Most Jewish communities from the Middle East experienced a loss of their former homeland, the dissolution of community structures, and at times are even unable to return to their places of origin. This geographical and psychological separation lends memories and spaces of the past special significance. This panel proposes a framework for the experiences of remoteness that have shaped and are shaping Middle Eastern Jewish communities. While focusing on specific countries such as Egypt, Iran or the Italian diaspora, the panel will present how space–either its recollection or new formation–serves to constitute present identities and communities.
Infrastructures that remained in the regions where Jews lived, that were built and inhabited by them, have not just material but also symbolic impact on how the former home is remembered. Spaces, buildings, and maps are representations of constantly morphing narratives of identity, in which different actors are involved with different objectives.
Methodology
The analysis is twofold: first, it focuses on former Jewish homes, graveyards or synagogues, and how they live on in the present. Secondly, it presents the discursive spaces that evolve when these spaces are visited from or recreated in the diaspora. Spatial structures formerly or newly assigned as “Jewish” are imbued with changing meanings over time. The discussion includes a historical background of the places under consideration, the circumstances of leaving and return, as well as interviews with individuals regarding their memories of and relation to particular spaces.
The results point to multiple ways of how space is part of creating meaning from a distance, or a meaningful present in the diaspora. This will enable a better understanding of how communities of Middle Eastern Jews locate themselves in their new homelands, how and what they remember, including tensions arising from competing forms of remembrance and identification.
The panel introduces a new approach to the historiography of Middle Eastern Jewish communities by looking at the strategies of dealing with loss as a form of agency in the process of coming to terms with the old and new homelands. In order to understand contemporary Middle Eastern Jewish identities, different sites should be included: besides the individuals who left, the socio-political dynamics in their former and new homelands are involved in inscribing different meanings to the sites under consideration, providing a bigger picture of the issues at stake in the process of identity and community formation across time and space.
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Mrs. Michele Baussant
We often assume that history begins with material traces and that these traces are the basis for asserting that something has happened. What occurs, however, when a population disappears from the landscape, as in the case of the Jews in Egypt, and when the landscape they shaped is destroyed, re-invested and transformed to such an extent it becomes barely recognizable, eroding the connections with the country the Jews once claimed as their own? And how their scattered and ghostly memories in and out of Egypt can still design the landscapes and the histories they were evicted from and those they newly settled (Halbwachs, 1951 and 1952; Topalov, 1997)?
This article draws on data collected through fieldwork, archival sources and interviews to explore three issues:
• how the Jews of Egypt, after their departure, transported, transplanted and promoted specific material artefacts, buildings, such as synagogues, place names and practices of their former local places of living into their new locations to keep a sense of belonging and a living connection to Egypt;
• the simultaneous necessity for them to maintain in Egypt those artefacts, even though they are no longer nurtured by living “milieux de mémoire” (Halbwachs, 1941)
• how they are also used, in a different way and for other purposes, by some Egyptians to rebuild their history and understand their present;
To better understand how those related "postsigns of memory" (Benvenisti, 2000) also connect imaginaries, memories, and individuals, within and outside Egypt, transcending the separation, I will focus in particular on the rededication ceremony of the Eliahu Hanabi Synagogue in February 2020. This event brought together Egyptian Jews from several countries and continents, and Egyptians, during which they went to different places now symbolic of both their presence and absence, in Alexandria and Cairo.
The expected outcomes of this paper are to highlight the disruptions and recovering between two parallel collective memories, offering mirror images of each other - the memories of the displaced Jews and the memories of the people who remained – through their both shared and conflicting material and symbolic legacies. The aim is also to strengthen understanding of the cross-effects, in social spaces and on groups now estranged, of the persistence of physical traces of the past “without memories” and of displaced memories of people "without traces".
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Mrs. Monica Mereu
My contribution aspires to give a narrative form to the history of the internal migration of the Tehrani Jews, who used to live in the old Jewish quarter of Tehran (Oudlājān) and then moved out from the 1950s. Through a collection of memories and life stories the aim is to retrace the history of a generation which had experienced a deep cultural and religious transition from a community social life in the quarter to a secular society in Tehran. The purpose is to reconstruct the memories and feelings about the changes occurred in Oudlājān, in its physical, demographic, social and cultural aspects and, consequently, in people’s life.
The almost complete abandonment of Oudlājān forced a spatial and social reorganization of the community, and also a “remapping” of its identities and practices. Indeed, as argued by McDowell (1999), any sort of migration changes individual and group identities, their affiliations, cultural attitudes, and practices. Jewish daily life inside the quarter was a repetitive model of standard behaviours, where everything was well-known and trusted, while their new life in greater Tehran was constructed of a succession of new cultural models that they often struggled to feel as their own. Especially for the older generation it was difficult to leave their familiar spaces and their traditions: indeed, they often preferred to continue shopping in Oudlājān, organizing visits to the ruined neighbourhood on a weekly basis. Moreover, they tried hard to reproduce, also in their new environment, the traditional norms that were perpetrated inside the quarter.
The contribution is based on various fieldwork research I have conducted in Iran in the last two years. I would present the outcome of this research through different autobiographical interviews, giving voice to those people who keep memories of the changes occurred in Oudlājān through different visions and perspectives, given their ability to provide us with an intense and multiform insight of their life in and outside the quarter. With the abandonment of the neighbourhood, the recall to life stories is decisive, because memories become traces of something that was but is now absent. When the Jews abandoned Oudlājān, as reported emotionally by one respondent, they left “a neighbourhood in ruins” behind them: together with the quarter, the history of many families and of an entire community was crumbling. Therefore, in the recourse to memory, there is also a natural need for self-preservation.
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Ariane Sadjed
This paper deals with the meaning of space in constituting Iranian-Jewish history. I will approach it from two aspects: first, from the place of origin, that is where Jewish communities in Iran lived, and how the history of these houses and places is erased or rewritten. Secondly, I will look at how diasporic Iranian Jewish communities remember spaces from which they have been separated for decades, and the role of this imaginary relationship for constructing communal memory and identity.
Although there is still an active Jewish community in Iran, the majority of Iranian Jews have left Iran from the mid 20th century onward. The diasporas are characterized by a spatial and psychological segregation, as most of them have not been able to return to Iran after the revolution in 1979. How has this affected representations of Iran, especially among those for whom their Iranian ancestry is still an important part of their identification?
An expression of these representations is the reconstruction of former Jewish neighborhoods on maps or as miniatures from memory. These images and narratives of the past are passed on to following generations who have never been to Iran. Thereby new meanings are created while others are erased. I will show concrete examples of these reconstructions and the respective discourses accompanying them.
Little is known about the afterlife of the buildings and places that were inhabited by Jews in Iran. Do they still exist? Who lives there now, or what are they used for? What is the status of their ownership? My analysis will focus on the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran, where to date no Jews remain. By example of several selected buildings from the historical quarter, I will show how the history of these houses is reframed in the context of Iranian national discourses. Caravanserais formerly owned by Jewish families for example, were central in the economic and political structures of Mashhad. The rewriting of their past thus has implications not only for urban history but also in regard to the status and contribution of Jews to the wider Iranian society.
In conclusion, these examples show how spaces of the past are redefined from the diaspora communities, as well as from actors who are in charge of these places now. By analyzing their different objectives, my paper points to the contemporary discourses and challenges in conceptualizing Iranian Jewish historiography.
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Dr. Piera Rossetto
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.
