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Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, edited by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VR: Ashgate, 2008. 365 pp. $99.95.
In recent years there has been a heightened critical awareness of the role of spatiality in the Jewish imagination, reflected in numerous conferences such as Lehigh University’s 2007 “No Direction Home: Re-imagining Jewish Geography,” textual productions such as Barbara Mann’s special Prooftexts issue devoted to “Literary Mappings of the Jewish City,” Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu’s Grasping Land: Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse & Experience, or my own Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing & the Desert, to name just a few recent exemplars. Jewish Topographies (whose genesis was the University of Potsdam’s “Makom: Place and Places in Judaism” program) is certainly the most critically useful investigation to date if only for its breathtaking historical, geographical, and cultural scope. It is impossible to fully convey the riches here; suffice to say that the scope of this groundbreaking volume manages to encompass an extraordinary range of evocative milieus, even including virtual worlds and “meta-places” such as Mini Israel, brilliantly structured around five evocative themes (“Construction Sites”; “Jewish Quarters”; “Cityscapes & Landscapes”; “Exploring & Mapping Jewish Space”; and “Enacted Spaces”). Editors Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke seek to overcome the “tendency to privilege time over place” (p. 1) that they see as the pervasive norm of Jewish studies (aside from spaces connected to religious traditions or Holocaust memory) while affirming the Jewish Diaspora “as a touchstone for the globalization process” that illuminates its “premises, conditions, and perils” (p. 3). The editors’ corrective aim (they express impatience that Jewish literary studies’ dominant paradigms of “Our Homeland, the Text” and “People of the Book” overlook “empirical notions of space and place”) is to explore neglected Jewish topographies in some instances and, conversely, to bring new angles to bear on more traditionally explored locales. The Jewish research model that inspires the editors is that of the Bund’s rigorous commitment to specific Diaspora communities and histories. Hence, for the most part, the eighteen essays assembled here (exceptions noted above) examine lived space, or “the location of Jewish presence rather than the construction and interpretation of Jewish spaces on the textual or metaphorical level” (p. 2).
Particularly admirable is the editors’ success in gathering essays that demonstrate the connections between different Jewish topoi (Morocco and the Israeli development town of Netivot, the former Soviet Union and Brooklyn) as well as Jewish subcultures such as the historical mellah of Fez or even the “religious micro-spaces” of contemporary Budapest and Toronto. Many essays traverse the literal and the symbolic, such as Miriam Lipis’ perspective on the sukkah as “A Hybrid Place of Belonging.” Identifying four “symbiotic” realms of belonging embodied in this ritualized and ephemeral commemorative space (Land of Israel, Bible as portable homeland, God’s presence, and the local) she draws on an impressively international study of sites in Europe, Israel, and the U.S. to consider the sukkah’s function in “modern urban contexts” (p. 28). In her beautifully lucid formulation, the sukkah is the quintessential artifact of Diaspora, it “constructs and expresses a hybrid concept of places of belonging, which overcomes the dichotomy of having or not having a place of belonging, by superimposing . . . real and imagined places” (p. 31). Another worthy essay that ventures into the nexus of Jewish symbolism and communal life is German architect Manuel Herz’ “‘Eruv’ Urbanism” which posits that the eruv “shifts the current notion and meaning of the private and the public” and “introduces a different understanding of space and territory” into urban space (p. 47). Expanding this paradigm to contemporary Jewish life in Germany, Herz sees the eruv as a provocative and necessary disrupter of the unfortunately enduring historical tendency to “concentrate” all its institutions in one locale: “Apart from the localization of synagogues within the urban fabric, an architectural strategy based on the eruv would lay importance on the mundane…of the everyday. With…few exceptions, there are no Jewish bakeries, butchers, cafes, or bookstores in German cities” (p. 57). For Herz, a greater diffusion of Jewish culture and commerce would more genuinely “normalize” German-Jewish relations than has occurred until now.
One of several Israel-oriented essays, Yael Zerubavel’s “Desert & Settlement” offers a rich and incisive exploration of Jewish Palestinian and early Israeli society’s fraught relation to desert space, arguing that the polarities identified in her title “served as oppositional yet interdependent space metaphors . . . integral parts of the cultural construction of space in the emergent modern Hebrew culture” (p. 203). For early Jewish immigrants, “desert” was a more diffuse, and symbolic, identifier that stood for cultural spaces outside of Zionist settlement, a paradigm that derived from a discourse that portrayed the land as “fallen into deep slumber, or engulfed by death and mourning” prior to the Jewish return. Zerubavel’s fascinating discussion makes excellent use of a diverse source of evidence: early immigrant reports, literary writers, geography texts, JNF posters, and popular song. Some of the greatest pleasures in this volume happen to be essays that explore offbeat or unconventional notions of “Jewish spaces.” In Erik Cohen’s “Talking Distance: Israeli Backpackers & Their Society” he argues that the vast numbers of young Israeli trekkers who escape the pressure-cooker of Israeli society after their release from army service differ from earlier generations in pursuing an “inward orientation” (p. 269). In sharp contrast to youths from other nations, rather than immerse themselves in local cultures, they cling to “not just . . . any backpacker enclave, but . . . distinctly Israeli ones” (p. 269), whether in Cuzco, or Katmandu. Citing research suggesting that young Israelis “carry the environmental bubble of their home everywhere they go” (p. 270), Cohen speculates that this may be owing to their recent military experience in the occupied territories; he notes their borrowed slang: hamekomiim (the locals, a term applied by soldiers to Palestinians, kovshim (conquerors) and mitnahalim (settlers). On the other hand, musicologist Galeet Dardashti argues that many young Israelis are actually growing less insular in her “Buena Vista Bagdad Club” which examines the growing popularity of Jewish Iraqi musicians as part of an increasing sophistication and openness to Mizrahi and Arab cultural traditions that reverses decades of neglect and bias on the part of Eurocentric Zionist culture.
In a richly speculative mode, Michael Feige’s “Mini Israel” examines a popular tourist site located between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv composed of over 350 exact-replica models of archeological and modern structures. Intrigued by its ideological uses as a utopian liberal model, Feige is nonetheless struck by the “sacred” status apparently conferred to the miniature Western Wall and Yad Vashem by their originals: “the blurred lines between the macro and the micro. . . . There is a transparent plastic cover protecting the miniature Muslim prayers from the vengeance of full-sized, very real Jewish extremists” (p. 329). He sums up the experience as a nostalgic “inner journey into Israel and Israeliness, to a sense of pristine existence for which many Israelis long and feel that they have lost” (p. 330). The site ultimately enacts a fantasy of containment in which diverse figures “such as the Muslim-Arab or the Haredi, stay within…their designated spaces, and remain unthreatening and benign” (p. 339).
As these compelling examples suggest, Jewish Topographies is one of the most profound and far-ranging contributions to interdisciplinary approaches to Jewish studies (many of its essayists place the latter in creative yet cogent conversation with architecture, cultural studies, anthropology and other disciplines) to appear in years, and its editors are to be congratulated for assembling such a vibrant collection of innovative scholarship. Anyone with a scholarly (or even casual), interest in questions raised by historical commemoration, memory, tourism, anthropology, history, or spatial studies will strongly benefit from these lively and accessible investigations of the symbolic hierarchies and identities invested in place.
Ranen Omer-Sherman
University of Miami
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