Spectres of Conviviality: Jewish Absence, Material Heritage, and the Promise of Social Difference in Lebanon

Lebanon is the only Arab country where the number of Jews grew following Israel's establishment in 1948. Having called Lebanon home for millenia, the once-14,000 strong community now exclusively lives abroad. What kept Jews invested in Lebanon despite growing regional turmoil, and what remains today of their homes, synagogues, and schools?

In this talk, I plot transnational sinews of kinship, capital, and multigenerational storytelling to demonstrate how affective and material ties to Lebanon are maintained far beyond the state’s borders. To understand how diverse relationships to the spaces of an absent minority group influence concepts of belonging and heritage-making among the body politic, I consider how interfacing with “things Jewish” leads non-Jewish Lebanese to reflect on their prior histories and articulate their own notions of plurality by recalling the only ethno-religious community of 18 officially recognised sects to have virtually ceased to exist during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). I show how contemporary Lebanese, much like their non-Jewish counterparts in Krakow, Berlin, and Salonica, serve as “cultural brokers,” interpreting and preserving these sites and objects.

Speaker biography

I am a sociocultural anthropologist whose research deals with material heritage, exile and absence, legacies of imperialism and colonial rule, and collective memory in the eastern Mediterranean. My current book project, culled from over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, addresses the absence of, and social memory about, Lebanon's Jewish community and their spaces “post”-civil war (1975-90). I am currently a Teaching Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Birmingham (UK). Previously, I was Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University.