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Jewry's Nationals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2016

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States have their nationals and religions have their religionists, each of whom shares in a distinct and inherited identity. In considering whether Jewry is one of those communities which consists of dependents born into it, three distinct variations arise: there are those who recognize that Jewry is a unitary group with the right to have a National Home; there are those who hold that Jewry, as a community, must be combatted as an enemy; there are those who view Jewry as a group of individuals, the interests of which Jewish organizations (not necessarily of a Zionist orientation) have found it to be their responsibility to safeguard in situations where their interests were not safeguarded as nationals of specific States.

In politological terms, the first and third combine positively and the second and third negatively, but in each combination Jewish organizations were faced with the obligation to act on an international level under conditions and by means so novel in terms of international practice that they were termed unprecedented and sui generis, and for which international law had no place to integrate the kind of non-governmental protective activity which was evoked, or to illustrate how a victim's experience creates law, or how scattered communities operate generically, within patterns exclusive to them.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1981

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References

1 Lador-Lederer, , Streugemeinschaften, in 35 Europa Ethnica (Vienna, 1978) 154 ff.Google Scholar A distinction must be made between communities resulting from contiguous areas of settlement, which had been cut up into several statai complexes (generally the population of mountainous areas, such as the Kurds, the Incas) and communities not living in contiguous areas, partly as a result of migration or remnants of eroded ethnic communities (Celts) and partly dissident religious groups. This phenomenon of scattered communities has been largely neglected in ethnology, law, linguistics, most probably because scientific research is a matter for institutions belonging to the establishments of centralized governments. It will be noted that in all these cases continuity is provided biologically, each newborn “member” sharing in the heredity which makes up the group—whether that be the subjective features of group (language, religion, customs) or the objective features which the surroundings are attributing to them. This would apply also to minority groups chopped off the matrix nation, whether in the shape of historical settlements or in that more modern one of expatriate economic emigrants (Germans, Italians, Mexicans, etc). This is what corresponds to their nature as Generationsgebilde.

2 As explained below, n. 9, we shall use the term “citizenship” in lieu of “nationality” (in the Anglo-Saxon sense); the French “ressortissant”, where usable, would be fully acceptable.

3 Der Kastnerbericht über Eichmanns Menschenhandel (München, 1961) 24.

4 It appears that William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was the first sociologist to elaborate on the distinctions between in-group and out-group relationships. For a contemporary analysis see the chapters on “Belongingness” and “Togetherness” in W.H.Whyte, Organization Man.

5 Two papers on this subject by the present writer shall be found in the 1981 volume of the Michigan Yearbook of International Legal Studies.

6 There is no legal definition of who is a Jew. Several concepts, halakhic and sociological, are in competition, each backed by some authority, partly confirming and partly excluding each other. The halakhic definition is Jewry's autonomous definition; for practical purposes, such as the application of the Law of Return, 1950, a Jew is one “born of a Jewish mother or [who] has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion” (24 L.S.I. 28, sec. 4B). With rare exceptions the definition suggested in the text would qualify as Jewish on sociological grounds all those who have had to suffer a Jewish fate and have not persisted in another religious community. This would correspond to the scope of rehabilitation carried on by Jewish welfare organizations for Jewish victims. The latter would generally include Jews of non-halakhic conversion and dependents of mixed marriages. In recognition of the facts of life, Israeli citizenship is automatically acquired by the wife of every Jewish oleh, as well as by his descendants for two generations and their spouses, “except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion”. The range, suggested in this paper, would be broad enough to include all persons who declare themselves to be Jewish and have a Jewish fate.

7 The proviso as to the non-eligibility of converts is a reflex of the view of the Israel Supreme Court in Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior (1962) 16 P.D. 2428; S.J., Special Vol. 1. For Silber, J. a decisive argument was that “we do not cut ourselves off from our historic past nor deny our ancestral heritage. We continue to drink from the original fountains. The shape has changed, the channels have been altered; but we have not sealed the wells, for without them we would be ‘as the poor that are cast out’.” In terms of Jewish victimology, a convert's identification with a religious teaching which presides over such victimizing cannot be considered compatible with Jewry as a community of fate. (This makes it possible to draw a distinction between Spinoza and confessed converts). The in-group criterion would allow the inclusion of all those who fought for Israel although halakhically not Jewish.

