Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948

Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948, is a book by Louise London, first published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. It has 313 pages, covering a preface, nine chapters followed by a conclusion, two appendices detailing biographical notes and Home Secretary and Home Office permanent under secretaries (1906-1950) respectively, and an index preceded by a bibliography. There is also an image of an elderly Jewish refugee arriving at the Port of Southampton, and of over 200 refugee children, part of the kindertransport, arriving at Liverpool Street Station. ==Background==

London, who writes on the "rights of aliens", is a former immigration lawyer, and daughter of a refugee from Eastern Europe. Her book is based on her thesis completed in 1992 from the University of London. ==Content==

The book details how the British government responded to refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe between the years 1933 and 1948. She writes that immigration policy “was designed to keep out large numbers of European Jews - perhaps 10 times as many as it let in”. She details the Aliens Act 1905, the introduction of immigration controls and visas, and the private charities that assisted the first Jewish refugees. ==Response and reviews==

The Initial response in the Independent, by Julia Pascal, called the book both "admirable" and a "disturbing read". Todd Endelman, notes in his book The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000 (2002), that London's book on the topic is the best account of British refugee policy. Rory Miller, in The International History Review, described it as a scholarly addition to the historical interest in Jewish immigration. In The Economic History Review, Richard Thurlow calls it "a highly valuable addition to the literature of a highly controversial topic". He says that London provides evidence for both sides of the argument, her work on the 1930s is more precise compared to the period during the War, when public opinion changed significantly, and on the whole is "thought-provoking". ==Interpretation==

The book is used to debate the kindertransport, as London asks what happened to the parents and elder siblings of the children who "did not come to Britain and are thus not part of the story". Her note of a lack of images of the parents left behind has been used to support the notion that the kindertransport story is too simplistic and overwhelmingly positive. In The Jewish Quarterly Review, Susan Cohen notes that it would be easy to make parallels with later immigrants, "and to replace Jews with Bosnians or another ethnic group". Steve Paullson, historian and expert in Holocaust studies, makes similar parallels, but to be interpreted as such with caution.. "the Holocaust is a limiting case, a "plight of refugees" that developed as far as it possibly could into a campaign of total extermination—under conditions, of course, of total war. It would be wrong, therefore, to view Louise London's book as mainly a source of ammunition for present-day polemics. Still, it provides much food for thought". Regarding the restrictions of entry stemming from immigration policy being particularly more restrictive for Jewish refugees from Sudetenland, he points out that "Britain did not know, of course, that they would soon fall into the hands of the Nazis." ==Awards==

It was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in 2001. ==Sequelae==

In 2008, London published an article titled "Whitehall and the Refugees: The 1930s and the 1990s", in which her comparisons claim that "the same worry about the long-term effects of immigration—that is, that refugees would settle in the country and not return home or move on—that very much influenced the tendency to inhibit aid to Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, is still very much alive today." In 2021 she published "The Agenda of British Refugee Policy, 1933–48", in which she writes that refugee policy "is policy on refugees, not for them". ==References==