The home that never was: rethinking space and memory in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish history

Abstract

"Recent research on Jewish migration and 'Jewish spaces' usually asks for the relevance of 'Jewish spaces' in Jewish life. This article looks the other way and examines how the changing conditions of Jewish life altered emigrant's perceptions of their 'old home' in East Europe. It argues that in Jewish memory East Europe functioned as a mythscape which changed from a repressive and revolutionary over a progressive to the lost 'old home'. As a result the article calls to more carefully historicize processes of Jewish memory and spatial semantics as expressions of relations between conflicting groups." (author's abstract)