Topics: Diaspora, Ethnography, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Revival, Outreach, Baal Teshuvah, Orthodox Judaism, NGOs, Young Adults / Emerging Adulthood, Religious Observance and Practice, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish Revival” and “Jewish Renewal” projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed “lifestyle Judaism”. This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency. Indeed, the trope of a “Jewish Renaissance” has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This article explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post-secular world in two different sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, we interrogate the relations between “diaspora” and “homeland” by analyzing two case studies: the Jewish revival movement in Budapest, Hungary, and the Jewish renewal initiatives in Israel. While the first instantiates a diasporic movement anchored in a post-denominational and post-secular attempt to reclaim Jewish tradition for a new generation of Jew-llennials (Millennial Jews), the second group operates against the Orthodox hegemony of the institutional Rabbinate by revisiting religious ritual and textual study. By proposing new cultural repertoires, these movements highlight the dialectic exchange between center and periphery. The ethnography of religious revival decenters the Israeli Orthodoxy as “the homeland” and positions the diaspora at the core of a network of cultural creativity and renewal, while remaining in constant dialog with Israel and other diasporic communities.
Abstract: In recent years, Berlin has witnessed an ever-growing internationalization, predominantly through migration flows from all over the world. Its Jewish population has equally diversified: Berlin is now populated by Jews from the Americas, Europe and also by young Israelis who permanently live in the city. The migrant group of ‘Israelis in Berlin’ has attracted significant media attention in Germany, Israel and beyond and has often been portrayed as detached from the existing local Jewish community. My thesis interrogates this assumption and presents an ethnography which shows diverse and complex affiliations and Jewishness(es) entangled with nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality. Through the immersion in ‘Jewish’ and ‘Hebrew’ Berlin, I span an interrelated ethnographic field which I construe as a scene. Focusing on a choir, and its connections to a synagogue and a queer Shabbat event, I investigate ‘how the scene constitutes itself as Jewish’. Combining ethnography with biographical-narrative interviews, I present how this scene is enacted and performed, embedded in the respective historical and socio-political contexts, and constituting itself by migration and conversion. By way of mirroring the biographies of migrants and converts, I argue that Jewishness in the scene is constituted by complexity rather than unity, ambivalence rather than certainty and contestation rather than agreement. The influence of Israeli migration to Berlin and the presence of Hebrew engenders the emergence of new ways of ‘being Jewish’. Under the specific representations of Jewishness in Germany, ‘being Jewish’ is always co-constructed alongside the negotiation over ‘being German’. Thus, by way of mapping trajectories of conversion and migration and their embeddedness in their respective socio-political contexts, I analyse processes of ‘becoming Jewish’ and their impact on this urban scene. In the framework of urban scenes, diaspora and secularism, I describe transformations towards new forms of urban (religious) socialities and aesthetics (music) and show how biographical research and the study of urban scenes offer profound insights towards new understandings of contemporary societies in the light of global transformations.
Abstract: This thesis argues that British orthodox Jewish women (BOJW) generate spaces within the British orthodox religious community to practice piety in a non-conformist fashion. The spaces they generate both enable BOJW to perform these interventions, as well as reflect back on the normative practices of the British orthodox community. In this way these pious practices inform, influence and shift what constitutes normative practice going forward. I ask what sort of agency accounts for these practices, and how these particular practices inform wider questions of agency. Some theories of agency have rendered the religious subject as repressed, and religious women as voiceless, sometimes invisible. Many religious subjects reject this traducing of their choices, and, instead celebrate opportunities for personal and communal religious agency and alternative performances. I consider these pious interventions through the ethnographic examination of three crucial areas of orthodox religious life: education, ritual participation and issues of leadership and authority. These three areas of investigation represent the most significant arenas of religious life within which BOJW negotiate their identities. During the eight months of fieldwork, I conducted twenty-one qualitative in-depth interviews; additionally, I examined material from local communal websites, synagogue-community mailings and advertising. My findings suggest that intelligibility, as a function of identity, plays a vital role in the ways in which BOJW navigate their way through their religious lives in their homes, communities and workplaces – such that it functions as sacred edifice, restrictive restraint as well as avenue for creativity. Contemporaneously, some of the BOJW interviewed stated that although there has been some shift in normative religious practice in their local synagogue-community, they also experienced backlash from local religious authorities who construed their performances as meta-acts of communal, political and social transgression, rather than acts of religious piety – precisely because they were pious acts performed by women.
