Jewish Space Research Articles

The Roads of Baal Shem Tov: Reimagining the Carpathians as a Jewish space in the 20th Century

This article examines the Jewish imagination of the Carpathians in 20th-century literature. Non-Jewish observers who discovered the Carpathians at this time typically saw the Jews as an alien symbol of urban civilization that disturbed the authenticity of mountain life. The article analyzes essays from various Jewish intellectuals, whose aim was to rediscover the Carpathians as a Jewish space through the figure of the Hasidic leader Baal Shem Tov, who lived in the area during the 18th century. By connecting his life with the mountain landscape, they created a Jewish figure embedded in nature and not alienated from it.

Jewish Spaces in Egypt as Sites of Memory

This article explores Jewish spaces in Cairo as repositories of memory and their role in shaping a collective understanding of the Jewish past among non-Jewish Egyptians. By examining these sites through the perspectives of engaged observers, it uncovers their multifaceted reflections of Jewish life and culture. Interactions with these sites reveal the intricate interplay of internal and external factors, such as the dynamics between Jews and Muslims, the reverberations of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and societal responses to Jewish culture. These sites evoke a sense of patriotism among Egyptian Jews and their fellow citizens, marked by the fusion of Arabic, Hebrew, Judaism, and Islam. Understanding this perspective necessitates considering the roles of various stakeholders, including the remaining Jewish community, state institutions, conservationists, and scholarly professionals. It also requires an examination of ongoing societal debates and official decisions regarding the preservation or demolition of Jewish sites. Diverse viewpoints emerge from these discussions, reflecting issues like anti-Semitism, anti-Israel sentiments, distrust of the Egyptian state, and prioritizing the preservation of inhabited spaces over abandoned ones. By shedding light on these contradictions within Egyptian public discourse, this article underscores the significance of acknowledging and celebrating Egyptian Jewish heritage, which continues to shape society today.

Jewish Spaces in Present Vienna: A Relational, Hybrid Approach

In October 2017, Vienna’s Leopoldstadt community succeeded in reinstalling a Hebrew street sign in a public space of the second district. This achievement became possible in large part due to the efforts of an active online community that encouraged many people to share their wish to have visible signs of the former historic Jewish quarter in the present urban space. Through vigorous Facebook and other social media activities, the interest that the group generated put pressure on the city, leading to the support of an art project. The placement of the Hebrew street sign marked a hybrid way of constructing Jewish urban spaces. The dialogue between virtual and physical spaces added new layers to the historic Jewish quarter of Vienna; this way of relational space making is, I wish to argue, paradigmatic for today’s Europe as it witnesses the heyday of Holocaust tourism and klezmer revivals. In this article, I investigate this space-making process in Jewish public history in present Vienna and examine how the virtual community frames the way urban Jewish spaces are constructed.

‘The Most Saving Slum in Glasgow, and the Most Abandoned’: Twentieth-Century Materiality and Twenty-First Century Virtuality in the Jewish Gorbals, Scotland

In 1905, Yiddish poet and Glasgow union activist Avrom Radutsky described the Jewish population of Scotland as ‘a mere drop in the ocean’. Nevertheless, by 1920 this drop had swelled to 20,000 people, centred primarily (though by no means exclusively) around the Gorbals in Glasgow. The area was characterised by vibrant community life, but also cramped low-quality housing, poor sanitation and harsh economic inequality. Many of Glasgow’s Jews began to climb a social ladder that would lead them out of the Gorbals and towards more spacious residences in the south-west of the city, but maintained regular contact with its streets, shops and places of worship. Large-scale demolition of the neighbourhood in the 1960s mean that the Gorbals looks very different today, and the Jews are gone. The Jewishness of this space, however, still remains: a remembered or imagined presence in the minds of second and third generations, celebrated through community outreach, or romantically evoked in popular narratives. Equally, an absence of Jewish life in today’s Gorbals has been paralleled by the emergence of wide-ranging and socially minded virtual networks of shared memory. Through analysis of contemporary accounts and archival sources, oral histories, fieldwork interviews, and lively online discussion groups, this article examines how this former densely populated Jewish neighbourhood now functions as an important lieu de memoire, but in a significantly different way to Eastern Europe’s pre-war Jewish spaces. At the geographical edges of more traumatic histories, the Gorbals instead provides an affective link for contemporary, assimilated Scottish Jews, while at the same time the area’s Jewish history becomes part of a wider virtual online community – signifying an emotional connection to immigrant narratives and grounding personal and social histories.

