Let me get this straight, they had no reason to fear the man who constantly made threats to invade and expand the Greater Germany? Plus with the appeasement going on, you'd think that they'd feel afraid.
Your argument in no way refutes mine. I see no discrepancy. European Jews from Europe fled to Palestine, and are the majority of the Jews in Israel now.
If I recall correctly, this argument started over whether or not Hitler was directly responsible for the existence of a viable Jewish state in the Middle East. That's why it is noteworthy that most of the fifth wave of Jewish settlers did not come from Germany. If you were a Jew in Poland or Russia, what reason did you have to fear Nazi Germany before the very late 1930's? He made a lot of noise, true, but it was an option question if even Hitler was mad enough to plunge the world into the horrors of war after what had been seen in the first war. Lots of people, incorrectly, seemed to be willing to assume that he would not, that he would only seek treaty revisions. Past that, even if you believed that Hitler meant what he said in his little book (and not what he so often said in his speeches, that he wanted peace), if you lived in Poland or Russia, what reason did you have to fear him? Based on the experience of the last war, why would you expect all of Poland to fall to the Germans, and to do so quickly enough to make it difficult if not impossible for you to flee? Wouldn't you assume from the previous war that even if Germany attacked Poland, it would take months if not years to conquer the entire nation, giving civilians time to flee to the east? Secondly, I think you are underestimating human nature when it comes to sensing further threats. If you were a German Jew, Germany was your home, it was all you knew. Giving up all that and leaving would be a difficult decision. Even after the Nazis came to power, with their anti-semetic rhetoric, there would be a lot of people who simply assumed it was all show, or it would all blow over. Even after they started enacting anti-Jewish laws, I think few people really understood how far the Nazis would take it. If you read diaries and autobiographies of Jews living in Germany at this time, one thing that almost always comes through is the sheer shock of Krystalnacht. I really think for many people, this was the first time they realized the Nazis meant it. That the Nazis weren't just going to ban them from professorships, they actually aimed to hurt or even kill them. But before that?
Looking at the evidence, I think it is reasonable to assume that most of the settlers in the fifth wave, or at least that portion of it from 1929-1937 or so, were motivated more by economic turmoil and the old-style anti-semitism of Eastern Europe than fear of Hitler's Germany directly.
