Emigration from Russia and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1840s-1940s

FAIN: FEL-268516-20

Eileen Mary Kane
Connecticut College (New London, CT 06320-4125)

A book-length study on Jewish and Muslim emigration from Russia to the Middle East from the 1840s to the 1940s.

Between the 1840s and 1940s, over a million Russian (and later Soviet) subjects migrated to the Middle East, yet this history is under-researched and its implications for the present are poorly understood. These migrants transformed the places where they settled, and thinking about migration and politics. I seek NEH funding to write this history, and reveal how presumably separate strands of ethnic and religious migrations in fact intersected. By exploring how competing state and philanthropic institutions sought to limit, channel, and instrumentalize these human migrations for their own purposes, I will recover a history that has often been distorted for ideological and national agendas. My book will integrate the histories of Jewish and Muslim emigration from Russia to the Middle East, which are typically written in isolation. More broadly, it will expand the boundaries of standard narratives of mass emigration from Europe, to encompass Muslim migrants and the Middle East.