Abstract: Immersion (tevillah) in a special pool of water (mikvah) is an ancient Jewish ritual act of purification. Rumors of personal healing through mikvah immersion are often presented as Jewish folklore or urban legends. Yet, my research shows that a surprising percentage of immersing respondents –both Orthodox and non-orthodox— have experienced mikvah immersion as either spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, or physically healing. My study investigates what it means to experience mikvah as healing; and whether these experiences correlate with other attitudes and personal practices that signal patterns in how Jews think about Self, purity, wellbeing, and healing. I conducted a survey (N=283) and 34 in-depth interviews in the United States, and an additional survey (N=239) in the United Kingdom –to determine how relevant the U.S. findings could be for the aspiring mikvah organization, Wellspring UK, that plans to incorporate mikvah as a central modality of care in a center for wellbeing in London. I interpret these findings through a ritual ecological analysis –integrating embodiment, ritual studies, history, and religious studies— that centers participants’ sensory-emotional descriptions of their immersion as centering and affirming, in the midst of personal suffering. I then seek to understand how immersers interpret these sensory experiences by framing their mikvah stories in the historical context of new conceptual constructs about body, self, wellbeing, healing, and purity that emerged from multiple Jewish engagements with the American Great Awakening (1960-1990). That sensory experiences of centering and affirmation are identified as healing reflects a holistic self-concept, observed among the majority of participants –immersers and non-immersers alike. Specifically, the contemporary Jewish self is a holistic body-self, integrating physical, spiritual, emotional, psychological, and relational aspects. Such holism means that upset in one aspect of the self produces difficulties in one or more of the other aspects. Thus, maintaining one’s sense of wellbeing requires continual balancing and rebalancing, a self-making project that dovetails with respondents’ high value for an emergent ideal of spiritual purity, defined as the alignment of one’s inner values with one’s outer speech and actions. Together, wellbeing and spiritual purity constitute an ideal state of radical shalom, as experienced during healing mikvah immersions.
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: The third of four mini-reports highlighting different aspects and findings from JPR’s major study ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews: what, why and how’, dives deeper into the different religious lifestyles and denominations of European Jews. Is there a single Jewish voice – or a majority Jewish voice – that represents the entire community? And if there is one – who holds it? In today’s political culture, understanding lifestyle differences within ethnic and religious groups is critical, both to understand their needs and concerns, and to address them.
The new mini-report highlights different aspects of how European Jews express their Jewishness through their choice of denomination – or lack of – and through different Jewish rituals:
• The most numerically significant subgroup is the ‘Just Jewish’ (38%), a general category indicating no clear denominational alignment, followed by the ‘Traditional’;
• European Jewry is undergoing a process of desecularisation: Today, across Europe, the share of more religious persons (Haredi and Orthodox) among younger age groups is substantially larger than among the older;
• The most traditional communities are those in Western Europe. In these communities, about 40%-60% of adult Jews identify as Traditional, Orthodox or Haredi;
• The less traditionally observant lifestyles are in the 74%-78% range in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, and reach 90% in Hungary and Poland;
• Attending a Passover Seder and fasting on Yom Kippur are observed by most Jews, including those outside of the Haredi/Orthodox fold. Lighting candles on Friday night and keeping kosher at home are also observed by a much broader range of Jews than just those from the Haredi and Orthodox communities.
The report is based on research conducted in twelve European Union Member States in 2018, which, together, are home to about 80% of the Jewish population of Europe. The study includes the opinions and experiences of over 16,000 respondents – the largest sample of Jews ever surveyed in Europe.
Abstract: Shabbat day with its ritual phases and liturgies, chosen as a focus for this study, presents an ideological paradox, with notions of both particularism and universalism (P/U) in the core of its narrative. Ritual with all its elements, such as participants, objects, space, music, body gestures and style of service, provide additional meaning to what is embedded in the words, and this needs to be taken into consideration while examining the ideology of a prayerbook. The ritual process may affect or alter their P/U meaning.
Thus, to advance the debate in discussing P/U in the contemporary British Jewish Orthodox, Reform and Liberal prayerbooks and ritual, I engage here with Judaism as a vernacular religion. Because it is not enough to examine only verbal expressions of the prayerbooks, I also consider the verbal, behavioural and material expressions of religious belief. I identify and critically assess various strategies, which depend for their effectiveness on the approach to change of specific worshippers and prayer leaders, and that are deployed in order to remove or minimize the impact of undesired particularistic formulations.