8 This Slavic term, still in use in present Communist terminology, is objectively now entirely dissociated from any religious connotation, irrespective of what the person concerned may have felt when declaring himself a Jew; in the majority of cases, religion will not have played any role.

9 Here is also the germ of what is not: Staatsvolk, or Nation. Indeed, the articulation of these problems suffers greatly from terminological inadequacies, each language having evolved a terminology adapted to its own social experience rather than to an abstraction elaborated by scientific method. In recent years some help has come from the use of “ethnicity” as a kind of common denominator. Herzl used the term Volk, normally translated as “people”, although, in contra distinction to nation (French) it is not necessarily coextensive with ethnicity; on the other hand, nation (French) does not correspond to “nation” in American usage, where it has a connotation similar to Staatsvolk which again may be dissociated from ethnicity but felicitously reflects the concept of a pluralist society. See n. 12.

10 As least one other scattered community, the Gypsies, shows the incapacity of the international community to deal with and to protect unorganized groups. Cf. Lador-Lederer, op. cit., supra n. 1 for full argumentation of how solutions to the problem were forthcoming only with the recognition by international law of the legal phenomenon of organization on a non-governmental level. Even earlier, James Lorimer (1818–1890) pointed out that it was not nonsensical to envisage the individuality of nations without territory; his examples were the Gypsies and Jews. Stalin took the opposite view with disastrous consequences for Jewry.

11 For what concerns the broader normative-philosophical implications, see Lador-Lederer, , “‘Victims’ Law': lus Cogens and Natural Law” (1978) 8 Israel Yrbk. on Human Rights 267.Google Scholar

12 The terminological argument in n. 9 supra makes it advisable to avoid the not less ambivalent derivative from “nation”—”nationality”—particularly as not only French but Central-European usage as well understands it in the sense of ethnicity, rather than citizenship.

13 The classic reference is the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, of February 1535, renewed and expanded in 1569, 1581, 1597, 1604 and 1673, and made permanent in 1740. Amended in 1861, it was terminated on 6 August 1924; Hurewitz, J.C., Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East, (1956) vol. I, pp. 1 ff.Google Scholar

14 Wolf, L., Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question (1919) 63–4Google Scholar; he notes that “the text of the Sultan's letter is preserved in the rare Lettere di Principi (Venice, 1581) iii, 171”.

15 Relevant treaty provisions are: Art. XIV of the Treaty of Carlowitz (Karlovac), 1699; Art. XIII of the Treaty of Passarowitz (Pozharcvats), 1718; Art. XI of the Peace Treaty of Belgrade, 1739; cf. Hurcwitz, op. cit.

16 In respect to the Franco-Swiss trade agreement. This case of “conflict of laws” found an end only with the full emancipation of Jews in the eighteen-sixties, Switzerland being the last European State to take this step.

17 The reference is to a trade agreement made in 1832, The attitude of the US was rather hesitating (Adler, C., With Firmness in the Right, pp. 176 ff.Google Scholar) and the House of Representatives saw no other way of obtaining satisfaction for its views, but to vote by a majority of 300 to 1, that “the said treaty is hereby declared to be terminated and of no force and effect”; ibid. p. 286. Sazonoff, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs “threatened that Russia would not reconsider signing another treaty except on the lines of the old one”; ibid. p. 287.

18 The Jewish community had long been recognized as one of the three millets—the Greek and Armenian being the others—with a Millet-Bashi at the “imperial level” (so to say) and Hakham Bashis at the local. According to the law (cf. Young— vol. II), forty representatives, drawn from the nine largest towns of the Empire (including Jerusalem and Jaffa) were allowed to join the eighty representatives in electing the Millet Bashi. While the various localities were governed by local committees, the Turkish Government did not deal with them and only summoned the Constantinople Hakham. The Law of 1854 (ibid., vol. I, p. 43) and of 1871 (ibid., pp. 59–60; 68–9), provided for elected Councils of Elders to assist the local mukhtar but this provision never came into full operation.