Abstract: The main issue explored in this thesis is how and why food is used as a channel through which everyday identities are informed and elaborated. The thesis explores when, how and in which circumstances food and the activities involved in its preparation, consumption and exchange can be used as vehicles for identities. My ethnographic focus is on the Jewish population of Thessaloniki, the largest and most economically viable city of Northern Greece. The Jewish past of this city is quite remarkable: the Thessalonikian Jews remained a significant part of the overall population and existed continuously until early twentieth century. Dramatic events during the twentieth century and in particular the coming of Asia Minor refugees in 1922-3 and the Second World War in 1939-45 caused significant upheavals and resulted in a radical reduction of the city's Jewish population. My ethnographic data confirm that this turbulent history is reflected in the construction of present-day Thessalonikian Jewish identities. Food and the associated activities like preparing, serving, eating, talking and remembering through food are explored as meaningful contexts in which the Jews of Thessaloniki make statements about their past, create their present, construct or reject collective identifications, express their fears and preoccupations, imagine their future. The identities of my informants were multiple and complex. Being Jewish interacted with being Sephardic, Thessalonikian and Greek. In the thesis I argue that food was a way of experiencing and expressing these identities. I use the term "community" cautiously since it fails to reflect the complexity of Thessalonikian Jewish experiences and the varying degrees of identification by individuals with that community. Different degrees of belonging are considered in relation to gender, age, economic and social status. Therefore, the ambivalence or often the reluctance of Jewish people living in Thessaloniki to be identified as members of "a community" is an important theme of the thesis. Another important theme discussed is the tension and the overlapping between religion and tradition meaning kosher diet and Sephardic food as it is translated and perceived by the Jewish people themselves.
Abstract: During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.
Abstract: This thesis centres the lived experiences of eighteen queer Jews in postsecular Britain. In situating my work between postsecular geographies of lived religion and the anthropology of experience, I present rituals as the technologies by which things are brought into being. By foregrounding rituals, I critically outline the haptic, politically conscious, and symbolic acts queer Jews mobilise in the (trans)formation of selves, spaces, and others. My findings are grounded in fourteen months of virtual narrative ethnography. My focus is on the stories participants told, the memories they recalled, and the queered ethnoreligious worlds they (trans)formed through unstructured life story interviews, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. Considering this, I conducted my research in collaboration with the Council of Christians and Jews – a nationwide forum for interfaith engagement – as part of their ongoing LGBT+ initiative. Throughout this thesis, I illustrate the ritual performances latent in participants’ selfactualisation. First, I explore the role of heritage and memory in participants’ selfconstrual. I find that rituals are pivotal in actualising ties to an imagined community or symbolic peoplehood – an affective, (im)material, and fundamentally social entity (trans)formed through the narration of history and recollection of memory. Second, I focus on participants’ extrasensory perception of the spatialised power relations they are subjected to, subject others to, and subject themselves to. Here, I find that rituals represent key place-making practices – the tools by which selves, spaces, and others are differentiated as such through the active, agential, and creative (re)aggregation of spatial configurations. Third, I emphasise the actualising power of ritual performance through the ethnographic vignette of Buttmitzvah. I demonstrate how ritual – alongside liminality and communitas – actualises the process of self (trans)formation in a queer Jewish rite of passage that is at once spatially bound and diffused, temporally fixed and transcendent. In doing so, I trace the complicated and often contradictory relationship between structure and anti-structure, communitas and commerciality, ritual and resistance. I conclude by arguing that rituals are more than indexical phenomena, they are the tools by which things are brought into being, worlds constructed, and subjectivities (trans)formed.
