Preliminary Programme

This paper will explore the methodological and theoretical challenges and benefits of adopting a spatial approach to pairing testimony with location to qualitatively map the experience of the Holocaust. The center of the case study will be my work on the Janowska concentration camp in Lviv, Ukraine. I employ techniques such as digital mapping, 3D modeling, and social network analysis to return experience to the locations where it took place and to explore how this approach can complement more traditional methodologies for the writing of history. (Show less)

Historiography has cemented the spatiality of Stockholm’s Jewish population into hierarchal, binary identities, divided between rich and poor, German and Eastern European, northern and southern, Reform Judaism and Orthodox Judaism. Proving this oversimplified image to be a literary construction by contemporary religious leaders, this paper ventures into the spatial reality of the urban minority, using GIS to find diversity among the approximately 7,000 Swedish Jews.

The paper aims to provide a voice for Jewish individuals twice marginalised in European-Jewish historiography. Due to material difficulties, historians have largely ignored Stockholm’s Eastern European and/or orthodox communities. Using the methodologies of building biography, oral history and GIS, I can, however, bring the plurality and individuality of this group into light. Locating various orthodox minyanim and religious schools across the map of Stockholm, I find inner-communal discussions on their construction and continued existence. Interviews emphasise the importance of individual ideals and choices in what sacred places to attend. GIS mapping contradict previous historians’ assumptions on the identifications of the orthodox Jew.

I will particularly emphasise the GIS mapping of orthodox members in this paper. Using a membership list from the personal archive of the orthodox synagogue Adat Jisrael’s chairman Jacob Ettlinger, and local taxation records, I can for the first time portray the orthodox community’s spatial relationship with the urban landscape. Contrary to previous scholar’s prediction mention above, these members were scattered all over Stockholm, portraying a Jewish orthodox demography that was individualised, with spatial and economic varieties.

Presenting case studies from my doctoral thesis, this paper sheds new light on the multiplicity that could and did exist within a small Jewish population. The interdisciplinary and digital approach allows the marginalised Jewish minority, and the twice marginalised Eastern European and/or orthodox community, to become the centre of the study, retelling their everyday life in the Swedish urban landscape. (Show less)

Before the Second World War, northwest Germany was one of the most socially and economically diverse regions in the country. Its largely protestant population was divided between Lutherans and Calvinists, leavened by admixtures of Mennonites, Catholics and Jews. The topography and soil of the region varied from the most fertile land in Germany to impassible and unfarmable moors. Each of these landscape types was home to different village patterns, forms of settlement and agricultural exploitation. Most noteworthy perhaps, the region was known as one of the most liberal places in Germany, constantly sending left-liberal and right-liberal deputies to the national and state parliaments. By 1932, it was one of the most fervently Nazi regions in the country. How did this come about and what factors influenced the acceptance of Nazism? I explore the transformation of the Northwest from liberal to Nazi in my just-published monograph, Antisemitism and Peasant Politics in Northwest Germany, and propose a new thesis on the spread of racist sentiment. The book uses election, census and qualitative data collected from 52 archives and libraries in Germany, Israel and the United States. I locate and analyze this data in a specially constructed GIS that displays the 582 discrete polling places for 752 cities, villages and hamlets. Using my spatial and statistical data, I am able to test theories on the origin and triumph of political Antisemitism – including theses recently put forward by Wolfgang Laipach for the Southwest (another traditionally liberal bastion) and Stephanie Fischer (regarding Jewish-Gentile relations in the Palatinate) – and present my own analysis. (Show less)