19 “It is a Russian proverb that a man without a passport is a man without a soul”: Turack, D.C., The Passport in International Law (1972) xv.Google Scholar

20 This was the situation throughout the 19th century: Rey, F., “La Question Israélite. en Roumanie” (1903) 10 Revue générale de Droit Intern, public 460526.Google Scholar The force of routine as well as the pressure of the local Jewish representation were so potent that at the Conference in Paris, 1919, the fight was for the grant not of protected-alien status but of outright Rumanian citizenship. A similar situation in Poland was responsible for the persistent claim that the Minorities Treaties include provisions recognizing all residents, having no other citizenship, as full citizens of the State. That made no impression on the Rumanians: Bessarabian Jews were supposed to obtain Rumanian citizenship upon the annexation of this former Russian province by Rumania; nevertheless, soon thereafter the Rumanian authorities limited acquisition only to those who could show twenty years' residence in the area, thus excluding all newly arrived refugees and reducing them to the status of apatrides.

21 Oppenheim-Lauterpacht, , International Law (1948) vol. I, p. 589.Google Scholar In what concerns Jews in the Holy Land, by order of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, the newly appointed British Vice Consul in Jerusalem was instructed in January 1839 “that it will be part of your duty… to afford Protection to the Jews generally: and you will take an early opportunity of reporting to His Lordship upon the present state of the Jewish Population in Palestine”: Hyamson, A.M., The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine, 1838–1914 (London, 1939) 2.Google Scholar

22 By some European (mainly Sweden) and Latin American States: Levay, E., Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Vienna, 1948)Google Scholar; Eck, N., “The Rescue of Jews with the Aid of Passports and Citizenship Papers of Latin American States” (1957) I Yad Vashem Studies 125.Google Scholar The legal basis for the issue of such protection passports may be found either in every State's sovereign prerogative of protecting innocent persecutees or in its right anticipatorily to grant citizenship to such asylum seekers and provide them with appropriate documents enabling them to leave the country in which they were endangered.

23 This Law (25 L.S.I. 117) might, and under certain circumstances should, lead to a category of “passport Israelis”, provided Israel were ready to claim, and the international community ready to consent, that Israel has the role of agent of protection, parallel or subsidiary to other available but inoperative agents, such as the UN, HCR and ICRC.

24 Whiteman, , Digest, vol. 8, p. 98Google Scholar—The practice was initiated by Germany; a law of 14 July 1933 revoked naturalization granted between 9 November 1918 and 30 January 1933 and deprived Germans who actively worked against the Nazi regime abroad of their nationality. A law of 15 September 1939 and a Decree issued thereunder on 25 November 1941 considerably extended the range of denationalization to include by implication all persons who had been deported; cf. Rasche's Commentary, p. 108. The same model was employed before the war by Poland (Law No. 22, Pos. 1919, of 1 March 1938) and Italy (Decree No. 1728 of 17 December 1938) and, of course, during the war by various Quisling governments. These apatrides were invariably the first group of deportees to the gas chambers: see Kempner, , Eichmann (Zürich 1961).Google Scholar

25 The only exception were prisoners of war, possessing the nationality of a Western treaty party in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1929, a clear sign that the motivation was pragmatic—fear of reprisals—rather than observance of the Convention. Poland, too, was a party, but its P.O.W.s were in fact deprived of any protection. See this writer's paper, “World War II: Jews as Prisoners of War” (1980) 10 IYHR 70.

26 The most explicit document is the Minutes of the Wannsee meeting on 20 January 1942 of leading government officials; cf. NG-2586/G in XIII, Green Series, pp. 210–217; see NG 2586/F, ibid., p. 198, which gives expression to the wishes of the Auswärtige Amt regarding the Final Solution.

27 Gen. Ass. Res 217/A (III). This is not the entire picture. A European Convention on Human Rights was adopted in 1950 and two further national Covenants in 1966, one on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the other on Civil and Political Rights, both in force since 1976.

28 “1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. 2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”.

29 Most extended assistance without question as to the halakhic qualifications of the refugee.

30 Whilst here intercession is formally done by virtue of state treaty, the historical antecedents are probably a better illustration of our point—ecclesiastical Orders dealing with the ransom of Christians made captive by the Moslems and sold as slaves.

31 As a Swiss private-law association, the ICRC enjoys no formal international status. Its standing is the outcome of its philosophy not less than of service, intergovernmental agreements and its capacity of proposing international legislation: Seidl-Hohenveldern, , Das Recht der internationalen Organisationen (1967) 4.Google Scholar

32 This is, of course, a rather optimistic view taken on the not very rich experience with the Red Cross Conventions of 1949. It certainly does not relate to the situation prevailing in World War II.