Abstract: For some, the early hours of the morning are a time when few are awake, the city quiet, and the streets empty. In London’s East End, however, the dimly lit alleyways are teaming with late- night revelers. Historically characterized as largely working- class neighborhoods, districts like Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Whitechapel have undergone a rapid process of gentrification in recent years and are now synonymous with trendy clubs, pubs, and wine bars.1 The Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, located just off Pollard Square, has been a cultural, political, and social hub of the East End since 1887. In recent years, the venue has become popular among students at the nearby Queen Mary, University of London, and a new wave of young urban professionals who are spatially segregated from the club regulars: Downstairs, the octogenarians still have their cards and gambling machine. But upstairs, the space is used for concerts, burlesque shows, voga (a dynamic fusion of yoga and vogueing), a pop- up Chinese restaurant and . . . “wild, unhinged good times.”2 Now and again, the walkways crossing Weavers Fields and the A1209 from the Bethnal Green Underground Station become a threshold to the United 148 Matthew Richardson Kingdom’s first queer Jewish club night. Organized around special and transitory dates in the Hebraic calendar, Buttmitzvah is a camp, erotic, playful, and satirical celebration of queer Jewish identities in postsecular Britain. The evening is centered around the backstory of the Rimmer family, pun intended, hosting their daughter Becky’s Bat Mitzvah. Facilitated by a troupe of dedicated actors, dancers, and drag kings and queens, the night is more than just a raunchy get-together. In this chapter, I explore the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah as an ethnographic case study to argue that the evening functions as an aspirational and motivational platform from which partygoers construct, demarcate, and celebrate an affirming identity politics. To do so, I use Turnerian anthropology of experience as a key analytical , methodological, and theoretical heuristic tool to explore the affective , anti- structural, collectivizing, and subversive qualities of the Bethnal Green Buttmitzvah. First, I situate Buttmitzvah in the socio- cultural- geographic context of postsecular Bethnal Green and identify it as liminal space providing the ideal settings for the generation of communitas, a special type of ritualized space- time whereby all those present enjoy an intense sense of belonging and identification with each other. Next, I explore the ritualization needed to generate this social state of communitas by drawing on what I call the ritual complex, an intricate system involving myths, symbols, and rituals functioning as media through which selves and others are formed, mobilized, and resisted. Finally, I unpack the anti- structural qualities of communitas by characterizing Buttmitzvah as a liminoid phenomenon in a liminal space, providing those in attendance with a platform for subverting antisemitic, heterosexist, and postsecular social structures. As such, I argue that religious life is life together because it is only when people come together and generate the collective electricity of communitas that the aspirational and motivational forces for constructing, demarcating, and celebrating religious selves and others becomes possible. It is through ritual performance, in other words, that an imagined community is actualized in an intense emotional state of social belonging. I conclude this chapter by highlighting the benefits of engaging with Turnerian anthropology of experience when researching alongside minoritized religious communities in postsecular contexts. The findings in this chapter are grounded in fifteen months of narrative ethnographic research (April 2020 to July 2021) with eighteen queer Religious Life Is Life Together 149 Jews who were living, or had previously lived, in postsecular Britain (their selected profiles are included in the appendix for context).
