ABSTRACT
There has been much very good social and political history written about the Jews in Australia.1 However none of this work sets this history within broader ideological understandings of Jews in the west, or in the context of the complex interrelationship of ideas about race and the nation-state which have been central to the development of the Australian nation-state. Conversely, in histories of migration to Australia and discussions of population policy, Jews hardly get mentioned at all-not at all in Stephen Castles et al.’s justly well-known Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia2 and three pages, one of which is a quotation, in Geoffrey Sherington’s standard text, Australia’s Immigrants 1788-1988.3 In this chapter I want to bring Jewish history in Australia out of its isolation and begin an examination of the cultural construction of Jews in the context of the evolution of the White Australia policy and its corollary, the idea of assimilation as the central plank in the formation of the Australian nation-state.
