Global Neighborhoods: Jewish Quarters in Paris, London, and Berlin

Preface

Preface We are not just defined by the three elements of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and defense of Israel. . . . It is obvious that 90 percent of our lives is not defined by these elements, but 90 percent of our image is. —Jonathan Joseph, President of the European Council of Jewish Communities The study of global metropolitan landscapes has taken a new strategic turn in regard to the conceptualization of their geographical and social parameters because of the diasporic revolution that such urban sites are experiencing. Diasporic communities in the information and digital age have revolutionized the modus operandi of Western European and North American cities because of their incorporation in large numbers into the polity, their competition for city resources, their contributions to the urban economy, and their significance as visible cultural outposts of their respective homelands. Until recently, immigrant neighborhoods were understood as marginal offshoots of their respective homeland—or simply as ethnic enclaves—and perceived as providing cheap labor and services to the larger urban community as part of their contribution to and inscription in the racialized global metropolis. More and more, in recent years, these ethnic enclaves have been seen by urban analysts as smaller, but pivotal global cities that both feed and are fed by the larger global metropolis in the midst of which the diasporans have resettled. They contribute to the growth and diversity of the urban population and the complexity of its governance structure, and, in their everyday lives, they also use the services provided by the municipal government. In what follows, analyses of the global cities of Paris, London, and Berlin will show how each is made up of smaller global cities constituted by xi xii Preface immigrant neighborhoods as the places of their territorial concentration, political integration, and geographical visibility. The conceptual apparatus deployed in this study of immigrant neighborhoods in the globalized metropolis is the result of an effort to develop an interface between two distinct literatures on the study of diasporas. The first has conceptualized diasporas as nomadic, a concept that implies movement, dispersion, and globalization. The second, chiefly employed with regard to urbanism, has conceptualized diasporas as sedentary, a concept that implies geographic location, territorial boundaries, and spatial enclosure. Each approach, however, has adopted the characteristics of the other and, in the process, the conceptualization of diasporas themselves has been redeployed in a new way and has generated new parameters that cut across state boundaries. From the perspective of the receiving society, immigrant neighborhoods continue to be seen as sedentary ethnic enclaves—and it does not matter how long they have been established in their locations—and are expected by the majority community to assimilate so as to enjoy the benefit of upward mobility. But from the perspective of the immigrants, their neighborhoods appear to be global diasporic cities (“diaspolises”) that actively participate in the affairs of the hostland, the homeland, and the global interactive network of diasporic sites. In particular, this book is about the organization of everyday life and the social integration of contemporary Jewish neighborhoods in Paris, Berlin, and London. Jewish neighborhoods are among the most developed forms of transglobal diasporic urbanism because of the length of time the transnation has been living outside its ancestral homeland and the numerous institutions it has developed over the years to care for members of the group at home and abroad. The book concentrates on the post-Holocaust era in an effort to explain how each urban diasporic site has followed a different path of development influenced by the local milieu in which it is incorporated, as well as by its extraterritorial relations with Israel and other diasporic enclaves inside and outside the hostland. Each neighborhood is seen as a node in a transnational network of transglobal sites that contributes to the performance of its singular territorial identity and cultural traditions. In previous studies of ethnic enclaves, the focus was on the nation -state as the niche that shapes their contours because the interest was mostly in assimilation issues as a way of gauging the integration of immigrants into society. The recent shift of emphasis identifying ethnic enclaves as transnational communities, however, stresses hostlandhomeland relations as the proper framework of analysis. Reconceptu- xiii Preface alizing ethnic enclaves as nodes within a transglobal network of sites shifts the emphasis in their study yet again, unveiling both their local and global orientations. This...