Topics: Family and Household, Main Topic: Other, Jewish Continuity, Anthropology, Ethnography, Intermarriage, Intermarriage: Children of Intermarried Couples, Conversion, Gender, Jewish Women, Religious Observance and Practice, Jewish Community
Abstract: There are less than 1300 Jews living in Finland who are members in the two officially Orthodox Jewish communities in Helsinki and in Turku. After the Civil Marriage Act was put in effect by the Finnish Parliament in 1917 the number of intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews started rising in the communities. Most of these marriages were officiated between Jewish men and non-Jewish women. In the beginning, the non-Jewish spouses kept their respective religious affiliations, but in many cases, their halachically non-Jewish children converted to Judaism. In the 1970s, adulthood conversions to Judaism became far more frequent in the communities—especially in the Jewish Community of Helsinki. Today, most of these individuals and their families concerned are still active members of the Jewish congregation. The high number of intermarriages and the conversions to Judaism have had a crucial impact on the development of the religious customs of local Jewry. Through the analysis of archival sources and new ethnographic material derived from semi-structured qualitative interviews, this case study investigates how intermarriages formed the traditions and habits in the families and in the communities. By relating the topic of intermarriage to the question of conversion, the study sheds light on institutional changes within the Jewish Community of Helsinki, and analyzes how women, who converted to Judaism in 1977, articulate and perform their religious practices, identities, and agencies when consciously aiming at building Jewish families.
Abstract: The anthropologist Robert H. Lowie (Towards understanding Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954) offers a historically informed ethnography of Jewish/non-Jewish relations in German speaking lands. Jewish families in Germany, Jews in families, and Jews and their families in post-1945 need to be seen in the context of these historically informed structures that shaped family histories: Interfamilial transmissions of identities and praxes that impacted on family, marriage, and partnership patterns. Issues of family structures including endogamy and exogamy cannot solely be explained by drawing on the religious (halachic) prohibition of exogamy, they need to be understood as a means of boundary management of a specific ethnic group (Rapaport, Jews and Germans after the holocaust. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997), to forestall assimilation (Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat. dtv, Munich, 2007), and within a specifically fraught context (Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! Hanser, Munich, 2018; Ginsburg, I’m a German Jew, and I’d Love to Be Normal, In HaAretz, May 19, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-i-m-a-german-jew-and-i-d-love-to-be-normal-1.8856650. Accessed May 19 2022, 2020; Kranz, Shades of Jewishness: the creation and maintenance of a Jewish community in post-Shoah Germany, University of St Andrews: St Andrews. Open Access: https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/handle/10023/872. Last accessed 19 May 2022, 2018) that drives the creation of transnational family networks (Bodemann, A Jewish family in Germany today: an intimate portrait. Duke University Press, Durham, 2005)—and neither can proximity, intimacy and love across the ethnic – and religious – divide be phased out because a very significant number of Jews marry and partner up with non-Jews (Kauders, 2007; Kessler, Jüdische Migration aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion seit 1990. Beispiel Berlin. Magisterabschlußarbeit Sozialwissenschaften. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Fern-Universität Hagen, Hagen, 1996; Umfrage 2002: Mitgliederbefragung der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. Unpublished research report, 2002; Körber, Zäsur, Wandel oder Neubeginn: Russischsprachige Juden in Deutschland zwischen Recht, Repräsentation und Neubeginn. In: Körber K (ed) Russisch-jüdische Gegenwart in Deutschland, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Göttingen, pp 13–36, 2015; Osteuropa 69:83–92, 2019; Kranz, Notes on embodiment and narratives beyond words. In: Hoffmann B, Reuter U (ed) Translated memories, Rowman, Farnham, pp 347–369, 2020a; Landesbetrieb Information und Technik Nordrhein-Westfalen 2019; Rapaport 1997), and cross an ethno-sexual boundary (Bodemann, 2005; Nagel, Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: intimate intersections, forbidden frontiers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; Schaum, Being Jewish (and) in love. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin, 2020; Schaum, Love will bring us together (again)? Nachwirkungen der Shoah in Liebesbeziehungen. In Chernivsky M, Lorenz F (eds) Weitergaben und Wirkungen der Shoah in Erziehungs- und Bildungsverhältnissen der Gegenwartsgesellschaft, Verlag BarbaraBudrich, Leverkusen, pp 159–174, 2022). This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of Jewish families, Jews and their families and Jews in families in Germany after 1945 by drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, and by way of contextualizing individual and collective Jewish praxes.
