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: The 2015 Spanish and Portuguese nationality laws for descendants of Sephardi Jews are unusual in their motivation to redress wrongs committed more than half a millennium ago. Both have enabled descendants of those Sephardi Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, or forced to convert to Christianity, to claim citizenship status through naturalization. The laws have elicited ancestral and contemporary stories that speak to the personal and social meanings applicants give to these citizenships. Through extensive oral histories with fifty-five applicants across four continents, we examine our narrators’ views on the laws’ deep roots in a genealogical concept of belonging, based on familial and biological heritage and the persistent criterion of the bloodline. We argue that the responses of Sephardi applicants complicate traditional notions of genealogical inclusion, unveiling instead a multiplicity of meanings attached to identity, belonging, and contemporary citizenship. While Spain and Portugal’s offer of what we call “restorative citizenship” requires the demonstration of biological and genealogical certainties, we argue that those seeking Spanish or Portuguese nationality complicate, expand, and sometimes subvert state constructions of citizenship as well as transform their own identities and belonging. More than recuperating a lost Spanish or Portuguese identity, many Sephardi descendants are discovering or deepening their ties to ancestral history and culture. Sephardi genealogy is also being mobilized in a contemporary global and European context in which citizenship and belonging are no longer defined exclusively by nation state territoriality, but rather through claims to new hybrid, multiple, and flexible identities.
Abstract: The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Jerusalem is attempting the first-ever demographic and genealogical study of a national Jewry as a whole, from its inception to the present day. This article describes the project, its aims, methodology and preliminary results. We use specially developed data retrieval methods that enable the access of available online sources, and we demonstrate that the extensive datasets we have generated are amenable to multidisciplinary analysis and interpretation. Utilising detailed information from the Scottish Census in 1841 till the 1911 Census (the most recent available under access regulations) and vital records from the middle of the nineteenth century to date, plus newly digitised Scottish newspaper and court records, a new and clearer picture of Scottish Jewry emerges. In presenting demographic and historical results already available from the study, we challenge some conventional perceptions of Scottish Jewry and its evolution.
By way of illustration, the article presents some of the preliminary demographic and historical results of the study, which challenge conventional wisdom. Among other things, the study reveals the migrant and transitory nature of the Jewish population in the nineteenth century and documents its stabilisation and eventual decrease in the twentieth century, on the basis of birth, marriage and death rates; and its dispersal throughout the country, beyond the major concentrations in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Hopefully, this study will serve as a model for other genealogical research into defined groups, religious or otherwise, at the national level.
