Transnational Perspectives on Jewish and American-Jewish Studies

Confronted with the question of the potential for a transnational perspective on American Jewish studies, I am tempted, as a historian, to answer with a question myself: What other way is there for Jewish studies to begin? My own research has been transnational from the very beginning: Even when I was working on Jewish student fraternities at German universities in Imperial and Weimar Germany, my protagonists and my sources crossed borders, which made my work as a researcher transnational—even if my research questions were not. Today, I am working on the experience of statelessness and the idea of universal belonging as one of the possible remedies to overcome statelessness. With such a topic it becomes much more obvious that neither the protagonists I am working on, the sources I am working with, nor the research questions as such can be limited to a single nation-state. As a researcher, I therefore need to take a transnational approach, just as my subjects did.

How so? And what does this say about the potential of a transnational perspective for researchers in general? It is true, of course, that there are plenty of research projects that do not need a transnational perspective. But in the field of Jewish history, either our source material (in a “transnational archive”) or our scholarly approach to analyzing that material, or both, need a transnational perspective—in the sense of taking different national contexts into consideration, whether this is because the research subjects migrated from one country to another, or because the sources did. Thus, even if we work on, let’s say, the fraternity students at the University of Leipzig, we will still need to work with sources that are archived in Israel, the United States, or elsewhere, and we will have to take into consideration that the students may have been first or second generation immigrants or may have decided to study in Leipzig because of antisemitic discrimination in their countries of origin (in that specific case, most often students from Tsarist Russia).

Let me then raise three points:

1. Categories of Belonging and of Defining One’s Self

For a long period of time, in (nation-) states that formed during the nineteenth century, Jews were mostly left at the margins of society and not accepted as full citizens. Left outside of the nation-state in the age of nation-states, they could not act as part of a national entity and framework. This had the potential to make Jews think in terms that transcended national belonging. The categories of belonging that Jews in modernity chose were diverse, ranging from that of a religious community to one focused on a reconstituted nation, the latter coming especially in the form of Zionism. Even the Zionist movement was a transnational endeavor: Although it aimed at the foundation of a nation state, its membership transcended existing national borders.¹ Only their Zionist conviction made them a transnationally active group. “Transcending nationality” was thus part and parcel of the Jewish experience, even if it did not necessarily lead to a transnational self-understanding.

2. The Transnationality of Sources

When people are on the move, their personal belongings move with them. Official documents, just as much as the full variety of personal documents, diaries, photographs, etc., are taken along. Others, of course, are left behind, and still others are produced along the way and in the migrants’ new homes. Thus, the sources that are used later as the historians’ basis for research are dispersed in different places. This is especially true for Jewish history. The archives containing material on Jewish History are located in many countries.² And even if one wants to work, say, on the history of a mikvah in a small provincial town in Southern Germany, one would still need to do one’s research in at least two countries, in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem and in the specific town in Germany.³ Thus, even if the research question does not have the slightest transnational angle, the body of sources for research is in...