PART I: THE NATURE OF JEWISH JOURNEYS

• Nicholas Evans, Keeping Kosher: Policies deployed by British and German shipping companies to develop the transatlantic Jewish passenger business
  • This article considers the specific religious and cultural needs of Jewish transoceanic travellers between the period from the introduction of the May Laws in Russia in 1882 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. It begins by surveying the commercial responses of European shipping companies to the growing demand for ocean travel by Jews escaping increasing social and economic persecution in Imperial Russia. It ends by examining how the rise of Nazism in Germany brought an end to the commercial dominance German companies had enjoyed over Jewish travel at a time when potential demand for Jewish travel was at an unprecedented height. Examining the figurative spatial zones provided for Jewish travellers highlights that, whatever the motive for such journeys, seaborne travel enabled Jews’ to potentially shed aspects of rabbinic law (food, travel and religious observance) that often dominated their life on shore and had, conversely, been essential to Jewish identity.
    
• Fritz Backhaus, The Population Explosion in the Frankfurt Judengasse in the Sixteenth Century
  • Despite the establishment of a ghetto in 1462 and repeated attempts by the city council and the inhabitants to drive the Jews out of Frankfurt, by 1600 the population of the Judengasse had grown from just under 200 to c. 2500, the percentage of the population from nearly 1 per cent in some years to 15 per cent. This essay distinguishes different phases of this dramatic population explosion against the background of the changing economic and political conditions for the Frankfurt Jewish community.
    

PART II: BODY, IDENTITY AND GENDER

• Greg Walker, Spiritual Journeymen? The Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrement
  • This chapter examines the remarkable late-medieval English dramatic work known as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament – an ambivalent parochial re-interpretation of the Continental genre of the ‘host desecration play’. It suggests that the conventions, ideas and even the characters of the play are curiously distinct from those of the surviving, strongly anti-semitic European plays, having seemingly undergone a sea change in the course of their journey from central Germany, Italy and France to rural East Anglia. The essay explores the potentially radical implications of the play’s conception of its Jewish characters, and of the central figure of Jonathas in particular, arguing that, while the playwright was not consciously seeking to question, still less to undermine, conventional assumptions about the nature and role of the Jews in Christian theology, the net effect of his dramatic experiments was to set those traditions on their heads.
    
• Henrietta Mondry, Fantasy Places and Fantasy Bodies
  • In his definition of Orientalism Edward Said explains how ‘textual attitudes’ (92) informed and influenced European travel narratives, specifically those descriptions of the sexed body of the ethnic Other. This paper demonstrates how such ‘textual attitudes’ borrowed from the dominant culture inform the search for an exotic self in the travel sketches of contemporary Russian Israeli writer Dina Rubina, an Ashkenazi woman determined to reinvent herself as a new corporeal Sephardic self. This investigation will show that at the root of Rubina’s search for an alternative body is the internalisation of the anti-semitic stereotypes which inform the image of the Jewish body.
    
• Veronica Belling, When Rivkah left home: Women's Journeys from Eastern Europe to South Africa
  • According to the popular Yiddish song, ‘Yoshke fort avek’ (‘Yoshke is leaving’). This paper, however, will examine the lesser known journey of Rivke, his wife, daughter, sister, or mother, the woman who was often forced to remain behind in eastern Europe until her male relatives had managed to save up enough money to send for her. Based on archival material, oral interviews, as well as previously untapped, predominantly male-authored South African Yiddish and Hebrew literature, this paper will explore women’s journeys, both material and spiritual, from eastern Europe to South Africa. It will attempt to reconstruct women’s lives in eastern Europe, identify the variety of reasons for immigrating, represent the experience of the journey and the transformation of these women’s lives in South Africa. Ii will investigate the influence of timing, place of origin, age, class, education and occupation, in order to incorporate a range of experience, from that of the illiterate and observant, to the educated, politicised and religiously alienated.
    
• Albert Lichtblau, Galician Journeys
  • Hostile stereotypes of Galician Jews date back to the days of the Habsburg Empire when Galicia was the crown land with the highest proportion of all Jews in the Habsburg Empire. Since then, the term ‘Galitsianer’ has travelled far and remains well established as a negative cliché. This article examines why the Galician Jews were identified as a specific group by both Jews and non-Jews, which stereotypes were transmitted, and how negative images of Galician Jews were created and transferred. This study highlights, in particular, the deep impact of journeys and migration on perceptions of Galician Jews.
    