Cochin in Sethu’s Aliyah: provincializing Jewish identity

ABSTRACT An interest in Jewish topographies involves looking at Jewish presence in locations that help relocalize Jewish space. In this article, we argue that the task of reading Jewish identity as a diaspora community calls for a location and geography specific response, especially in aesthetic discourses that unfold Jewish identity situated outside the Eurocentric contexts. Such location-specific readings can enable a “provincializing” of the West-centric construct of Jewish identity. We argue that Malayalam author Sethu's novel Aliyah: The Last Jew of the Village is an interesting case in point. Set in the middle of the twentieth century, the novel deals with the ways in which the Jews living near Cochin, an island-city in the southern province of Kerala in India, respond to the call for a “return” to Israel. As the Jews and other communities respond to the developments around a possible return, the Jewish and non-Jewish characters in the novel all unpack a different discourse about how Jews belong to Cochin, a phenomenon that can be appreciated once one begins to understand that Jews, as a quintessential diaspora community, have had multiple histories of inhabiting geographies. Foregrounding these locations, through provincializing, might offer possibilities of challenging stereotypes in literary critiques.

Minding the Body: Space, Memory, and Visual Culture in Constructions of Jewish Identity

While it is well established that articulations of identity must always be contextualized within time and place, only when we consider how bodies move through, touch, and are touched by physical, cognitive, and even imaginary spaces do we arrive at dynamic and intersectional expressions of identity. Using two divergent visual culture case studies, this essay first applies Setha Low’s theory of embodied spaces to understand the intersection and interconnection between body, space, and culture, and how the concept of belongingness is knotted with material and representational indicators of space at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Israel. Marianne Hirsch’s ideas about the Holocaust and affiliative postmemory are also considered to further understand how Jewish bodies inherit their identifies and sense of belonging. To test how embodied spaces and affiliative postmemory or collective memory implicitly operate to help shape and articulate expressions of Jewish identities, the focus then shifts to a consideration of the eight-decade career of New York jazz musician and visual artist, Bill Wurtzel. The clever combination of “schtick and sechel” in Wurtzel’s artistic practice, activated by his movement through the Jewish spaces of his youth such as the Catskills, and through his interaction with Jewish design great, Lou Dorfsman, underscore how Jewish belonging and identity are forged at the intersection of physical and tactile “embodied spaces,” where the internal meets the external and human consciousness and experience converge.

On the Journey Through Ukraine: Representations of the Holocaust in Friedrich Gorenstein’s Traveling Companions

Abstract For about three decades now, there has been an ongoing shift towards Geocritical literary analysis so that reading literature historically is now often supplemented by reading literature geographically, foregrounding the most significant political and natural features of the landscape (borders; big cities; shtetlach; mountains; valleys; rivers; forests), as well as the “mindset” of the population and the major historical events associated with them. Friedrich Gorenstein’s novel Traveling Companions (1989) is devoted most explicitly and holistically to the Holocaust in Ukraine and the dynamics of its spatial representation. Gorenstein also writes in a palimpsest mode: he simultaneously works with multiple layers of memory, not all of it his own, inscribed onto particularly Jewish spaces imbued with dense layers of historical events, ideational developments, and living experiences. The concepts of literary territoriality and the treatment of place, space, flow, and movement in literature and culture, including the interplay between the geographies of the ‘real’ and the geographies of the ‘imaginary’ are critical for the understanding of temporal-spatial displacements employed by Gorenstein as he attempts to reconstruct and interpret the textual map of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Gorenstein’s writing grapples with the complex relationship between the geographical space of Ukraine and the memory of the Holocaust and exposes his readers to the permutations of Jewish history and geography while focusing on the concepts of uprootedness, homelessness, and alienation as well as mass murder and irredeemable evil.

Yallah Y’All: The Development and Acceptance of Queer Jewish Language in Seattle

This study investigates how queer Jewish language develops among LGBTQ Jewish people themselves and the processes by which it is learned and adopted by cis-heterosexual people in shared Jewish spaces, focusing on the influence and perceptions of Seattle as a liberal and queer-accepting city. The authors analyze virtual ethnographic interviews with queer and cis-heterosexual individuals involved in Seattle Jewish life, which discuss participants’ experiences and observations surrounding queer Jewish language, emphasizing experiences in learning and adopting queer linguistic features and attitudes toward the acceptance of queer Jewish language in Seattle. It finds that communal awareness and acceptance of queer language in Jewish spaces is largely driven by the presence of queer individuals, particularly in leadership roles.