33 The Declaration is a document of various interpretations. The point has been made that while this provision at first applied to Great Britain only and the States which had endorsed it during the War, it “became binding on all States members of the L.o.N.” in consequence of the inclusion of the Declaration in the body of the Mandate for Palestine, which was on its part a resolution of the League Council”: Feinberg, N., “The Recognition of the Jewish People in International Law”, in The Jewish Yrbk. of Int. Law (Jerusalem, 1949) 17.Google Scholar

34 On the other hand, whatever the Zionist wishful interpretation, the realization of such virtual rights of the Jew to his homeland was subordinated to the administrative procedure of immigration permits, the only direct gain for Zionism being that it was in a position to administer the distribution of these permits.

35 L.o.N. doc. C.73.M.38.1929.V, p. 16; excerpts in Whiteman, op. cit., p. 32. Largely academic at the time of its presentation and bearing no reference to Jewry, this prise de position afterwards found full justification and a real field of application in the Nazi concept of Volkszugehörigkeit and the inclusion of the Auslandsdeutschtum in a strictly disciplined party organization—the Auslands-Organisation der NSDAP operating through 48 “national groups” under the effective command of a Landesgruppenleiter, also known as Hoheitsträger of the National-Socialist movement, the insinuation being that there was some sovereignty (Hoheitsrechte) vested in it.

36 Whiteman, op. cit., p. 35.

37 The State Department stated that the US “does not recognize a legal-political relationship based upon the religious identification of American citizens”, a formula which, in view of the position of Roman Catholics in the US, is evidently incorrect. Nevertheless, the Zionist Organization of America, found it necessary to assert “that that Organization had never advocated dual loyalty or any other legal political relationship”, adding that “the oneness of the Jewish people is not legal or political but emotional and spiritual and cultural”: Whiteman, op. cit.

38 Schmitt, C., Der Begriff des Politischen (1933).Google Scholar On 16 November 1941 Goebbels wrote in Das Reich: “Wir erleben eben den Vollzug dieser Prophezeiungen, und es erfüllt sich damit am Judentum ein Schicksal, das zwar hart aber mehr als verdient ist … es erleidet nun einen allmählichen Vernichtungsprozess den es uns zugedacht hatte…”.

39 Cf. Nuremberg doc. NG-2367 of 14 October 1942, reprinted in Monneray, H., La persécution des Juifs dans les pays de l'Est (Paris, 1949) 242.Google Scholar

40 See the report by the Slovakian Red Cross Society of 9 June 1942, reprinted in Durand, A., History of the ICRC, 491.Google Scholar

41 Whiteman, op. cit., p. 98, refers to some British judgements refusing to give effect to a German decree which denationalized German Jews outside Germany, the rationale being that were they to do so, “the enemy would have the power to remove its nationals from the disabilities of enemy status under legislation of the State of residence, by changing their status from that of enemy aliens to that of stateless persons”.

42 A first instrument was RELICO (Relief Committee for Jewish War Victims) set up in Geneva in April 1940, which operated from Switzerland and France, until the latter's collapse. See Unity in Dispersion, p. 201. Much of this activity, it should be emphasized, was of a Red Cross routine nature except that the Red Cross had not acted. As described by Durand, this “hands off” policy was adopted upon advice given, as early as December 1939, to the President of ICRC, Max Huber by Hartmann, Director of the German Red Cross Society, and, the ICRC “constata dès lors que des démarches spécifiques en faveur des Israélites étaient vouées à l'échec, et que, pour leur venir en aide, il était préférable de ne pas se référer à la ‘question raciale’ en tant que critère de protection”. With nothing more to report until October 1942, Durand notes that the ICRC decided that “il n'est pas possible de faire une démarche générale au sujet des Juifs” (p. 484).

43 Rescue operations were successful to the extent that the Jewish Agency—again “Jewry for its nationals”—was able to provide immigration certificates. Much more was done by way of charity, mainly by the Joint Distribution Committee, but this writer is by no means certain whether the directors of the Joint, would have agreed that it was a case of “Jewry for its nationals”.