• Hilda Nissimi, Layers of Identity in a Jewish Community: from Crypto Faith in Mashhad to 'Mahhadilan', USA
  • The purpose of this paper is to chart the multiple layers of identity the Mashhadi community accumulated on its journey from Mashhad, Iran to New York. It will argue that patterns of memory and gender roles forged in the community, since the forced conversion to Islam in 1839 (Iran) survived the long journey over distance and time to the United States. It will also trace the changes that were imposed by the immigration and the convergence of old and new. The paper will show how three major layers have developed side by side: Mashhadi-Iranian, along with Jewish-Zionist and American. These layers are characterised by the endurance of familistic values and empowerment of women, along with a special convergence of memory and religious practices. The interaction between the different layers is complex and moves from enhancement to discomfort.

PART III: INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION

• Sarah Pearce, Journeys in ancient Judaism: the migrations of the ancestors
  • For the first-century Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria, the journey narratives of the Pentateuch/Torah constitute a kind of map of spiritual migration, a chart of the journey towards God, under the direction of Moses. Indeed, it is this understanding of the centrality of the journey in Scripture that determines the fundamental place of migration in Philo’s philosophical interpretation of Judaism. Through allegorical reading of the journeys of the ancestors, from Abraham to Moses, Philo points to the deeper meaning of these journeys, their starting points and destinations, and the waypoints in between. The land of Egypt is a central point of arrival and departure, culminating in the great Exodus under the leadership of Moses. This paper examines the particular significance of Egypt in Philo’s reading of the Mosaic map of migration. What did Philo, an Egyptian Jew, make of the Pentateuch’s ambivalent construction of Egypt as home or waypoint on the ancestors’ travels? Why did he consistently read the Pentateuch’s Egypt as the symbol, par excellence, of ‘the land of the body’? I will suggest that two traditions seem to have been fundamental in generating this interpretation: the geographical imagination of the Pentateuch; and the influence of Platonist exegesis of the world imagined by Homer.
    
• James Jordan, 'What we have gained is infinitely more than that small loss'. Rudolph Cartier at the BBC
  • This article recounts the Jewish journey of producer and director Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian refugee from Nazism who forged a new life in Britain from 1935 onwards, playing a pivotal role in the moulding of BBC television’s post-war drama output. It also explores the journey of Jewish cultural texts and traditions as it discusses the production and reception of Cartier’s 1952 English-language adaptation for the small screen of Ansky’s classic play The Dybbuk. The challenges Cartier perceived in completing this production and the responses of both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences reveal much about the limits of assimilation in an increasingly multicultural Britain.
    
• Kristy Warren, It's bigger than hip hop
  • This article explores how Jews are using hip hop to express explicitly the position of Jewish identity within wider multicultural life. It examines how this expression varies in degree from artist to artist and how this surge in Jewish hip hop is connected to what some in the media are calling ‘radical Judaism’. The article argues that young Jewish people are now taking personal journeys of self-discovery with hip hop and other elements of youth culture acting as the vehicle.
    
• Fiona Frank, Hannah Frank's Glasgow Jewish Journey: from the Gorbals to the South Side
  • This article celebrates the life and art of Glasgow artist Hannah Frank whose Jewish journey took her from the traditional Gorbals tenement where she was born in 1908 to the Newton Mearns Jewish care home where she died in December 2008. This short physical journey formed only part of what was a substantially larger intellectual and cultural journey which took Frank through the canon of English and European literature, poetry and art, theatre and cinema. This article uses Frank’s diaries from 1924 and 1925 to explore this larger journey, using examples to show how her reading would influence her art throughout her life.
    