Screening Out Their Own: Muslim Gatekeepers of Jewish Spaces in Morocco

The literature on ethnic groups that were formed following migration reveals how symbolic and socioeconomic boundaries are manipulated by veteran groups to keep out the unwanted immigrants. It shows how these boundaries are to maintain and preserve the veterans’ dominant position. The case of the tiny Jewish minority living nowadays in Morocco reveals a seemingly contradictory mechanism: Muslim gatekeepers, who are part of the huge majority in Morocco, screen out their coreligionists from Jewish spaces. This gatekeeping fortifies the Jewish notion of exclusive spaces within which they feel safe as a tiny and fragile community. A close ethnographic gaze reveals that screening out Muslims is enabled due to a shared “cultural intimacy” that permits the minority to control access to their spaces. This paper sheds light on a deep level of cultural understanding that allows Jews to maintain bearable life as a dwindling minority in Morocco—despite their motivations to be separated—by appointing Muslim gatekeepers.

A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF THE VENERATION OF ICONS IN THE FIRST ICONOCLASM

Icons became an increasingly familiar presence to Christians, especially with the spread of the faith outside the Jewish space, more restrained from iconographic representations, although assiduously honoring the revealed scriptural text, as well as the temple adorned with figurative images and religious representations. However, in the 8th and 9th centuries they would be exposed to a fierce reevaluation, through the Byzantine iconoclasm, 726-780, 815-842. The Church would confirm, in the end, both the importance of iconography and the veneration of the icons, arguing it on the bases of Christ incarnation and on the antiquity of the tradition. There were still less emphasised the fact that God is sharing His all-blessing-grace and reveals Himselves through the icons.

Przeobrażenia dawnej przestrzeni białostockiego getta

The area of the Bialystok ghetto, existing from 1941 to 1943, encompassed a central industrial and service-residential zone. The buildings within this area suffered extensive damage during the war, and the vast majority of its Jewish inhabitants did not survive. The purpose of this article is to trace the process of the ghetto’s destruction and then the urban and social reconstruction of its space, examining its goals, stages and effects. As a result, it became temporarily a Jewish space, and later, when the physical and functional continuity was completely broken, a completely new, socialist, modern space.

The Blessing "Who Has Not Made Me a Gentile" and Its Alternatives: The Evolution of one Blessing in German Jewish Space in the Nineteenth Century

This paper discusses the Jewish discourse on the blessing She-lo ʿAsani Goy (Who has not made me a gentile), which originated in Germany in the nineteenth century and reflects a Jewish attempt to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. While liberal Jews omitted this blessing or changed it, some Orthodox Jews suggested making only modest changes to the wording of the blessing. Others objected to any changes, but gave new interpretations to the prayer in a manner that strengthened the Modern Orthodox stance. This analysis forms a case study of an ostensibly venerable tradition that is in reality a modern response to new challenges.

In the city of two springs: Perceptions of Mosul’s Jewish quarter among Zionist and Alliance Israélite Universelle emissaries

ABSTRACT The article discusses the reports and accounts of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and Zionist emissaries regarding life Jewish Quarter of Mosul (Mahallat al-Yahud) during the first half of the twentieth century. As a dynamic and open Jewish space, the quarter expressed the development of the Jewish community in the ‘city of two springs’, as Mosul was known among its inhabitants. The article discusses the ideological perceptions expressed in the accounts of the emissaries on life in the Jewish Quarter. The emissaries concentrated on aspects relating to the process of modernization, while describing the Jewish Quarter as a Jewish ghetto.

Yiddish Songs and Jewish Futures: A Besere Velt, Partisan Music, and Modern Performance

:A Besere Velt, the Boston Worker's Circle community chorus, performs for a modern audience the music of Yiddish-speaking Jewish partisans and ghetto resisters. Through active transmission and re-interpretation of partisan and ghetto songs, A Besere Velt invokes East-European Jewish tradition and creates a liminal space ripe with new possibility. In the process, the chorus gives these old songs life for contemporary Jews. The analysis situates the songs within the genre of Yiddish music and investigates through interviews ways that members build meaning through the performance of partisan music, the construction of Jewish space, and the promise of Jewish futures.

7. Une querelle souterraine : inhumation, restitution et espace juif dans l’Allemagne d’après-guerre

During the Nazi era, the role and boundaries of Jewish cemeteries underwent profound change. The places where Jews could grieve and honor their dead were utterly ransacked. This article focuses primarily on the upheavals that occurred in the Reich’s cemeteries under the Nazi regime. It then deals with a post-war conflict in Fulda where the JRSO, a major Jewish restitution organization, fought to recover the town’s former Jewish cemetery in its entirety. The history of such institutions, both in the Nazi era and in the decades following 1945, raises broad questions about how we understand the contours of “Jewish space” in Germany, its destruction, and the possibility or impossibility of its restoration.