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the city of Odesa and its altered reality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It discusses the different levels of fragmentation that run through the everyday life of a city and its residents and create fissures in identity and kinship, upheavals and reversals of historical memory, and challenges for conducting research during the war. Ukraine has an unusually complex ethno-linguistic and religious composition, with inherited historical divides. As a borderland, it constituted a pronounced case of political and national fragmentation even before the war. Odesa has its own forms of fragmentation, populated as it is by a rich amalgam of people and cut through with the afterlives of empires. The war has intensified all of these forms of fragmentation, bringing different histories into the present. The chapter addresses fragmentation on three different scales: the vignettes of Jewish Odesans reflecting on the war in the contexts of self, family, community, city, and nation; the historical narratives and historical truths revealed by the term “denazification,” which has served as Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.; and the reflections of a fragmented anthropologist, highlighting ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties of researching a constantly changing and deeply painful reality during the war.
Abstract: Jewish-Roman cuisine, the traditional food of one of Europe’s longest-standing Jewish communities, is among Italy’s most distinctive hyper-local repertoires. Gastronomes increasingly acknowledge the importance of Jewish foodways for Italian cuisine, but a few famous “signature dishes” often dominate popular ideas of Jewish food in Italy. In Rome, carciofi alla giudìa – deep-fried “Jewish-style” artichokes – have long been used to symbolize the diverse and complex Jewish-Roman tradition. Blending ethnographic methods with discourse analysis, I ask how and why carciofi alla giudìa occupy this role, and what this means for contemporary Jewish-Roman identity. I then examine a selection of “origin stories” behind other dishes in the Jewish-Roman tradition, arguing that going beyond the near-ubiquitous artichoke can complicate and enrich our understanding of Jewish-Roman history, culture, and identity. Rather than attempting to prove or disprove these stories, I analyze them as tools for self-fashioning. I identify a variety of characteristics that these narratives are used to communicate: including ancient roots; resilience and resourcefulness; and an openness to new arrivals and external influences. Finally, I interrogate the relationship between the Jewish-Roman tradition and the city’s cuisine at large, arguing that this too has important repercussions for Roman and Jewish-Roman self-perception and identity.
Abstract: Tarkastelemme kahden eri etnografisen aineiston pohjalta suomenjuutalaisten naisten kokemuksia antisemitismistä nyky-Suomessa. Aineistomme koostuu Ruth Illmanin Minhag Finland -hankkeessa tehdyistä suomenjuutalaisten haastatteluista (2019–2020) ja Elina Vuolan Ruumiillinen uskonto -hankkeessa tehdyistä haastatteluista (2015–2016). Vuola haastatteli vain naisia, Illmanin aineistossa on sekä naisia että miehiä. Keskitymme artikkelissamme naisiin. Myös antisemitismin kokemukset ovat joiltakin osin sukupuolittuneita. Pääasiallisena teoreettisena tulokulmana käytämme Helen Feinin (1987) kulttuurihistoriallista määrittelyä, jonka mukaan antisemitismillä on rakenteellinen, diskursiivinen ja yksilöllinen ulottuvuus. Fein kuvailee antisemitismiä kolmiona, jonka pohja on yhteiskunnan rakenteisiin upotettu juutalaisvastaisuus, joka ilmenee tietämättömyytenä, ymmärtämättömyytenä tai suorana syrjintänä. Tämän päälle rakentuu diskursiivinen ulottuvuus, joka tuo esille kulttuurisidonnaiset tavat puhua juutalaisuudesta, ja näyttäytyy stereotypioina ja ennakkoluuloina yleisessä keskustelussa. Kolmion huipulla ovat yksilön kokemukset suorasta tai välillisestä antisemitismistä omassa arjessaan. Tarkastelemme, miten Feinin malli näkyy (tai ei näy) aineistoissamme ja sitä, miten sen avulla voidaan jäsentää haastateltavien kokemuskertomuksia. Sukupuoliteoreettinen lähestymistapa puolestaan auttaa ymmärtämään koetun antisemitismin sukupuolittuneisuutta. Feinin malli osoittautui käyttökelpoiseksi, mutta jäykäksi tavaksi jäsentää arkisiin kokemuksiin keskittyvää etnografista aineistoa. Lisäksi havaitsimme, että paikkasidonnainen ja kokemuksiin keskittyvä analyysimme tuo uutta tietoa antisemitismin ilmenemismuodoista ja siinä tapahtuneissa muutoksissa Suomessa. Suomenjuutalaisten naisten kokemuksissa antisemitismi sekä uhan ja pelon tunne ovat lisääntyneet.