• Noam Zadoff, Travelling to the Past, Creating a New Future: Gershom Scholem's Journey to Germany in 1946
  • In 1946 Gershom Scholem was sent to Germany by the Hebrew University as a delegate to the Commission for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. The aim of this journey to a devastated land was to locate Jewish books and manuscripts plundered by the Nazis in order to transfer them to the National Library in Jerusalem, thereby creating continuity between the old and the new by building a Jewish centre in the land of Israel. This article charts that journey and reflects on how the months spent in Europe had a strong personal impact on Scholem, taking him back to his past and thereby confronting him with the destruction of European Jewry.

PART IV: JOURNEYS AND FAMILIES

• Jessica Roitman, Sephardic Merchant Journeys: Travel, Place and Conceptions of Identity
  • This paper will discuss two kinds of journeys – one actual and one metaphorical. The journeys made by Sephardic merchants between Europe, West Africa and the Spanish American colonies will be examined, along with the concept of journeying itself within the context of the early modern world. What will also be discussed is the manner in which two specific Sephardic merchant families originally from Portugal – the Fidalgo and the Gramaxo – acted and reacted to the stigmatising factor of Jewish ancestry. One family made a journey towards the open practice of Judaism while the other journeyed away from their Jewish ancestry and toward incorporation into the Catholic Christian elite. The factors that led to these very different responses to issues of cultural and religious identity will be explored.
    
• Ruth Leiserowitz, To Go Through Prussia? Litvak Migratory Decisions in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and their consequences
  • When the first railway between Russia and Germany opened in East Prussia (1859) it started a significant Litvak emigration particularly to the United States but also to South Africa, Germany and the first wave of emigration to Palestine. Very often families took different migration decisions. This article investigates inventories of practice and knowledge which were significant for the migration process of Litvaks who went from their Stetl in the Kovno Government to different places and states, exploring the reasons for their varying decisions. In spite of the geographical variation, the migratory processes of the Jews crossing over the border in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all exhibit common features.
    
• Tony Kushner, Cowards or Heroes? Jewish Journeys, Jewish Families and the Titanic
  • The journey of the Titanic has become the most famous in history. In the telling and re-telling of its narrative over the past century, however, the story of its Jewish passengers has been lost. This lacuna has occurred by two processes – the universalisation of the wealthy Jewish passengers and the marginalisation of those travelling steerage. This article explores the reasons behind both processes, focusing especially on constructions of the Jewish family and the male Jewish body in responses to the catastrophe. It does so especially through concepts of place and placelessness and the Jewish journey.
    
• Jonathan Goldstein, 'Not Just Another Country': The Olmert Family Sojourn through China as a case study of the role of travel in Jewish identity formation
  • This article examines the general role of ‘travel’ and ‘journeys’ in the formation of Jewish identity. In particular, it analyses the sojourn through China of the family of one of Israel’s best known personalities of the early twenty-first century, that of Jerusalem mayor, Vice Prime Minister, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. His family’s political identity coalesced in an Asian political context. His father Mordechai, usually called Motti, underwent an ideological epiphany while travelling to and residing in Harbin, China. Jewish identity in that metropolis had already been defined as a mixture of culture, language, politics, and religion. It utilises a four-part analytical framework applicable to Jewish journeys to many parts of the world. First, it focuses on ‘leavings’, or what motivated Jews to abandon their ancestral homeland; second, ‘passages’, or how the vicissitudes of travel to relatively unknown destinations shaped Jewish consciousness, thought and behaviour; third, ‘identity’, the cultural and intellectual characteristics which Jews adopted at their new destinations; and fourth, ‘return’, the ways in which Jews, in their new homelands, remembered, memorialised, and utilised their ties to the past and revisited their ancestral homelands.
    
• Gemma Romain, 'Who do you think you are?' Journeys and Jewish identity in the narrative of David Baddiel
  • This article explores aspects of the family history of David Baddiel, a television presenter and author based in the UK. It specifically examines the way in which Baddiel’s family history is represented in an episode of the television series Who Do You Think You Are? shown on UK television in autumn 2004. In this article, Baddiel’s family journey is contextualised within an exploration of the rise in popularity of family history pursuits in the UK, and a discussion of how family history is commonly represented and framed through the medium of television. Thereafter, the article investigates Baddiel’s particular family story in relation to collective and individual Jewish histories and memories, along with exploring how his story is portrayed in relation to the conventions of televised and celebrity-led history.