44 For a case remarkable for its intricacies, which occurred in Spring 1944, see Unity in Dispersion, p. 193.

45 Here, “United Nations” is a technical term—later used in the Peace Treaties of 1947 (with Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Italy and Rumania)—which does not relate to the members of the UN Organization, but to the signatories of the Declaration of the United Nations of 1 January 1942. The said treaties contain detailed provisions regarding restitution of property, etc. of “United Nations nationals”, this term including “also all individuals, corporations or associations which, under the laws in force in Rumania during the war, have been treated as enemy”: Art. 24(9.a); mutatis mutandis in the other treaties.

46 Robinson, Nehemiah, Spoliation and Remedial Action in the Institute Anniversary Volume, 1941–1961 (Institute of Jewish Afiairs, WJC, New York, 1962) Chap. VI, pp. 155207.Google Scholar

47 In 1970 COJO was replaced by the International Jewish Committee on Inter-religious Consultations, IJCIC, made up of the WJC, B'nai B'rith, the Anti Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Synagogue Council of America and the Israel Committee for Interreligieus Contacts. The WJC Report concludes with pride, and some exaggeration, that “thus the efforts of the WJC to establish a united Jewish front vis-à-vis the international church bodies were fully successful”.

48 As time went on, a dialogue developed and certain improvements in the Ecumenical Council's draft Declaration were negotiated, but the Curia remained adamant in rejecting any link whatsoever with Zionism or a recognition of the Jews' right to safeguard their survival, even after the experience of the Holocaust, in the shape of a sovereign State of their own.

49 One should admit, however, that the subject has apparently not been fully researched. Several more communities, the Armenians and the Chinese diaspora, are of a comparable cultural potential. On the other hand, certain groups, generally remnants of substantially eroded primary populations, Urvölker (Incas, Celts, Gypsies), are without capacity at organization because they are in general deprived of adequate opportunity for autonomous cultural identification and organized pursuit thereof.

50 The main example which comes to mind is the Pontifical Government at Rome. To a certain extent, its services are facilitated because of the State-like status which is enjoyed by the Città del Vaticano: a broadcasting service which does not depend on any external consent, a postal service and mint which propagate the Church among a broad public, an autonomous passport service etc. But dissemination of printed material, as well as the convening of international gatherings (whether on the religious or the scholarly level) operates along lines essentially identical with those of other international communities and associations of a similar intellectual texture.

51 Vogel, David, Lobbying the Corporation (1978) 192 ff.Google Scholar

52 Although not a few NGOs had maintained functional relations with the L.O.N. (among them the Comité des Délégations juives), the matter became ripe for institutionalization only under the UN Charter (Art. 71). Similar provisions have been adopted by subsidiaries of the UN, mainly UNICEF (6 Jewish NGOs have consultative status with it), as well as by the Specialized Agencies (7 Jewish NGOs have relations with one or more of them, 4 with UNESCO, 3 with ILO, 1 with WHO) which make up the UN “Family of Organizations”. A similar arrangement was adopted by the Council of Europe.

53 It is probably here, where the emphasis is on the availability of procedural means for practical action, that the intrinsic weakness of the consultative status is laid bare. It is a situation which calls for a re-examination of attitudes and probably for a more active insistence on such rights. The Jewish organizations would possibly not be the only ones in pleading a cause shared by all scattered communities and descendant groups.

54 The reference is to communities which are not organized as states. Arabs are therefore excluded although there is a growing number of IGOs and NGOs which declare themselves generically as “Arabic”, whatever the differences which exist and affect the sociological characteristics of the community of which they purport to be members.

55 That conspicuously there are no comparable cultural or scientific NGOs can be explained in part by the fact that the Mosaic religion has not acquired the characteristics of an organized Church and in part by the difficulty of showing the “Jewishness” substance or the need for Jewish professionals to collaborate at this level. The elaboration of the unifying features is as yet unfinished. The crux of the matter is the still unascertained extent of cultural symbiosis with surrounding cultural circles which can be tolerated without danger of loss of the main Jewish cultural stock.

56 In one respect UNESCO holds a place of honour in the sociological history of the “Jewish Problem”: in numerous publications and resolutions it combatted the myth of superior races and racialism in general. It did not, however, convince its own “parent” organization, the UN.

