Paper short abstract:

This paper presents everyday Jewish life in Finland based on rich ethnographic data that traces how rules of knowing, being and doing Judaism in Finland today are negotiated and reshaped in rituals and Jewishly perceived practices, which often are hybrid, secular and subjectively appropriated.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an ongoing research project that ethnographically examines everyday Jewish life in Finland today, focusing on experiences of knowing, being and doing “Jewish” among mainstream adherents, deeply engaged, critically secular and thoroughly indifferent members of this small but highly diverse minority group. Based on the framework of vernacular religion (Bowman & Valk 2012) the project strives to develop an analytic model for examining religion in day-to-day life that is applicable across contexts and cultures – sensitive to historical data and cultural context but also individual narratives and nuances.

Today, increasing migration, urbanisation and secularisation contest and reshape traditional boundaries of belonging. Thus, static values and conceptions of identity give way to more flexible subjective positions accommodating a variety of religious, secular and cultural influences (af Burén 2015). In our in-depth interviews, many informants express a longing to find religiously and culturally significant models from the past that can be subjectively appropriated today. Thus, they seek ways of expressing their Jewishness that are experienced as historically relevant and liturgically defensible but also individually meaningful, socially cohesive, practically doable, emotionally engaging and distinctly embodied (Illman 2019). Both everyday quandaries and existential questions influence their ways of crafting vernacular religious positions. Focusing specifically on formal and deeply personal rituals described in the data, the paper shows how rules are bent, broken and refashioned e.g. as the traditional boundaries between sacred and secular, gendered practices and ethnic customs, are transgressed and subjective combinations of rituals, performance style, ethics and interpretation are developed.