Introduction: anthropology of Jewishness in the twenty-first century

The special issue brings together contributions by anthropologists working within and across different ethnographic fieldsites and theoretical traditions to discuss the myriad ways in which Jewishness has been changing and thriving in the twenty-first century. The papers presented here highlight that Jewishness is not a homogenous construct and that there are embedded subjectivities within Jewish identities which claim their autonomous positions of culture and belonging. The authors explore through ethnographic research and reflections, as well as by deploying diverse theoretical perspectives, new ways in which differeing conceptualisations of Jewish identity intersect with notions of inclusion and exclusion; cast light on the relationship between political citizenship and personal understandings of belonging, and help us examine the notions of religious and the secular.

We hope that the issue will contribute towards the pluralist and multicultural turn in the field. The historical trajectories within each locale discussed here present unique transnational and local relatabilities that inform a multifocal analysis of anthropology of Judaism and Jewish communities, which is multidimensional and provides a lively spectrum of individual and collective identity-building. The articles offer ethnographically embedded analyses of multicultural encounters highlighting a pluralistic recognition through which Jewishness in present times is realized and negotiated. The papers explore unique Jewish subjectivities through an analysis of faith, customs, uncertainities in civic society, institutional practices and individual choices. The varied theorisations of discursive subjectivity within the diversity of Jewish identities discussed here encourage rethinking of local and global extents of norms as well as the interplay of cultural continuity and change. The authors engage with major issues of theoretical concern in social sciences to deliver nuanced understandings of Jewish identity and contribute to scholarship that has unsettled the notions of the centre and the periphery in Jewish history.¹

Jennifer Creese, the first contributor to the special issue, discusses through her ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Jewish community of South East Queensland, Australia, conceptualisations of antisemitism through the lens of broader social scientific theories of fear and explores how her research participants can alleviate fear by adopting a wide range of strategies to combat potential antisemitic attacks. Reflecting on her interlocutors’ experiences and understandings of antisemitism, the author analyses how a shared theorisation of anti-Jeish prejudice brings a sense of community closeness. The paper considers the questions of class, region, ethnicity and local politics to elucidate the specificity of the Jewish community within the multicultural mosaic of the South-East Queensland society in which Creese’s interlocutors live and assertively respond to right wing discourses. It also makes a timely ethnographic contribution to scholarship exploring understandings of antisemitism within and outside Jewish communities by paying close attention to the way the researcher’s interlocutors in the field theorise this form of prejudice.

The paper by Simon Cooper and Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli examines the idea of ⁣⁣cultural grammar within Jewish practices. Through observation of cultural activities such as breaking a plate at engagements and breaking a glass at weddings, kiddush and havdalah on Shabbat and festivals, washing hands with mayim rishonim and mayim aharonim at a meal, marriage and divorce rituals, the authors present an analysis of how these customs and laws changed over time. The article explores through the theoretical lens of the structuralist and constructivist anthropologhical perspectives how new customs emerge in Jewish culture and how changes of rituals in time balance and integrate existing customs to recreate cultural symmetries.

Rachel Werczberger’s paper explores the phenomenon of New Age Judaism (NAJ) in Israel. The author discusses identity narratives of Israeli NAJ participants to better understand their commitment to spirituality and their individual Jewish identities. Werczberger views identity as personalized “heterogeneous construct with multiple internal contradictions” and suggests that her interviewees’ understandings of what it means to be Jewish serve as unique theorisations of Jewishness. The “non-linear”, “unsettled” biographies presented by Werczberger are stories of personal transformation through specific routes, conveying individual reflections and insights that refuse to accept metanarratives of the religious and the secular, as the narrators craft their individual essences and spiritual sensibilities to challenge the contours of the prevalent categorizations within current Israeli discourses of Jewish identity. The paper emphasizes the dimension of agency in portraying the way its protagonists embrace different modalities of Jewishness and “consciously choose to engage with Jewish tradition, infusing it with personal meanings and reforming it according to their spiritual needs and sensibilities”. Werczberger’s intervention thus usefully contrubutes to scholarship which theorises Jewishness as constituting its own category of analysis that does not map easily onto the received academic and political notions of race and religion or of the religious and the secular.²

Papers by Dani Kranz and Maina Singh focus on the questions of the positionality of the ethnographer in anthropological research in Jewish Studies and the relationship between the anthropologists and their interlocutors. Kranz’s paper, which has a strong historical, as well as theoretical significance, explores the development of anthropology at the intersection with Jewish Studies in post-1945 Germany. Drawing on in-depth engagement with a wide range of ethnogreaphic sources, Kranz offers a compelling and thought-provoking account of a history of the discipline, which in Germany, as the author posits, “takes place in an ideological, political, and emotional triangle”. The paper importantly explores the gendered and community-specific dimensions of anthropological study of Jewishness in Germany, drawing particular attention to the volume and prominence of emotional labour that underpins scholarship in this field. Kranz’s discussion elucidates the productive potential of paying analytical attention to the positionality of anthropologists in ethnographic research and asking questions about whose voices get to be heard in anthropological literature. It also highlights how broader societal processes of marginalisation affect not only communities minoritised in social and political terms but also anthropologists as a community of practice when they engage the problematics of subalternity and disadvantage in their work.

Finally, Maina Singh offers a personal account of conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Jewish communities of South Asian ancestry in Israel, focusing on the affective ties with India that transpired in her interlocutors’ reflections on their migration journeys. Singh’s analysis demonstrates how these accounts unsettle essentialist understandings of Jewish experience, as well as received understandings abour the perceived centre and periphery of the diaspora condition, and discusses how in the conversations with the author the spatial dimension of her research participants’ life histories traverses the temporal one. Singh points out that her interviewees maintained a strong feeling of attachment towards their cultural and historical heritage on the subcontinent, and reflexively explores her own journey of engaging the field of anthropology of Jewish communities by identifying spaces where the ethnographer’s cultural and linguistic roots intersected with those of her research participants. The paper thus productively complicates anthropological reflections on the insider/outsider divide posing a question about which positionalities of the researcher could constitute an insider perspective in ethnographic fieldwork.

The special issue opens multiple avenues for further research at the intersection of anthropology and Jewish Studies and we wish to thank the authors, the reviewers and the editors of the journal for enabling us to bring this project to fruition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a key text see Gilman, Jewish Frontiers.

2 See, for instance, Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins”.