During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First
World War) Switzerland played an important role in absorbing immigrants. Though located at the
periphery of the main migration routes the federal state with its liberal policies on
foreigners became a key destination for students revolutionaries and travelers. The
micro-studies and more general papers of this volume approach the topic in its transnational
local linguistic gendered and ideological dimensions and from various disciplinary angles.
They interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the
Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics of this volume range ? among others ?
from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish politics (Bundism
Socialism Yiddishism Zionism) conflicting performative cultures of Jewish and Russian
revolutionaries the Swiss Lehr- and Wanderjahre of the Jewish public intellectual Meir Wiener
the impact of Geneva on the Zionist Hebrew writer Ben Ami the Russian-Jewish students'
colonies in Berne and Zurich and questions of individuals' integration and acculturation.