57 Ludwig, C., Die Flüchtlingspolitik der Schweiz (1957) 103, 112 ff.Google Scholar

58 Turack op. cit., 210 ff. His attention was concentrated on recent practices and did not include historical precedents, such as the aftermath of World War I, when the ICRC rendered most valuable services in repatriating to Central Europe thousands of P.O.W.s, scattered all over Russia and Siberia and as a result cut off by the Communist Revolution and the subsequent civil war. This repatriation obviously had its bureaucratic part as well.

59 Known as “ICRC Travel Document No. 10.100A”; the French series bears the number 10-100bis; ibid., p. 126.

60 The ICRC issued travel documents in 1954 in Lebanon and Israel.

61 The New York Times Magazine of 22 January 1961.

62 Taylor did not refrain from suggesting the possible extension of this reasoning to other scattered communities, even the “Negro people”: “If racial hatreds lead to the lawless killing of a Negro in the South, in Ben-Gurion's sense [there would be] no doubt that [this] is a crime against the Negro people”, in order to reject the view “that ‘historic justice’ requires the perpetrators to be tried, before a court in a ‘Negro State’ such as Ghana or Guinea”. We find it difficult to assume that General Taylor would not have sensed that while Jewry is a (scattered) community, in part resettled in Israel, “Negroes in the South” are part of the American nation, and not of a scattered community of descendants of slaves, originating in nearly all African countries, and spread over nearly all countries of the Western Hemisphere, without any ethnic community among them.

63 (1962) 19 Bar Bulletin of the New York County Lawyers Association 101. Herbert Wechsler was in charge of the War Division of the US Dept. of Justice, 1944–46, and principal legal technical adviser to the US judges in the Nuremberg Trial. His role is succinctly demonstrated in Smith's, BradleyReaching Judgment at Nuremberg (177)Google Scholar index. Telford Taylor had another form of de-judaïzing the Final Solution: a crime against a Negro “is as much a crime against whites as blacks”, and a criminalization of crimes “against Jews” must not mean that “it is no crime against non-Jews”. While it is true that a crime against Frenchmen is “as much a crime” against Germans (or is it not?)—France did not forgo her sovereignty in penal matters because there was a concurrent German sovereignty of a like sort, sed si duo faciunt idem, non est idem.

64 To a very large extent World War II is repetitive of World War I, both as to war aims and to the battlefields in the East—but during World War I Germany never complained that Polish or Russian Jewry had been an obstacle to her military operations, territorial gains and occupation regime. If the situation was different during World War II, it is because 1939 was already the sixth year of Hitler's war against Jewry.

65 There had come about a debate on whether the Jewish victims of the Holocaust would qualify as of Israeli “quasi-nationality”, Ms. Helen Silving being for, and Mr. Woetzel against, the former in a paper in (1961) 55 Am.J.Int.Law, the latter in the (1962) Crim.L.R. (The papers are reprinted in Mueller, Gerhard, International Criminal Law (1965) 290353Google Scholar and 354–365, respectively). To the mind of this writer, a debate on that subject is superfluous if a legal subjectivity of any sort is recognized to Jewry, or to scattered communities in general.

66 It has not been believed appropriate to expatiate here on what one must assume familiar to all Israeli readers—the effect this doctrine has had on Israel's positive law. The reader not familiar with the Hebrew version of the relevant laws, should not be confused by an incorrect terminology, which translated Hok HaEzrahut as ‘Nationality’, in lieu of ‘Citizenship’ law. This is to say that in Israel—and it is not different in other countries—the community substance is only very imperfectly reflected in citizenship regulations. Since the insertion in Israel's Declaration of Independence, of the State's goal of Ingathering of the Exiles—the totality of the Exiles being Jewry—the oleh is a returnee, not an immigrant (in contradistinction to what was the positive law under the Mandate). When considered in the light of the present exposé, the statutes enacted in Israel are providing ipso facto the immigrant part of Jewry's nationalis with an Israeli citizenship and all those administrative and consular services that go with it. And there is more to it: according to Amendment No. 3, 1971, to the Citizenship Law, the Minister of the Interior may, at his discretion, “grant” nationality by virtue of return” to a person who “has expressed his desire to settle in Israel… even before his aliyah”.”