration in the aftermath of the Second World War, offering a unique lens from which to understand the end of empire through histories of minorities largely overlooked.
Eliana Hadjisavvas is Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck. She is a historian of migration and displacement in the British Empire and is currently undertaking a five-year funded research project on Jewish displacement and detention in the British Empire, particularly in southern and eastern Africa. From 2018 to 2021, Eliana was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has also held fellowships at the Library of Congress’ Kluge Center in Washington D.C and New York University’s Remarque Institute.