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.
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: Förintelsen är en historisk händelse som lever vidare i samtidens medvetande i form av minnesmonument och museala minnesutställningar och processas av forskningsinstitutioner och myndigheter. Bland överlevandefamiljerna lever minnet kvar och nu har några av deras barnbarn, den Tredje generationens överlevande, tagit på sig att förvalta minnet. Samtidigt florerar antisemitismen i det svensk samhället vilket formar och påverkar den judiska gruppen och barnbarnen. Den socialantropologiska studien som har genomförts kan visa att detta påverkar deras identitet. Syftet med studien är att undersöka den tredje generationens identitetskonstruktion och hur den formas av minnet av Förintelsen, samtida antisemitism samt de judiska institutionerna. I den etnografiska undersökningen som primärt har centrerats kring intervjuer och observationer framkom att det finns en uttalad vilja att minnas Förintelsen. Vissa påpekar vikten av att minnas i ett privat sammanhang, inom familjen, medan andra tycker att de mer offentliga minnesstunderna uppfyller behovet. Samtidigt lever barnbarnen i en tid med en manifest och latent antisemitism vilket formar både deras tillvaro och självbiografi. Några av forskningsdeltagarna har blivit utsatta för regelrätta antisemitiska påhopp medan andra har strategier för att undgå att synliggöra sin judiska identitet. Identiteten formas dock inte bara av detta utan också av den judiska etniska samhörigheten, de judiska institutionerna, det judiska kalendariet och kulturella och sociala riktlinjer. I studiens slutsatser kan det konstateras att den Tredje generationen överlevandes minnesbearbetning av Förintelsen baseras i mångt och mycket på en generationella minnesöverföring som har pågått under forskningsdeltagarnas liv då de har samtalet med överlevandegenerationen. Empirin visar också att de bär på förhållningssätt och strategier kring hur de hanterar en samtida antisemitism i kombination med att de bär på de överlevandes berättelser om den tyska, extrema formen. Detta tillsammans utgör en av grunderna till identiteten. Empirin visar också att den tredje generationen väljer att leva ett judiskt liv, inom den Judiska församlingens ramar, baserat på individuella val och ställningstaganden.
Abstract: In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in which gay cultures are rooted and develop, and which allows, and perhaps actively embraces (specific kinds of) sexual diversity. This sexual imaginary assumes contingency among sexuality, transformation storyline and displacement, and suggests that identity is enabled, enacted, conscripted and occasionally, violently incited as a result of spatial positions and migration. While the migration stories celebrate and brand the city as a cosmopolitan and queer haven, they also reveal an ambivalent dimension, which draws on ambiguous historical baggage and current hostility to strangers. In what follows, I discuss the shift to ‘queerness’ and the emergence of racial identities that came to light during my Berlin ethnography, charting the ways those shifts coincide and exploring the processes by which identities are lost and found.
Abstract: Travelogue – On the Contemporary Understandings of Citizenship among European Jews – title and subject of Theodor Barth’s thesis – encompasses six books with ethnography based on a multi-sited fieldwork, in Central- & Eastern European Jewish communities.
The books are concerned with aspects of their own conditions of production, from fieldwork research to writing, alongside the ethnographic subject of the Travelogue: the conditions of Jewish communities (mainly in cities of Central and Eastern Europe) in the last half of the 1990s (1995-99).
The books root the model experiments developed throughout the Travelogue in different ethnographic contexts.
Book 1 (Spanning the Fringes – Vagrancy to Prague) is a traveller’s tale with quite contingent, serendipitous, and very short-term trips to sample Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Sofia, and Budapest.
Book 2 (The Minutes of the ECJC) is a commentary and analysis around a conference which the candidate attended in Prague in 1995 of the European Council of Jewish Communities (ECJC). It focuses on the political work and changing strategies of the ECJC. This book establishes some of the terms of the problems of community-Jews in Europe.
Book 3 (The Zagreb Almanach) is a description and analysis of the candidate’s stay with the Jewish community of Zagreb, focusing on a place, a green room, the community centre itself—this is the closest to a traditional site of community living in his ethnographic research.
Book 4 (The Books of Zagreb and Sarajevo) provides a contemporary and contextualized reading of a key Jewish ritual complex—the Passover Seder and its text, the Haggadah. This is a cultural object for systematic iteration and commentary, on which to articulate in depth a number of his insights gained more diffusely from observation. Among all the books, book 4 is the one intensive piece in which the textual analysis defines a process through which the candidate intends to sensitise the reader to how pattern can emerge from details.
Book 5 (Thirteen Kisses—a Manual of Survival From Sarajevo) relates a testimonial account of how the activist group La Benevolencija functioned in Sarajevo humanitarian relief during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The candidate hopes to demonstrate a slow transition from wartime testimonials in the presence of an anthropologist, to recognition in the urban commonwealth in the aftermath of the war. He also invites the reader to consider the particularities of survivor testimonies and contrast these to how the war-zone was perceived from the outside.
Book 6 (The Account of the Lifeline) provides an understanding of a search and accountability model developed by La Benevolencija—in co-operation with the Joint—during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). It consolidates and expands the account of the Jews in Sarajevo and their humanitarian actions, through the candidate’s work on archives of the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) in Paris.
The six books of the Travelogue are rounded up in three concluding sections, containing 1) a synopsis of the findings across the books (Frames – Modeling Disordered Systems), 2) an account for the process of visual modeling throughout the books (Design – Choices and Aggregates), 3) a bibliographic presentation in which various sources influenced the conceptual choices and experiments that are made throughout the manuscript are discussed (Bibliography: Reflective Readings). In this way, the candidate hopes to retrace his steps from the findings, via the crafting of the volume back to the ranks of colleagues and readers.
Abstract: In this paper I present some initial findings from my multilocal ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on the “Trikalan Jews”, i.e. Jews living in or originating from Trikala, a city in the Thessaly region of central Greece. In particular, my research focuses on two axes: the historical processes of community formation and its social transition after World War II as well as the recent sense of belonging of the potential members of that “community” and the ways they experience and negotiate their collective memory and identity. On a theoretical level, the first hypothesis grounded in the field is that the “community” tends to appropriate/be appropriated by subjects who currently live “elsewhere”. In this sense, it is reproduced as a glocal network in which Jewishness and locality are interconnected, experienced, and performed in multiple, fluid, and often fragmented ways. On a methodological level, my research is based on the fundamental techniques of ethnographic and ethnohistorical research which have been adapted to the conditions and restraints of a multilocal field.
