L.r.e. (lucia) Admiraal

Biography

Lucia Admiraal is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES). Her research project 'Entangled loyalties. Middle Eastern Jewish views on Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the Arabic Jewish press 1933-1948' is funded by NWO (PhD's in the Humanities 2016). The project is supervised by prof Gerard Wiegers, prof Irene Zwiep and dr Robbert Woltering. Lucia Admiraal graduated in History and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Amsterdam and studied Arabic at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC). 

Research Interest

This project investigates how European Nazism and anti-Semitism challenged the entangled loyalties of Arabic speaking Jewish intellectuals in the colonial settings of the Middle East during the 1930s and 40s. While the Nazi persecution of European Jews sharpened tensions between the opposite objectives of Jewish assimilation and political Zionism on a global scale, Middle Eastern Jews were reconsidering their position in the emerging Arab nation states. The research focuses on interrelated Arabic-language Jewish newspapers from Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq. The main aim is to understand if and how their reports on the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Europe complicated Jewish notions of integration in the Middle East between 1933 and 1948. By using the analytical tools of entangled history, the research aims to locate Middle Eastern Jewish views on Nazism and anti-Semitism in their historical, local and regional contexts and to map the transnational networks of Arabic speaking Jewish intellectuals and their interconnection within the Arab public sphere. It aims to unveil how Nazism and anti-Semitism challenged notions of ‘Arabness’ intersecting with ‘Jewishness’ in the Middle East prior to 1948. More broadly, the research contributes to the study of transnational networks and modern transnational debates on integration and inclusion.