Integration through distinction: German-Jewish immigrants, the legal profession and patterns of bourgeois culture in british-ruled jewish palestine

This article examines the encounter of the German Jewish immigrants with the crystallizing of local Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that their accepted image as cultural aliens, based on their allegedly incompatible European-like bourgeois life-style, was propagated by both parties in this encounter, causing their marginalization and at the same time serving them as an important socio-cultural resource. Focusing on the field of the legal profession, it analyses the 1930's and the already emerging and highly-accepted patterns of a local middle-class civic culture (despite its rejection by the political discourse), which facilitated the advancement of an elite group of Germanborn lawyers in this field.