A synagogue, a well, a mikveh and a stele: ethnographic notes on Bragança´s Jewish heritage

ABSTRACT This article analyzes some of the data collected during an anthropological research carried out among Jews, crypto-Jews and their descendants from Bragança, Portugal. In view of the growing interest in the Jewish heritage in the country, Bragança has also revived its Jewish legacy and is decorated with new Jewish cultural spaces in recent years. The study describes what were the authenticity and significance premises set by the official agents involved in this construction and also the Brigantines´ role and perceptions in the process, reflecting on the ‘engaging heritage’ notion considering four local sites.

Introduction: Jewish cultural heritage, space and mobility in Spain, Portugal and North Africa

Introduction: Jewish cultural heritage, space and mobility in Spain, Portugal and North Africa

Nourishing a Community: Food, Hospitality, and Jewish Communal Spaces in Early Modern Frankfurt

This article explores early modern practices of cooking and hospitality, both in and out of homes, in the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt am Main. The focus is on Garküchen (eateries) and communal ovens, which were increasingly regulated by the community. Communal leaders employed creative strategies to find solutions for nourishing a growing local and visiting population in the limited space of the early modern Jewish ghetto. Their attempts to expand were propelled by concrete historical events, particularly by a series of fires, which shaped the physical spaces in which this process unfolded. Looking at these institutions allows for a reconsideration of the spatial boundaries of the Jewish ghetto.

New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands by Polonsky Antony Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland by Lehrer Erica (review)

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 380 (pp. 114, 135 and 149). Gleichschaltung, we are told, permeates not only history politics but ‘all other aspects of life in Russia’. However, social science literature uses Gleichschaltung to describe one specific political system, that of the Nazi regime in Germany under Hitler. By applying it to Russia today, Weiss-Wendt clearly indicates that he regards Putin’s political system not as authoritarian, but as totalitarian. It is a pity that such a serious historian as Anton Weiss-Wendt has burdened this well-researched book with so many elements of the political pamphlet. University of Oslo Pål Kolstø Polonsky, Antony; Węgrzynek, Hanna and Żbikowski, Andrzej (eds). New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands. Jews of Poland. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. lxviii + 501 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $149.00. Lehrer, Erica and Michael Meng (eds). Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2015. vii + 299 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £23.99 (paperback). These two fascinating publications analyse the changing cultural landscape in the growing understanding of the Jewish past and present in contemporary Poland from various theoretical, historical, sociological, anthropological, museological and architectural points of view. Unlike many earlier publications on Polish Jewry in post-1945 Poland, the books do not concentrate on the past and the magnitude of loss, but rather on the present and, even more importantly, on the possible future. In other words, instead of ‘chasing Jewish ghosts in Poland’ or chasing ‘vanishing traces’, both volumes offer ‘new directions’ in understanding the current process of change based on solid historical, sociological and cultural bases in reconstructing, restoring and memorizing Jewish communities in today’s Poland. New Directions is a collection of thirty-seven expanded articles which were presented as papers at a conference in May 2015 to introduce the academic community to the permanent exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The collection, edited by leading scholars Antony Polonsky, Hanna Węgrzynek and Andrzej Żbikowski, includes papers by researchers from Poland, the US, the UK, Israel, Germany, France, Russia and Lithuania. The collection represents not only a highly insightful introduction to the strategies behind the creation of the museum but also, and more importantly, shows the progress that has been made, only relatively recently, in the history of Jews in the Polish lands. REVIEWS 381 The POLIN Museum opened on 19 April 2013 and quickly became one of the iconic sites in Warsaw, partially due to its stunning architecture and its location in the highly symbolic Muranów district where the Warsaw Ghetto was established in November 1940. POLIN is located next to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, near a statue to Jan Karski, a passageway named after Irena Sendler, a few hundred metres away from a bunker on 18 Miła Street where the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising committed suicide instead of being captured by the Germans, and a few hundred metres from the Umschlagplatz from which Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were transported to Treblinka extermination camp. Thus, the location itself represents a link between real places where the tragedy of Warsaw Jews took place during World War Two and their commemorative narratives that find their expression in the museum. POLIN was designed as a narrative museum, so relies on telling a story through objects, audio/visual material and also reconstructions, which include the spectacular painted ceiling and bimah (timber-frame roof) of the synagogue in Gwoździec built in 1650 that was destroyed completely by the German army in 1941. The museum contains ten galleries — ‘Forest’ (the origins of Polin which in Hebrew means ‘rest here’), ‘First Encounters (960–1500)’, ‘Paradisus Iudaeorum (1569–1648)’, ‘The Jewish Town (1648–1772)’, ‘Gwoździec Reconstruction’, ‘Encounters with Modernity (1772–1914)’, ‘On the Jewish Street (1918–39)’, ‘Holocaust (1939–45)’, ‘Post-War Years (1944 to the present)’ and ‘Legacy’. POLIN is, however, much more than a narrative space and a visual experience. It is also an active civic institution hosting cultural events, conferences, book presentations and workshops that attract large numbers of participants, and classes about the Polish-Jewish past...

