Space and Place in Jewish Studies

7 The City

116 7 The City She had gone with Saul to buy them in Al-Shurja market. Mounds upon mounds of suitcases. The Jews are going, the Jews are going. It was a grand time for tinsmiths and suitcase dealers. Liquidation sale. The seasons of sales to the Jews were over. Earthenware platters for Passover, palm fronds and pomegranates for Sukkot, noisemakers and masks for Purim. There would be no more Jews and their holidays would not longer be felt in the market. The tin suitcases close the season. To each one a suitcase, to each one the space they leave behind. —Shimon Ballas, “Iya” As seen through the eyes of Iya, a Muslim housekeeper, the departure of Jews from Baghdad in the 1950s leaves the city utterly changed and bereft of one of its most essential populations.1 The market’s character as a Jewish space was determined by the material needs of the Jewish religious calendar; its demise will be similarly fixed by the Jewish consumption of suitcases for their journey, after which all that remains is their absence. Ballas’s story describes the Jewish exodus from the point of view of those left behind, producing a tragic and deeply felt tale that traduces the boundaries of home and exile. Iya’s Jewish employers are heading to an Israel described as a backward desert, exotic and far removed from Baghdad’s urbane, cosmopolitan life. The story’s sense of Jewish experience as deeply enmeshed in an ethnically and culturally diverse space is a recurring feature of depictions of modern Jewish urban space. So, for example, Sasson Somekh remembers prewar Baghdad in these terms: “On a typical day, my father would switch linguistic codes a number of times. He would speak Jewish Arabic at home and move to Muslim Arabic on the street; at work, he spoke English with the bank’s British managers and various dialects of Arabic with the customers. He wrote bank records in English, and then read English and French when he came home. In contrast to, for example, the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria, who normally used French at home, the Jews of Baghdad spoke only Arabic The City 117 among themselves—that is, the Jewish Baghdadi Arabic dialect.”2 As noted in the conclusion of the last chapter, language has often shaped the relation between place and notions of home and belonging. In the multiethnic space of the city, language has played a constitutive role in Jewish attempts to carve out a space of their own in relation to the city as a whole, its institutions and other citizens. This chapter traces the evolution of Jewish spaces, both real and imagined , within the heterogeneous, provocative, and at times threatening space of the city. We begin by examining some of the earliest forms of Jewish urban experience, including the ghetto in European cities and the Jewish quarter in cities of the Levant. While Jews in medieval and early modern Europe did not live in isolation from their Christian neighbors,3 these areas arose and were shaped by many different historical forces. Some of these factors were internally derived and devoted to maintaining the purity of Jewish communal life, while others were externally imposed, determined by a variety of social, political, and economic motivations . The city’s connection with modernity is explored here through the notions of port, court, shtetl, and shtot, spatial categories that have informed historical research both conceptually and substantively. Finally, we consider New York and the new global architecture, sites that offer different exemplary patterns of Jewish urban life. As indicated in chapter 3, the selections offered here only scratch the surface, and the reader is referred to the notes for suggestions for further reading. However, a few general questions and principles guide our discussion: while the synonymity of Jews and modern urban experience has by now been convincingly depicted, analyzed, and argued by sociologists, historians , critics, fiction writers, and demographers, when exactly did Jews become urban? In both Christian Europe and in the Levant, urban centers evolved in the early modern period in relation to both commerce and theology . In the medieval and early modern periods, the idea of Jews as a spiritual community set apart may be understood in relation to “Christian political units such as the kingdoms of England and France [which] had begun to define themselves spiritually as well as physically.”4 However, we can find tremendous differences between the emergence of areas typified by Jewish...