Abstract: In the lives of students in Luxembourg’s Liberal Jewish complementary school, flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria—they are multilingual, cosmopolitan, and their approach to Jewish life is flexible, and equally importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves “like everyone else.” These factors are understood to facilitate multiple movements and belongings in the contemporary world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of more observant Jews whom they refer to as “religious”; the material, embodied, and visible nature of observant Jewish life is perceived to be an impediment to participation and success in the secular sphere. However, when Jewishness appears in these students’ secular school classrooms, it is most often represented by Orthodox-presenting men—often a man in a yarmulke. Further, these men and their yarmulkes are taken to represent all Jews, framed as a homogeneous group of religious adherents. For many complementary school students, these experiences can be jarring—they suddenly find themselves on the “wrong” side of the religious–secular divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward religion and Jewishness.
Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between marriage and conversion from a critical gender perspective, based on a comparative ethnographic study of women’s conversion to Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the Netherlands. In the study of religion and gender, a valuable conceptual framework developed that questions the limited representation of religious women (as somehow ‘oppressed’) and recognises agency within observance. However, up to now, theories and conceptualisations of female conversion have not been able to successfully deal with the tension between individual agency and relationality, more concretely: between individual choice and the impact of intimate relationships. This article suggests a framework more capable of grasping the complexities of conversion and marriage, by introducing the concept of mixedness. In this approach, relationships are understood as agential spaces of religious becoming. Conversion forms and reforms what is ‘mixed’ within a relationship, and intimate relationships indeed play an important role in religious becoming. The goal is to move beyond the binary options that women seem to have to vocalise their process: either they convert because of someone else (implying less agency) or their religious transformation is an expression of autonomous, individual choice (neglecting the impact of relationships). Mixedness highlights the dynamic and fluid aspects of intimate relationships, whilst simultaneously focusing on the interactions between the couples’ experiences of mixedness and social norms of majority and minority religio-racial groups.
Abstract: While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.
Abstract: This article draws on an ongoing research project that seeks to document ethnographically everyday Jewish life in Finland today. Based on the framework of vernacular religion, it approaches religion “as it is lived” (Primiano 1995) and analyses the many expressions and experiences of rules in day-to-day Jewish life as part of complex interactions between individuals, institutions, and religious motivations. Historical data, institutional structures and cultural context are put in dialogue with individual narratives and nuances, described as “self-motivated” ways of “doing” religion.
In this article, we seek to investigate what a vernacular Jewish approach to making, bending, and breaking rules amounts to in a community where increasing diversity and deep-reaching secularity contest and reshape traditional boundaries of belonging. What rules are accepted, adopted and appropriated as necessary or meaningful for being and doing Jewish? Our analysis traces how static values and conceptions of “Jewishness” give way to more flexible subjective positions as our interviewees struggle to find religiously and culturally significant models from the past that can be subjectively appropriated today. Both everyday quandaries and existential questions influence their ways of crafting vernacular religious positions. Focusing on formal and personal rituals related particularly to family life and foodways, the article shows how rules are revisited and refashioned as the traditional boundaries between sacred and secular, gendered practices and ethnic customs, are transgressed and subjective combinations are developed.
