Between Nostalgia and Utopia: The Construction of Jewish Cultural Space in Early Nineteenth Century Europe

The process of constructing Jewish cultural space is not a historical narrative with fixed beginnings, middles and ends. It is not a discovery of the true roots and causes of Jewish culture, history and identity; it does not decide on what is Jewish cultural space and what is not. Instead, it is an ongoing construction process that at various times appropriates different historical trajectories, different literatures and different sources to make sense of “Jewish experiences” and to cast meaningful Jewish futures. In this chapter, we think of space as a fundamentally relational concept. It is firmly grounded in the experiences of people and is given meaning when new experiences are continuously re-woven with previous experiences. Cultural space includes historical memory, utopian horizons, sites of identity and joint literary resources that set sentiments in words, all under a common identifying collective name, in this case, “Jewish”. It is important that cultural space is a multidimensional experience. It is possible to describe it, evaluate it and feel it as part of its tactility, as evidence of its basic reality. It would then be wrong to think of construction as an opposite to authenticity. Cultural space is permanently changing vis-à-vis new experiences, and its very reality is dependent on the continuous reordering of both the past and the future.