Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 9.2/3
- PART I: PLACE, DISPLACEMENT AND BELONGING
- Maura E. Hametz, Foreigners in their
Own City: Italian Fascism and the Dispersal of Trieste’s Port Jews
- After the First World War, despite the decline
of liberalism and the collapse of the Habsburg empire, the community
of port Jews
in Trieste continued to thrive. For much of the inter-war period, Italy
recognised port Jews’ economic utility to schemes for economic
expansion in Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Political transformation,
embodied in Italy’s adoption of racial legislation, not economic
decline, caused the Jews’ dispersal after 1938. Yet it was port
Jews’ flexibility, their international contacts, wealth, and
influence that enabled them to escape Italy, fascist persecution, and,
ultimately, the Nazi Holocaust.
- Michele Langfield, Lost Worlds’:
Reflections on Home and belonging in Jewish Holocaust Survivor Testimonies
- This article draws upon Holocaust survivor
testimonies to explore the interaction between place and displacement
in the formation and
evolution of local, Jewish and ethnic identities. In particular, the
ways in which the personal experiences of interviewees have affected
their notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are
addressed. Relationships with former homelands vary and have been significantly
affected by pre-war, wartime and post-war experiences. Connections
with home and family have frequently been severed and are more likely
to exist in diasporic communities than in countries of origin.
- Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain,
Constructing a Usable Past: History, Memory and South African Jewry in
an Age of Anxiety
- Three seminal studies published between 1930
and 1955 played a critical role in defining a received version of
South African Jewish
history. All three helped towards a self-definition of a community
looking for a usable and respectable past in an age of anxiety and
vulnerability. Shaped in significant measure by these texts, a collective
memory emerged which incorporated a questionable understanding of the
community’s origins, development and character. Critical dimensions
of the South African Jewish experience were ignored or distorted in
this drive towards acceptance and respectability.
- William Kenefick, Comparing the
Jewish and Irish Communities in Twentieth Century Scotland
- When examining ‘place and displacement
in Jewish history and memory’ it is clear that the notion of ‘displacement’ is
too pejorative and unhelpful in the Scottish historical context. In
examining Jewish relations with the Irish this study demonstrates that
while the Jews settled in the Gorbals area of Glasgow’s south
side a generation after the Irish, they ‘broke free’ of
the ‘Glasgow Ghetto’ a generation and more before them.
The Jewish experience of settlement in modern Scotland was thus a positive
one and their relations with host community much less problematic than
that of the immigrant Irish.
- PART II: RACE, PLACE AND PERIPHERY
- Wieke Vink, On Burial, Boundaries
and the Creolisation of the Surinamese Jewish Community
- A central theme in the history of the
Surinamese Jews is the persistent tension between the creolisation
of the local community
and a continued belonging to the Jewish diaspora. This field of tension
is manifested by the way community boundaries were created, negotiated
and recreated throughout Surinamese Jewish history. The cemetery reflects
this history of changing cultural identifications of the Surinamese
Jews by its changing style of gravestones and by the various conflicts
surrounding death, burial and cemetery space. Based on a study of the
shifting position of ‘coloured Jews’ in the Surinamese
Jewish community from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century,
as displayed both at the cemetery and in cemetery-related stories,
I will argue that this transformation of cemetery space should be understood
as a case in point of a creolising Surinamese Jewish community.
- Jonathan Goldstein, Memory, Place
and Displacement in the Formation of Jewish Identity in Rangoon and Surabaya
- In nineteenth and early twentieth century
Rangoon, Burma, and Surabaya, Dutch East Indies, ‘memory’ [zachor], ‘source’ [makor],
and ‘location’ [makom] were important determinants of Jewish
identity. Jews lived in alien contexts but tolerant surroundings. Immigrant
Jews were civically included and could organise freely. Each city was
a tranquil location where Jews could deepen their commitment to Rabbinic
Judaism and/or Zion. But precisely the same conditions enabled Jews
to intermarry and/or convert. This process began well before World
War II. A brutal wartime Japanese occupation and post-war economic
trauma and political upheaval in both places ultimately destroyed the
peaceful environments Jews once knew. By 1960 virtually all Burmese
and Indonesians who had remained Jews had moved on to other places
of refuge, notably to the reborn State of Israel. A handful of stalwarts
remained in both locations to tend their respective synagogues and
cemeteries.
