Making the northwest London eruv, 1988--2003: The construction, representation and experience of a Sabbath space

This dissertation addresses the relationships between urban space, material culture, and religious ritual in late twentieth-century London with particular attention to the ways orthodox Jews conceived of the city for religious purposes. They transformed theory into practice by constructing a large Jewish domestic space and enacting Judaism in a broadly visible, public manner within it. There are two questions at the heart of this inquiry: How do religious actors make the urban environment part of their ritual identities and practices? How do the formal and sociological properties of the city suggest ways of living a religiously committed life?; Chapters One and Two examine the processes of planning and the physical production of a Jewish space in a late-modern city as examples of "rabbinic urbanism," a way of understanding and interacting with the city characteristic of Jews committed to the rabbinic tradition. Although this example of Jewish spatial inscription was bound by oral and textual traditions and by the customary practices of earlier generations of Jews, it was also an historically specific event distinguished by its reception in the context of late-twentieth century British planning practices. In Chapter Three, I argue that the representation of the eruv in planning images---mostly drawings and maps---advanced unexpected conceptions of religious space and activity. Chapter Four is about the ways news photographers represented urban Jews and Judaism to their audiences. Chapter Five draws on oral histories and mental maps in order to understand the experience of Sabbath space. By focusing on actual urban spaces, the last two chapters reveal radical impulses within halakhic Judaism, particularly with respect to gender. The creation of an eruv in London not only closed the gap between the theory and experience of sanctity on the Sabbath for Jewish women, but also generated unprecedented types of images of them. In these images, religious Jewish women were construed as politically powerful, halakhically knowledgeable, and spatially unlimited people who remained "traditional" in their practice of Judaism. In the concluding chapter, I argue that the case of the eruv shows that the shaping of space is at least as important as the cultivation of time in creating experiences of sanctity for Jews on the Sabbath.