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Anatomy of a PhDScottish Jewish Identity over five generations
Fiona Frank University of Strathclyde Centre for Oral
HistoryFor Lancaster University Continuing Learning Group
What happened
To chart the transmission of Jewish culture and identity, by interviewing around 20 people with Scottish Jewish heritage
Original intentions
The first people I interviewed happened to be distantly related, but VERY different (class, levels of observance, where they grew up in Glasgow, political views, attitudes, age....)
Which led to....
Looking in more detail...
Jewish Chronicle Jan 6 1905EdinburghLast Sunday, Mr David Hoppenstein, Honorary Minister and
Reader of the Central Synagogue, was presented by the members with a massive and ornamented silver loving-;cup, bearing a suitable inscription, in recognition of his untiring zeal and his valuable services to the congregation. Mr Hoppenstein has acted as honorary Minister and Reader for the last two years and a half. A large gathering of ladies and gentlemen assembled at the synagogue. Mr J H Fred, in the absence of the President, made the presentation, and referred in suitable terms to the good work performed by Mr D Hoppenstein. Mr Hoppenstein replied in English, and afterwards delivered a Talmudic discourse in Yiddish. The company were afterwards entertained to a cake and wine banquet, when several toasts were honoured
Jewish Chronicle, 11 May 1906Prizes and Certificates. At the Herriot-Watt College last week, Isaac, aged
19, second son of Mr and Mrs D Hoppenstein, was awarded three class medals in Advanced Chemistry (Organic and Inorganic), Physics, and Mechanics respectively. Mr I Hoppenstein also figured first in the Dott’s Physics Competition held last June, while in the course of the past session he was successful in being first prizeman at one of the examinations conducted by the St Andrew Ambulance Association.
Theme: “marriage choice”
Bourdieu argues that when an anthropologist [or historian] draws up a genealogy, it is sometimes forgotten that those genealogies are ‘the product of strategies (conscious or unconscious) oriented towards the satisfaction of material and symbolic interests and organised by reference to a determinate set of economic and social conditions’
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), p.36.
According to rabbinic law, the status of the offspring of intermarriage is determined by the mother: a Jewish mother bears a Jewish child, a non-Jewish mother bears a non-Jewish child.
Cohen, Shaye J D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
FF – so you knew that you couldn’t have ever married anybody that wasn’t Jewish, is that what you mean?...
Lionel – Oh, no, that would cause great consternation among the parents, that would cause even sadness. Any observant Jews couldn’t accept it at all. They’d regard it as losing a child…. They offered up a mourners prayer for them.
Lionel Levy, 3rd generation
Marrying out - 1Morrie Hope-Stone: did any of our Scottish
relatives come to our wedding, can you remember?
Betty Hope-Stone: No. No. They said the prayers for the dead for you or something.
FF: Did they actually do that? Morrie Hope-Stone: No. Betty Hope-Stone: You always said they, you
said they would. And I, I was horrified. That anybody could take it quite so seriously.
Marrying out - 2But one of the strangest ones was a boy, a Hoppenstein
grandson, who for years lived a life in a Midlands town, as an optician, and nobody knew he was married. And it all emerged when he became ill, quite seriously ill with MS, multiple sclerosis. And some of the family went down to meet him, and instead were met by a lady doctor, who turned out to be his wife, who nobody knew existed. And very gradually, the story unfolded, that that boy was married to that girl in Paisley Abbey! How he contrived that, heaven knows. … The parents had no idea about Leslie’s marriage, or to whom, but they seemed quite pleased when they discovered that there were grandchildren – two girls and a boy.
Fred Stone, 3rd gen
Barbara - Ailsa – Barbara’s sister
And everybody accepted my mum…and us. … The grandparents, apparently , were absolutely delighted to hear that they’d got grandchildren. … it’s a nice story, that everybody was happy in the end
But there was always that, because we weren’t Jewish, that we weren’t sort of, didn’t have the feeling of belonging to them, we were just sort of an outsider looking in and accepted but not as part of the family, more as like a visitor really, but a visitor you were pleased to see but a visitor that, you know, that nevertheless would be gone and that was it.
Another way of looking at the family tree: Social network Analysis (SNA) - ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ family networking and communications
Prior to Herts reunion - Diagram made using ‘Ucinet’ ©
After Herts reunion
Bourdieu suggests that each member of the group has power as a ‘custodian of the limits of [that] group’. As it is possible that each member could, then, modify the limits of the group through ‘some kind of misalliance’ – ‘through the introduction of new members into a family, a clan or a club, the whole definition of the group ... is put at stake’ – it follows that ‘in most societies the preparation and conclusion of marriages should be the business of the whole group, and not of the agents directly concerned’ . ... Although arranged marriages no longer take place in most western societies, families, and communities still ensure the enaction of
occasions (rallies, cruises, hunts, parties, receptions, etc.), places (smart neighbourhoods, select schools, clubs, etc), or practices (smart sports, parlour games, cultural ceremonies, etc) which bring together, in a seemingly fortuitous way, individuals as homogeneous as possible in all the pertinent respects in terms of the existence and persistence of the group’.
Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Forms of Capital', in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1986), p.250.
Jewishness, like most – perhaps all – other identities, is imagined: it has no empirical, objective, verifiable reality to which we can point and over which we can excalim: “This is it!” Jewishness is in the mind. In the felicitous phrase of Benedict Anderson, we are speaking of an ‘imagined community’.
Cohen, Shaye J D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Hellenistic Culture and Society). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
So insider/outsider status within Judaism (or anything) is ‘constructed’ or ‘imagined’
and it has all given me a lot to think about!
I’ve felt marginal to every community that I’ve ever been in. Marginal to Scottish culture, being Jewish. Marginal to Jewish culture, being not one of the Jewish community because they all lived out in Giffnock and Newton Mearns and they were all materialist and Zionist and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that, so I felt apart from them…. Certainly being down here [in London], being Scottish and Jewish makes you feel different. I’ve always felt an outsider wherever I am. And I’m OK with that.
Ivor Kallin (4th generation)
So...I haven’t submitted yet – still waiting for final
comments on my full draft from my supervisor (next week)
Then I will have 6 weeks to complete and submit
What next? Two conference papers:For the Social History Association conference
‘Generation to Generation’, Boston, November 2011: http://www.ssha.org/
“And she worked in a tiny little office in the
corner of the shop”: Gendered Memories and Transmission of Occupational Values
For the Jews on the Celtic Fringe conference, Coleraine University, Sept 2011
“So I can’t spell her bible with a capital B, cos it’s not a real Bible. So I got the belt for that”: four generations of Jewish children in Scottish schools.
And a BOOK!????????and, of course, possible ongoing research
work......
But I won’t get any of that until I complete and submit. And pass the VIVA
SO – what I’d like is for you to talk in 2s or 3s for 5 minutes each way, about what you got from the talk, and what you’d like to know more about.
And THEN we’ll do QUESTIONS.
As a mature student working in isolation from my university and my supervisor, I needed supports:
The Senior Learners’ Group Research CircleA couple of study-buddiesPhinished.com – an on line community for
people finishing their PhDs
