There is a comforting little fable circulating in parts of the Jewish world. You hear it at dinners, after community events, in the half-confident tone people adopt when discussing disasters they assume will happen to somebody else. If things become truly ugly in Europe, Canada, South Africa, or even parts of the United States, Jews will simply go to Israel.

History has a nasty habit of humiliating people who confuse refuge with logistics. The 1930s were full of Jews who assumed there would always be somewhere to go, some embassy to petition, some government that would eventually recognise the danger. Then came the affidavits, the quotas, the missing documents, the delayed approvals, the closed ports and the dreadful discovery that hatred moves much faster than administration.

Israel remains the great Jewish refuge. A state built, in part, because the world once decided Jewish desperation was an immigration problem rather than a human one. But even Israel runs on systems, ministries, evidentiary standards and legal definitions. And legal definitions can become merciless under pressure.

The modern diaspora is far more complicated than people like to admit. Large numbers of Jews possess fractured family histories. Soviet records lost to Communist........

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