Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses a range of heritage narratives surrounding the preservation and memorialization of Jewish ritual baths in urban landscapes across the Mediterranean. It argues for an ethnographic approach, citing critical possibilities for analyzing politics of memory, identity, and placemaking.

Paper long abstract:

Dozens of recovered and reconstructed Jewish ritual baths currently serve as interpretive and "immersive" features of urban Jewish heritage landscapes across the Mediterranean. They are largely memorialized as sacred spaces whose presence has been hidden just below the surface for generations. Considering the customary role of ritual immersion in enacting Jewish identity and continuity, it is perhaps no wonder that contemporary Jewish heritage discourses claim the ritual bath (miqveh) as a site of monumental significance. Interestingly, the museumification and monumentalization of these baths in Jewish quarters of Toledo and Girona in Spain, for example, and in Jerusalem and Safed in Israel has drawn heavily on an insistence that the pools represent a quintessentially Jewish time and space. Drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Spain, Sicily, and Israel, I trace the signification of the now-desiccated pools by diverse stakeholders in the present day, including local grassroots and municipal patrimony organizations, global cultural heritage networks and the nation state. By highlighting the affective relationships between the subterranean, formerly aqueous spaces and the technologies of placemaking employed by those who care for them, I engage contemporary memory projects whose stewards and audiences hold distinct and even irreconcilable attachments to the recuperation of Jewish historic built environments. Through this paper, I argue that the site of the miqveh offers critical possibilities for reconsidering the polarizing rhetorics of loss and recovery that dominate Jewish heritage discourses and for reframing hegemonic narratives of belonging, while taking seriously the nuances of community-based understandings of cultural memory, inheritance, and claims to time and space.