"We must carry on": The Jewish Relief Unit, Displaced Persons and Anglo-Jewish Humanitarianism in Postwar Europe.

This project will investigate and create a deeper understanding of the indispensable role of the Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) - a small but remarkable British relief organisation that helped Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in postwar Europe - and the ways in which it fundamentally shaped the experience and future of Displaced Persons (DPs). By using the JRU as a window into the postwar world, this project will create a more nuanced understanding of the contribution of relief workers and DPs to the wider postwar developments and consider the reciprocal, long-lasting impact that these groups had on each other.
This project will contribute to furthering understanding of refugee studies, Anglo-Jewish humanitarianism and British responses to the Holocaust. It addresses two significant lacunae in the current scholarship: the historic exclusion of DPs and relief workers' voices from the wider histories of the period, and, more specifically, the near-total neglect of the JRU.
It is guided by four research questions. The first question will utilise the methodology of intellectual history to focus on the personnel employed by the JRU, asking how factors such as class, nationality, political beliefs, and gender shaped the experience and approach of these relief workers. For many DPs, relief workers represented a pillar of stability in a period of great uncertainty. As DPs' primary connection to the outside world, the JRU personnel exerted a real influence on the ways that those they interacted with developed and were perceived. Thus, a thorough examination of the JRU personnel will further our understanding of not just how relief was facilitated but by whom, and why.
This initial focus will inform the project's second research question, which will draw on the JRU's personnel files, survivor testimony, and memoirs to ask what the tangible, long-term impact of the methods and ideology of the JRU and its field workers was on DPs and their identity reconstruction.
The project's third guiding research question will consider the institution more broadly, utilising its organisational and administrative records to ask how the organisation as a whole contributed to the developments of the postwar landscape. By approaching this question through the eyes of some of the key people on the ground, this project will highlight the multi-faceted nature of contemporary developments (such as the creation of Israel), reinforce the engagement of both DPs and relief workers, and reinstate these groups into the historic narrative as ambitious contributors in their own right. This will challenge the outdated trend of presenting DPs as a homogenous and dependent group who were products of the situation around them - a trend which continues to falsely inform discourse about refugees in the present.
Finally, the fourth research question will consider how the JRU fits in to the environment of postwar humanitarianism more generally. It asks how the JRU drew its approach from other organisations and how the organisation and its activities exemplify wider developments in the field of humanitarianism at that time. In particular, it will focus on the ways in which the JRU differed and carved its own path.
To undertake these questions, this project will utilise an integrated approach, combining the methodologies of intellectual, social and cultural history. Drawing on intellectual history, it will not only trace the ideas which informed and guided the institution and its personnel, but contextualise these ideas in the wider postwar environment and the development of Anglo-Jewish humanitarianism. Leading on from this, it will draw on social and cultural history to analyse how these ideas manifested in the JRU's activities, and their powerful, long-term impact. In particular, it will use a framework of social network analysis to explore the significant effect of the JRU's approach on DPs' identity reconstruction.