Abstract: Chamamos-lhes Anousim (pl. de Anous, que significa forçado ou coagido em hebraico), também conhecidos como marranos, conversos, tornadiços, Povo da Nação, Cristãos-Novos ou Judeus àqueles que permaneceram em Portugal e Espanha e praticaram o seu Judaísmo em segredo, ou deixaram a Península Ibérica devido à Expulsão (1497) e à Inquisição (1536-1821), muitos tendo continuado a praticar livremente o Judaísmo na diáspora. Sabemos, no entanto, que os judeus ou cristãos-novos que permaneceram em solo lusitano, adotaram e mantiveram várias estratégias discretas ou ocultas para resistir à conversão forçada até ao presente. Também sabemos de muitos portugueses que insistem numa identificação com a matriz judaica e de um esforço paralelo e sem precedentes para recuperar o que resta dos vestígios da memória dessa cultura judaica em Portugal. Assiste-se a uma intensa atividade revivalista em torno do património cultural judaico no país. O que não sabemos é em que medida tais processos identitários e materialidades e imaterialidades mnemónicas judaicas persistem hoje na esfera pública e privada, e como esses traços culturais coexistem com a fabricação nacional de património, nos seus diversos aspetos materiais e discursivos. O estudo foca-se nestes últimos, pela via etnográfica
Abstract: Os Cadernos de Orações Criptojudaicas e Notas Etnográficas de Judeus e Cristãos-Novos de Bragança resultam de uma investigação baseada em trabalho de campo antropológico realizado em Bragança e são uma coletânea de dados que atestam a persistência da cultura judaica, criptojudaica, ou cristã-nova no distrito, até à contemporaneidade Incluem-se nesta obra uma síntese do levantamento histórico e um conjunto de dados etnográficos respeitantes ao património cultural judaico e cristão-novo da região nas suas dimensões imateriais, narrativas ou discursivas, e nas suas dimensões materiais, objetificadas - peças que atestam que se trata de um legado que não só perdura na memória coletiva local, como é ainda no presente um legado estruturante da identidade local, tornando-a multicultural. O leitor encontrará uma parte do que existe deste património judaico e cristão-novo transmontano, pois uma etnografia é sempre algo em construção, um olhar inacabado que carece de constante atualização, dado que a permanente transformação e construção fazem parte da própria essência de todas as culturas. Mas é sobretudo um tributo aos brigantinos que participaram nesta construção e que, vencendo os receios do secretismo, se deixaram motivar pela esperança de se integrarem num judaísmo plural e num Portugal mais intercultural.
Abstract: This article introduces a new analytical model for researching vernacular religion, which aims to capture and describe everyday religiosity as an interplay between knowing, being, and doing religion. It suggests three processes that tie this triad together: continuity; change; and context. The model is envisaged as a tool for tracing vernacular religion in ethnographic data in a multidimensional yet structured framework that is sensitive to historical data and cultural context, but also to individual narratives and nuances. It highlights the relationship between self-motivated modes of religiosity and institutional structures, as well as influences from secular sources and various traditions and worldviews.
The article is based on an ongoing research project focusing on everyday Judaism in Finland. The ethnographic examples illustrate how differently these dynamics play out in different life narratives, depending on varying emphases, experiences, and situations. By bringing together major themes recognized as relevant in previous research and offering an analytical tool for detecting them in ethnographic materials, the model has the potential to create new openings for comparative research, because it facilitates the interlinking of datasets across contexts and cultures. The article concludes that the model can be developed into a more generally applicable analytical tool for structuring and elucidating contemporary ethnographies, mirroring a world of rapid cultural and religious change.
Abstract: Gershom Scholem argued in his momentous book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941, 34) that as the traditional Hasidic way of life was extinguished by the Holocaust, the last ‘authentic’ form of Jewish mysticism came to a close: “it has become again what it was in the beginning: the esoteric wisdom of small groups of men out of touch with life and without any influence in it”. Nevertheless, practices stemming from Kabbalah and Jewish mystical sources have since the turn of the millennium become more popular than ever inside as well as outside Jewish communities in Europe and North America, relocating and reframing traditional practices for a late-modern, urban, liberal and inclusive spiritual milieu. But are such vernacular practices to be seen as ‘authentic’ continuations of the tradition, or merely as vulgar commodification? Here, the views of contemporary researchers differ significantly.