- Moshe Terdiman, Jews of Algiers
- This article explores class and social divisions
within the Jewish community of Algiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. It
shows that although the Jewish community maintained a distinctive coherence,
the 'Livorno' Jews dominated the community at the expense of the 'native'
Jews of Algiers. Livorno Jews had connections to European Jewry, enjoyed
the status of Musta'min, lived separately, filled leadership positions
within the community, and married among themselves. 'Native' Jews were
defined as dhimmis and had lesser occupations.
- John Simon, Jewish Identity in Two Remote
Areas of the Cape Province: A Double Case Study
- This article examines two important and somewhat
picturesque centres of Jewish life in (then) remote areas of the Cape
Province, namely
Namaqualand in the North Western Cape and Oudtshoorn in the South Western
Cape. The Namaqualand Jews featured prominently in the shipping and mineral
industries and in the subsidiary commercial activities which emerged
from them. Oudtshoorn Jews became deeply involved in the two principal
industries with which the area’s prosperity waxed and waned, namely
ostrich farming and tobacco. Both brought the Jews more closely into
contact with their mainly Afrikaans neighbours than was the case in other
areas and yet the Oudtshoorn community at its peak was so Jewishly robust
that it earned the soubriquet ‘Jerusalem of South Africa’.
The article examines those features which characterised the two communities
and their relationship with their neighbours.
- PART III: PLACE, MIGRATION AND MEMORY WORKS
- Nancy Foner, Migration,
Location and Memory: Jewish History through a Comparative Lens
- This article is based on the premise that
a comparative perspective can enrich our understanding of the role
of location in the lives of
Eastern European Jewish migrants and their descendants. It explores,
through a comparative lens, how the context or place where Eastern
European Jews moved 100 years ago shaped their lives in their new homes
at the time of initial settlement. It also considers issues concerned
with memory, including how the historical experience of migration in
specific locations influenced memory of it.
- David Cesarani, Putting London Jewish Intellectuals
in their Place
- The extensive cultural histories of New
York’s Jewish intellectuals
have made much of the ethnic and spatial dimension in their formation
as individuals and as a group. Over the same time span that New York
Jews threw up a galaxy of creative figures, from the 1920s to the 1950s,
London witnessed the emergence of a stunning concentration of Jewish
intellectuals. Many came from London’s East End which performed
a similar function to New York’s Jewish immigrant districts.
Yet cultural historians have not delineated a prototypical London Jewish
intellectual and there is little cultural history of Jewish intellectuals
in London. This article is a tentative attempt at a sociological analysis
of London Jewish intellectuals investigating the relationship between
place, ethnicity and memory in the emergence of a distinctive intellectual
cadre.
- Tony Kushner, Memory at the Margins, Matter
out of Place: Hidden Narratives of Jewish Settlement and Movement in Britain
- This article explores the memory and history
of a Jewish shopkeeping community in the south coast English port
of Southampton during the
first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on the marginality
of these Jews, it highlights the fluidity of Jewish migration within
countries of immigration such as Britain and questions assumptions
of Jewish economic success and mobility. It then explores why this
community has been subsequently subject to amnesia in both local and
Jewish collective memory, suggesting that these Jews and their cosmopolitan
neighbours have been regarded as ‘matter out of place’
- Veronica Belling, ‘A Slice of Eastern Europe in Johannesburg’:
Yiddish Theatre in Doornfontein, 1929–49
- This article explores how location influenced
attitudes to the preservation of Yiddish language and culture and
hence the construction
of historical memory. Between 1929 and 1949 the Johannesburg Jewish
Workers’ Club had a thriving Dramatic Section which produced
Yiddish theatre with a leftist slant. It was situated in Doornfontein,
the suburb east of Johannesburg, that from the early 1930s was the
focus of the Eastern European immigration. Based on an examination
of the Yiddish weekly newspaper, the Afrikaner Idishe Tsaytung [African
Jewish Newspaper], this paper will examine why a permanent Yiddish
theatre group never emerged, and why this rich and lively episode was ‘forgotten’ and
erased from the collective memory of South African Jewry.