Kovács , János Mátyás Trencsényi , Balázs Brave New Hungary: Mapping the ‘System of National Cooperation’ (review)

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 384 A fascinating piece by Jonathan Webber, ‘A Jew, a Cemetery, and a Polish Village: A Tale of the Restoration’, in many ways concludes the practices of remembering and recovering Jewish space through a detailed discussion of the extreme complexities and challenges faced by those who carry out even a relatively simple project, such as erecting a fence around a small Jewish cemetery without visible traces of tombs in the village of Brzostek. As Webber points out, ‘the strongly educational element of the entire Brzostek project has confirmed that energetic intercultural dialogue can genuinely help a recovery of history and a reconciliation with the past, which can amplify personal and communal identities in fruitful ways’ (p. 259), despite stereotypes on both sides. These two volumes provide an insightful and penetrating contextualization of the dramatic process of change in post-Communist Poland, with its desire for the Jewish presence to become a ‘normalized’ part of a pluralistic, modern society that is not afraid of learning about its past. More importantly, however, the books strongly imply a new future for Jews not just in Poland but also in the spaces of history, mutual understanding and greater cooperation. UCL SSEES Katarzyna Zechenter Kovács, János Mátyás and Trencsényi, Balázs (eds). Brave New Hungary: Mapping the ‘System of National Cooperation’. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York and London, 2020. ix + 449 pp. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $130.00: £100.00. This is a useful collection of articles on an important issue in contemporary European politics — the question of what to do about the authoritarian, self-described ‘illiberal democracy’ constructed in Hungary since 2010 by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz (Alliance of Young Democrats). Most of the nineteen contributors are Hungarian, many from Hungary’s academic diaspora, including historians, political scientists, economists and sociologists. The editors make clear their Orbán-critical standpoint and desire to defend liberal values, while being keen to avoid ‘using emotional language’ (p. 2). Renáta Uitz focuses on the ‘Declaration of National Cooperation’ issued by the new government in 2010, and its sequel, the Fundamental Law of 2011, which became Hungary’s new constitution and the basis for the socalled ‘System of National Cooperation’ (SNC). Uitz makes a clear case for the Fundamental Law’s importance as a driving force behind government policies on all fronts, explaining the extreme legalism of Fidesz’s approach, which creates a framework for justifying the suppression of dissenting voices. Everything since has been done gradually, but with great underlying purpose. REVIEWS 385 Ferenc Laczó examines the SNC’s ‘politics of history’, providing a survey of who’s who in historical scholarship, and how the historical profession has been politicized by a regime obsessed with rewriting the historical record. The rise of a neo-nationalist narrative is mirrored by the decline, or absence, of a coherent liberal vision. Laczó focuses on Holocaust commemoration, which has become debased by the attempt to blame everything on the occupying powers, whether Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, and on ‘honoring the victims without casting doubts on nationalist visions of history’ (p. 42), by playing down Hungarian participation in the mass murder of Jews. There is a glancing reference to the role of Mária Schmidt, ‘the leading memory activist of the Hungarian Right’ (p. 43), although more could have been said about this particular ideologue. Virág Molnár discusses non-government organizations (NGOs) and Fidesz’s campaign against ‘foreign agents’. Orbán, taking a leaf out of Vladimir Putin’s book, has made a habit of penalizing and driving out of Hungary any NGO receiving funds from foreign donors, and regardless of its purpose. An early victim was Ökotárs, a non-profit environmental organization which the government baselessly accused of financial irregularities, before ordering a police raid on its premises in 2015 and eventually shutting it down. The refugee crisis of 2015 provided Orbán with even greater justification, as he saw it, for cracking down on NGOs seeking to help refugees and asylum-seekers, accusing such groups of being funded by the Hungarian Jewish émigré tycoon and philanthropist George Sörös for his...