This chapter’s point of departure is this controversy over ‘authenticity’ in research on Jewish mysticism. A vernacular religion perspective is applied as a means of untying the knot that has formed through the unfruitful juxtaposing of classic and contemporary Jewish mysticism. Discourses of authenticity are exemplified by a case study dealing with contemporary practices of niggunim singing: (mainly) wordless melodies sung as a means of elevating the soul to God, repairing the world and strengthening the divine presence in the world. Niggunim is a practice with roots in Hasidic Judaism, which is currently experiencing a renaissance within contemporary Jewish spirituality. Ethnographic material has been gathered among Jews from progressive milieus in London to shed light on the practice in general, and this chapter analyses how the practitioners reflect upon authenticity.
Topics: Antisemitism, Israel Criticism, Jewish Identity, Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism, Anthropology, Employment, Ethnography, Work, Main Topic: Other, Religious Observance and Practice, Jewish Women
Abstract: This research introduces an anthropological perspective in the debate on religious identity and the workplace. In particular, it examines the relationship between Jewish identity and practices and the workplace in Belgium, with a focus on gender issues. Thanks to in-depth interviews with a number of Jewish women in Brussels about their daily experiences in the workplace and extensive field work in this community, valuable and generally difficult to access data regarding Jewish women’s workplace participation, perceptions, and experiences has been collected and analyzed. There is a complex relationship between Jewish identity, practices and the perception of the respondents as it relates to the workplace and their own position. Perceived hostility towards Israel and the Jewry is a recurrent issue amongst the respondents. As Judaism is often connected to the State of Israel and the current political climate, individual Jewish women are sometimes confronted with unpleasant or negative comments or experiences in the workplace. Besides forming a strong deterrent for many of the respondents to participate in the mainstream workforce, this puts a lot of pressure on those women working for non-Jewish organizations. To a certain extent, Jewish practices are adapted, modified and negotiated by the working Jewish women to meet the demands of dominant norms in the modern Belgian workplace. In addition, the ‘coping mechanisms’ that are applied by the respondents are frequently gender-specific and family-motivated.
Abstract: This chapter analyses the intersections between Judaism, conversion, belonging, and gender, through the lived material practice of the tallit. Conversion to a religious tradition is not merely a change in mind set, but rather implies the learning, performance and negotiation of a religious habitus. This is especially the case with conversions to Judaism, or giyur, which focuses on the learning of practices and commitment to synagogue life. Such process of ‘self-making’ is directly related to questions of gender and the possibility of taking on certain objects and tasks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter traces how conversion materialises in daily ritual practice for women in various Jewish communities in the specific ritual use of the prayer shawl, or tallit. Gender equality has been one of the prime topics by which liberal Judaism came to distinguish itself from orthodoxy in the Netherlands. A symbol of this difference is the use of the tallit by women, both in the local Dutch context as well as internationally. Historically, women have been excluded from Shul life, and wearing a tallit, as is permitted in liberal synagogues, can be revolutionary as a marker of inclusion. For converted women in the Jewish diaspora of the Netherlands, wearing the tallit in service can be a confirmation of their Jewishness, but is more often met with ambivalence. Some don’t practice, because they do not want to disturb the status quo, or because they see value in gender segregation in shul. Others do, for equally varied reasons, from political quests for emancipation, to pious desires for submission and devotion. As a compromise, specific forms of ‘women’s tallit’ have entered the synagogues, worn by women who do so out of pious desire. This chapter starts from these various prayer shawl practices, to trace broader questions of belonging. It asks not only how this object is used, but also which types of gender discourses, pious desires, and notions of agency are expressed through the use (or lack thereof) of a tallit.
