This volume is a collection of 17 essays originally presented at a workshop at St. Antony’s College, Oxford almost a decade ago. The essays follow an extensive introduction by the two editors that lays out both the theoretical justifications and the methodological advantages of this project, all conceived in the spirit of the so-called “spatial turn” in historiography. Beginning in the 1990s, interest in concrete places and in real or imaginary spaces became part of the new cultural history, with this topic often considered on its own in an ever-growing historical research landscape. In this case, promise the editors, the conceptual apparatus developed by the new turn would be applied to the study of minorities, specifically to the Jews in modern times, and in what may be called their German diaspora. Using concepts such as place, space, and boundaries, they explain, is a means of opening new perspectives on the intensively researched field of German Jewish history, while also newly illuminating matters of integration and seclusion, belonging and identity. The book is divided into three parts: “Imaginations,” “Transformations,” and “Practices,” and as one moves from the heavily theoretical introduction to the concrete historical contributions, the potential of this overall approach begins to unravel....
George L. Mosse Memorial Symposium