Drawing these threads together, I triangulate the reading of Shabbat texts with ethnographical methodologies, thereby providing a better understanding of the way in which Jewish liturgy works as lived religion. The thesis contributes to further discussion of P/U notions within Jewish liturgy and serves to advance methodological thinking about siddurim and Jewish ritual.
Abstract: This report outlines the context, methods, data, and findings of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project British Ritual Innovation under Covid-19 [BRIC-19]. The project ran from August 2020 to September 2021,
with the aim of documenting and analysing changes to British communal religious life during the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, and of providing best practice recommendations for religious communities adapting their practice to address similar crisis situations in the future. Particular effort has been made to include data that reflects, to the extent possible, the geographic and religious diversity of Britain, by focussing on questions
of religious practice rather than on theological questions or issues of belief which are specific to faith traditions. The full context of the project, along with a detailed discussion of the research methods used, is contained in the introduction.
Abstract: Статья посвящена проблеме межэтнических брачных союзов, в основу исследования легли экспедиционные материалы, собранные в Приднестровье в 2017-2019 гг. В еврейской среде в советский период традиция смешанных браков получает широкое распространение, такие союзы приводят к трансформации классического определения еврейства, что в свою очередь оказывает влияние на представления партнеров о собственной идентичности. Авторами было собрано и проанализировано 29 интервью с информантами (евреями и неевреями), состоявшими в смешанных браках, и их детьми; были выделены три основных зоны напряжения в межэтнических семьях (восприятие данного союза окружающими, имянаречение ребенка и похороны) и три стратегии преодоления напряжения: выбор нейтральной и светской традиции; компромисс (сочетание двух традиций) и интеграция одного из партнеров в культуру другого. В качестве зоны кросс-культурного взаимодействия информанты выделяли праздники; связанные с ними традиции, как правило, были смешанными (например, Песах и Пасха). Авторы приходят к выводу, что описываемый синтез культур приводит к дрейфу идентичности информантов и трансформации представлений о «настоящем еврее», согласно которым знания о традиции или практические навыки становятся важнее принципов галахи.
Abstract: Статья посвящена трансформации, которую претерпел обычай «ѓахнасат кала» в современной российской еврейской общине. Заповедь «ѓахнасат кала» была впервые упомянута в талмудической литературе как
предписание увеселять жениха и невесту, однако позже, в XVII–XVIII вв., в Ашкеназе получила новое содержание: община должна была собирать на приданое бедным невестам, с тем чтобы они могли выйти замуж, – тем самым нищие девушки удерживались от социальной маргинализации или крещения. В современной российской еврейской общине (и, как выяснилось впоследствии, среди русскоязычных ультрарелигиозных евреев Израиля) это название стало употребляться по отношению к совершенно новой практике – сбору денег на организацию свадебной церемонии для жениха и невесты, уже выбравших друг друга, а нередко живших в гражданском браке и пришедших к иудаизму. В отличие от традиционной ситуации, когда стоимость свадебных расходов покрывается взносами гостей, в данном случае спонсорами свадьбы становятся пользователи интернета, сочувствующие данной паре, а бенефициарами – члены общины с высоким статусом. Таким образом, организация дорогой свадебной церемонии становится
для будущих супругов своего рода подтверждением их статуса в общине. Подробно анализируется один такой случай, произошедший в общине Московской хоральной синагоги в 2019 г. Делаются выводы о структуре общины, о ее экономике и роли краудфандинга в современной российской еврейской ортодоксии.
Abstract: Au carrefour des études de genre, de la sociologie des religions, et de la sociologie politique, cette recherche explore la dimension locale des conflits religieux sur le genre à partir du cas du judaïsme français des années 2000 et la fabrique organisationnelle du genre et de l'identité juive dans les synagogues non orthodoxes en France, qui se caractérisent notamment par l'ouverture du rituel aux femmes. L'approche ethnographique permet d'analyser les dispositifs de socialisation (comme l'organisation de l'espace, du rituel, de la prise de parole, de la formation religieuse, de la mobilisation pour le développement de la synagogue) qui contribuent à la production locale du genre. En particulier, cette thèse montre comment la perception de la division sexuée du travail dans l'organisation, l'appropriation des débats religieux sur le genre, la légitimité de mobilisations locales pour la participation des femmes au rituel, dépendent de la position de chaque organisation dans les concurrences religieuses. Dans une configuration où la place des femmes dans l'espace religieux est utilisée comme marqueur symbolique entre courants religieux en concurrence pour la définition de l'identité juive (configuration que l'on propose d'appeler plus généralement politisation religieuse du genre) la participation répétée au rituel et aux activités de la synagogue engendre un intérêt pratique pour le genre, qui se traduit notamment par une fierté égalitaire masculine et par une injonction féminine à la justification. Si les travaux sur genre et religion ont surtout abordé les contextes religieux conservateurs, cette recherche explore la normativité des contextes religieux égalitaires
Abstract: In this article I investigate ritual life at the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the largest and longest running Orthodox synagogue in the Russian capital. Unlike many Eastern European synagogues, this synagogue is a thriving prayer community due to its unique congregation of Russian, Georgian, Bukharan, Mountain, and visiting Western Jews. I focus on a fistfight that took place between an Israeli and a Georgian Jew during prayer. I detail how Russian and Georgian Jews interpreted the incident to be a result of their different ethnicities, Russian and Georgian respectively. The fight elucidates how ritual in post-Soviet society provides the means for the production of ethnicity and Jewish identity. Arguing for localism within Judaism's transnational ideology, I suggest that Jewish identity, like ritual, is performative and contextual. I also show how the shifting power relations in post-Soviet society have reshaped ethnicity, making state-endorsed market reform a reference point of ethnic differentiation.
