Sammendrag
De-essentialized self-selected identities challenge how boundaries of Jewishness have traditionally been understood. Yet an increasing number of individuals (and at times even communities) are claiming Jewish or partially Jewish identities without undergoing formal conversions and without verified Jewish ancestry (whether matrilineal or patrilineal). Such self-proclaimed Jews present new realities as to how and potentially why people cross the boundary into Jewishness. This paper seeks to examine the self-understood motivations of individuals who have come to identify as Jewish without going through traditional procedures of conversion with a recognized beit din or a beit din’s confirmation of Jewishness by descent.
While the phenomenon of self-claimed Jewish identities is a global one, this paper will be based upon empirical data gathered in interviews with and observations of such Jews in Norway as part of a wider project on unaffiliated Jewish identities there.
It will primarily examine why these individuals have come to their Jewish identities according to their self-narratives and other information they convey. Secondary questions include how they view their Jewishness (or transition thereto) in terms of wider questions of pluralism and multiculturalism, how they understand Jews and Jewishness as being constructed around them, their role in these constructs, and their relations with the wider (and more normative) Jewish world.
The paper will explore to what extent the research participants are motivated by a desire to become or embody the multicultural, by Christian theological concerns, by cleaving to a Jewishness not presented by the Jewish communities near them, by a desire to become the multicultural, by a sense of loss (or guilt or shame) over historic treatment of Jews in Norway during the Shoah or other factors which may lead towards some form of redemptive identification as Jews, and other considerations raised by the research participants.
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