The widespread and long-held preconception that all Jews lived in ghettos and were relentlessly subject to discrimination prior to the Enlightenment has only slowly eroded. Geographically speaking, Jews rarely lived in ghettos and have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Power struggles and wars often led to the creation of new national borders that divided communities once united. But if identity formation is subject to change and negotiation, it does not depend solely on shifting geographical borders. A variety of boundaries were and are still being constructed and maintained between ethnic and other collective identities. The contributors to this book, like other post-modernist historians, turn their gaze to a wide range of identities once taken for granted, identities located on the border lines between one country and the next, between Jews and non-Jews as well as on those between one group of Jews and another.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction - Judith Frishman and Ido de Haan
- Part I. Boundary Work
- The Ghetto of Florence and the Spatial Organization of an Early Modern Catholic State - Stefanie Siegmund
- Explaining the Formation of Ghettos under Nazi Rule and its Bearings on Amsterdam. Segregating “the Jews” or Containing the Perilous “Ostjuden”? - Dan Michman
- Markers of a Minority Group Jews in Antwerp in the Twentieth Century - Veerle Vanden Daelen
- Part II. Cultural Trespassers
- Jewish Parliamentary Representatives in the Netherlands, 1848-1914. Crossing Borders, Encountering Boundaries? - Karin Hofmeester
- Catinka Heinefetter. A Jewish Prima Donna in Nineteenth-Century France - Ronald Schechter
- The Political Significance of Anne Frank. On Crossing Boundaries and Defining Them - David J. Wertheim
- Part III. Crossing Borders
- The Twentieth-Century Portuguese Jews from Salonika. “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin” - Manuela Franco
- Dutch Jews and German Immigrants. Backgrounds of an Uneasy Partnership in Progressive Judaism - Chaya Brasz
- Burnishing the Rough. The Relocation of the Diamond Industry to Mandate Palestine - David de Vries
- Part IV. Jews in Limbo
- Some Reflections on Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Poznania and Jewish Relations with Poles and Germans - Krzysztof A. Makowski
- Belgian Independence, Orangism, and Jewish Identity. The Jewish Communities in Belgium during the Belgian Revolution (1830-39) - Bart Wallet
- Citizenship, Regionalization, and Identity. The Case of Alsatian Jewry, 1871-1914 - Paula E. Hyman
- Moroccan Jewry and Decolonization. A Modern History of Collective Social Boundaries - Yaron Tsur
- Contributors
- Index of Names and Places
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