Abstract: Kosher food is not necessarily the same as 'Jewish' food. The thesis explores ideas of Jewish identity in Britain in relation to food, examining the period from the end of austerity in the mid-1950s until the beginning of the twenty-first century. The period starts with Britain's emergence from the strictures of rationing and the development of an era of abundance and choice that has led, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to a complex and ambivalent relationship between food and society. The thesis explores food in relation to the histories of diverse British Jewish communities and individuals deploying a range of evidence including oral histories, memoirs, journalism and cookery books. It studies the practice of Jewish identity and food, looking at Jewish communities ranging from the strictly Orthodox to progressive Jews. Theories of place, displacement and circuitry in the context of a global food economy are central to the thesis as are ideas of memory, myth and ritual. The first two chapters study the religious, political and social context of kosher food practice in Britain, analysing relations between the ecclesiastical authorities, the kosher food industry and consumers in which issues of class and gender are pivotal. Non-Jewish responses to kosher food are also examined. The third chapter interrogates the culinary origins of Ashkenazi and Sephardi food in Britain in the context of the globalization of the food industry, questioning how this affects the 'Jewishness' of specific culinary practices. The final chapter investigates the meaning and development of Jewish food rituals with respect to Sabbath and festival observance. The thesis suggests that despite the particularity of Jewish practice in relation to food, and the specific circumstances of the Diaspora, the Jewish practice of identity through food should not be treated as exceptional. The concept of 'Jewish' food is as problematic and as valid as the identification of any other group with a specific cuisine.
Abstract: À l’époque contemporaine, il est des réalités socioculturelles et historiques dans lesquelles la transmission, base de la reproduction et continuité des rites familiaux, ne va pas de soi et nécessite de reconsidérer à la fois la famille et le mode de transmission.
En ex-Allemagne de l’Est, une forte population juive russophone a émigré de l’ancienne Union soviétique depuis 1989. Le régime communiste, long de plus de 60 ans, a engendré une rupture profonde dans le mécanisme de transmission du judaïsme et de la judéité. Aujourd’hui en situation de réapprentissage, les pratiques des rites se font de manière différenciée selon les groupes d’âge, dans le but de revendiquer une judéité spécifique. En conséquence, les rites réapparaissent mais se transmettent dans un mode tout d’abord horizontal, impliquant frères-sœurs et cousins, puis vertical mais ascendant, des enfants aux parents.
Abstract: Свадебные ритуалы бухарских евреев описываются в статье по материалам полевых исследований автора, проведенных в Узбекистане, Израиле и СȀА в период с 1991 года. Автор предлагает не столько законченный и самодостаточный монтаж, сколько многоплановые кадры из частной жизни, указывая на пересечения между социальной структурой и человеческой деятельностью, между унаследованными традициями и новаторскими изменениями. Рассматриваются шесть празд- неств из серии бухарско-еврейских свадебных практик: ши-ринхори - поедание сладостей, олицетворяющее помолвку; утвержденная советской властью гражданская свадебная цере-мония в ЗАГСе; кош-чинон - празднество, когда родственники невесты принимают участие в отдалении, пока происходит приведение в порядок волосков на ее лице; праздники кудо- бини и домот-дророн, которые проводятся во внутреннем дворе родительского дома невесты и означают приветствие жениха и его семьи в доме невесты; кидуш - религиозная свадебная церемония. Автор приходит к выводу, что не существует статичной базовой формы бухарско-еврейской культуры, отклонения от которой или изменения внутри которой могут быть опознаны.
