Negotiating Jewishness at the Margins of Norway’s Jewish Periphery

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Modern Jewish History

Abstract

This paper will explore how self-identified Jews in Norway today who are not members of organized Jewish communities see other Jews as viewing their Jewishness, and how (if at all) that impacts their own Jewish identities and practices. As elsewhere, Norway is home to self-identified Jews who are not halachicly Jewish either because of patrilineal descent or non-orthodox conversions, as well as Jews who claim to be halachicly Jewish yet are unable to document their claimed heritage as requested. In Norway, however, the only synagogue operating every shabbat does not accept as members those who either are not or cannot prove that they are halachicly Jewish. In addition, even some of those Jews who can document their halachic status but are not members can also feel that their continued non-member status invalidates their Jewishness in the eyes of the wider society, and those who feel this way will be included in the analysis.

This paper will examine how marginal Jews in Norway’s Jewish periphery understand the wider community as relating to their own Jewishness based upon discourse analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with individuals removed from organized Jewish life in Norway. Some are from post-war refugee groups that were not fully accepted into communal life while others are more recent immigrants or converts to Judaism. It will then explore how the research participants themselves explain the negotiation process of relating the perceptions they perceive others of having about their own Jewishness and how they report that as influencing their own Jewish identities and practices.

The paper is part of a wider project to de-essentialise constructs of Jews and Judaisms in Norway. What little research there is on Norwegian Jews generally focuses on those within the organized Jewish communities, and until now none of it has focused on those outside the communities, a gap this paper and project begin to address.

Author

• Tyson Herberger, Inland Norway University