Abstract
If you look up an address in Milan (Italy) in Google Maps, then you will find, in the South-Western part of the city, a curious label: Quartiere ebraico, Jewish quarter. Actually, a Jewish quarter does not exist in Milan, and one has never existed. A Jewish ghetto, like the well-known ones in Venice and Rome, is also not present. So, why does Google Maps identify this area as Jewish? Is there a particularly ‘visible’ Jewish presence that has induced the developers of Google’s mapping service to put the label there?
The paper explores—in first instance—how the production (Lefebvre 1994) of this ‘Jewish space’ (Lipphard et al. 2008) is connected to the protagonists of the larger study the contribution refers to: Jewish migrants from the Middle East and North Africa who resettled in Italy between the 1940s and 1980s.
Concerning the case of Milan, data collected through fieldwork, institutional sources and personal testimonies, will show how—from an historical point of view—it was precisely the settlement of few thousands Jews from Libya, Egypt, Iran, Syria and Lebanon that made possible—and subsequently visible—the creation of new, Jewish spaces in the urban environment. Moreover, the construction of some synagogues, schools or cultural centres by the ‘new comers’ clearly reflect the will by some of them to maintain cultural boundaries and to re-create former social and cultural environments beyond the private sphere of the single household.
As a result, as Middle Eastern and North African Jews established their home and collective spaces in Milan, a diverse Jewish presence appeared more clearly not only on the urban map of the city but also within the social fabric of the receiving Jewish community.
Is there then—the paper investigates further— a deeper, anthropological understanding we can gain from the visibility displayed by the label on the city-plan? Does this spatial production trigger—on the micro level of personal recollections—other realms of visibility connected to migration, where (in)visibility is often associated with processes of racialisation; with regimes of representation; with identity formation processes?
Understood as “an ‘open field’, or an ‘element’ in which the social occurs” (Brighenti 2010: 37), visibility help us delving deeper into a curious label that—beside geo-locating a quarter that does not actually exist—locates processes of belonging at the intersection of multiple scales and timespaces.
Discipline
Geographic Area
Sub Area