Pools wet and dry: MIKVEH ethnography and Jewish heritage flows

• In Event: Jewish Traces and Memory Work: A Transnational Perspective

Abstract

This paper presents ethnographic material from two years of multi-sited fieldwork in Sicily, Spain, Poland, and Israel, with special emphasis on sites in Catalunya and Andalucía, Spain. Through archival, scriptural, and anthropological analysis of broad theoretical, geo-temporal, and architectural material related to Jewish ritual immersion pools and practices, it proposes an interdisciplinary approach to questions of historical memory and cultural representation rooted in the historic built environment through the lens of heritage tourism and preservation initiatives across the Mediterranean and Europe. Reflecting on diverse narratives that intersect, overlap, and contradict each other, this paper highlights a range of popular, critical, and statist Jewish heritage projects that problematize discursive categories of belonging and unbelonging, past and present, erasure and reconstruction. It draws on ethnographic reflections concerning water, including its absence, and its dynamic role in shaping Jewish ideas about cultural and genealogical transmission, spiritual regeneration, and place-making in complicated and often contradictory ways. Citing interviews with tour guides, community leaders, educators, and archaeologists, as well as observations of tours, museums, archaeological sites, and community programs, this paper argues for the interpretive potential of sites of ruin, particularly defunct MIKVA’OT, in reframing politics of representation and inclusion in Jewish studies. It also centers the MIKVEH as a site of Jewish cultural (re)production and distinction vis-à-vis cultural heritage discourses situated within political landscapes where Jewish identity itself becomes a site of historical reckoning, spiritual return, and touristic opportunity. Photographs, audio recordings, and video recordings taken by the author will be presented alongside this paper.

Author

• Jaimie Luria, Cornell University