Paper short abstract:

Non-Jews’ discussions of “the increased Jewishness” of their neighbourhood in Antwerp elucidate the afterlife of historical racial tropes in local discourses, and their re-articulation in relation to the notion of ‘everyday neighbourhood life’ as a new racializing frame for diagnosing strangeness.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decades, the Jewish population in Antwerp has become more visible as it has become more pious, with an increasing part of the Jewish population keeping to Hareidi norms of dress and Hasidic communities now constituting an estimated 25 per cent of the Jewish population. Simultaneously, modern orthodox and Hareidi Jews have started to move away from the traditional Jewish neighbourhood located in a working class and migrant area around the central station to an adjacent more bourgeois borough, turning buildings that previously had different functions into Hasidic schools, prayer houses and kosher shops and eateries. In the eyes of non-Jewish middle class denizens, their neighbourhood has become “more Jewish”. In order to grasp and express what this means to them, they draw on, and mix, classic antisemitic tropes with culturalist postcolonial imaginaries of neighbourhood domination, white alienation, and religious unfreedom that are normally focused in Flemish public debates on deprived ethnic neighborhoods, ‘Moroccans’, and ‘Islam’. I understand these local non-Jewish perceptions and discourses as revolving around the questions what the limits are of ‘normal’, ‘autochthonous’ Belgianness and how these could, or should, be drawn. What emerges from Jewish and non-Jewish denizens’ negotiations of the question of the “increased Jewishness” of the neighbourhood, and what unites the otherwise curious re-combining of antisemitic, culturalist and secularist racial tropes and different historical templates for conceptualizing strangeness, is a particular notion of ‘the neighbourhood’ and ‘neighbourhood life’ acting as a new hegemonic diagnostic frame.