Europe's Jewish Places

Aschkenas 2015; 25(2):209–220

Tabea Alexa Linhard: [email protected]

Tabea Alexa LinhardEurope ’s Jewish PlacesDOI 10.1515/asch-2015-0015

Abstract: Dani Karavans Denkmal »Passagen«, das sich im spanischen Portbou befindet, ist der vielleicht bedeutendste jüdische Ort in Europa . Diese provokante Feststellung dient als Ausgangspunkt für die Beschäftigung mit der Frage, was einen Ort in Europa heutzutage zu einem jüdischen macht. An Hand einer Analyse des Gedenkortes in Portbou werden die Konzepte »jüdischer Ort«, »jüdis-cher Raum«, »jüdisches Erbe«, und das »virtuell« Jüdische untersucht. Orte und Identitäten ergeben sich aus den komplexen Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Indi-viduen und Gemeinschaften; wobei beide einem zeitlichen Wandel unterliegen. In Anbetracht der jüngsten Angriffe auf jüdische Orte und jüdische Personen in Ländern wie Dänemark , Frankreich oder Belgien diskutiert der Artikel die Bedeu-tung von Europas jüdischen Orten.

Outside the small border town of Portbou (Catalonia , Spain ) lies Dani Karavan ’s monument »Passages,« built to honor the philosopher, essayist, and critic Walter Benjamin and also »the memory of the nameless,« as the inscription on a glass wall that is part of the monument reminds its visitors.¹ The philosopher took his own life in Portbou in 1940: he feared deportation to occupied Europe and, in all likelihood, a concentration camp.² Karavan ’s monument not only is »a medita-tion on exile and the radical displacement effected by Nazi persecution,« it also is a Jewish place, perhaps even Europe ’s foremost Jewish place.³

If the statement above seems provocative, it certainly aims to be. Yet rather than encouraging a competition over which is the most Jewish of all places in Europe , this provocation aims to raise a series of questions: what exactly makes a place »Jewish« in twenty-first century Europe ? And what does the expression »Jewish place,« mean, also with regards to related concepts that include, but are

1 The entire quotation reads: »It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.«2 Benjamin had previously been detained in the prison camp Château de Veruche, near Nevers (France). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Harvard 2003, p. 438.3 Elissa Rosenberg: The Geography of Memory: Walking as Remembrance. In: The Hedgehog Review. Summer (2007), p. 55.

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210 Tabea Alexa Linhard

not limited to: Jewish space, Jewish heritage, or virtually Jewish? This brief intro-duction hardly is the first one to address these issues; space and place have been the subject of numerous analyses within Jewish Studies since the 1990s. More recent overviews include the volume Jewish Topographies. Visions of Space, Tra-ditions of Place, edited by Julia Brauch , Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke (2008), as well as a thematic focus issue of the Anthropological Journal of Euro-pean Jewish Cultures, on »Jewish Space Reloaded!« edited by Eszter B. Gantner and Jay (Koby) Oppenheim (XXIII, 2, 2014). The respective introductions to both works not only provide excellent discussions of the current state of the field, they also confirm that the debates over Jewish space and place continue to evolve. Smaller in scope and depth, this essay aims to address some of the issues that lie at the intersections of Spatial Humanities and Jewish Studies, in light of a place like »Passages.« The aim here is not to establish once and for all which would be Europe ’s most Jewish place, but rather to question what defining a place as Jewish entails.

»Space« and »place« are sometimes used interchangeably, but these terms do not have identical meanings. However, determining the differences between »space« and »place« can be tricky, as Anne Kelly Knowles , Tim Cole , and Alberto Giordano point out in the introduction to Geographies of the Holocaust (2014):

The twin concepts of space and place are difficult to pin down with any kind of precision or certainty. Yet place and space are fundamental to human emotion and experience. While these concepts are deeply connected to the physical environment, much of their richness comes from the mediation of human perception and our notion of value.⁴

The authors derive their understanding of the conceptual difference between space and place from the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan who argues that the more abstract space, »refers to containers of human activity,« while place becomes the »center of felt value.«⁵ Along similar lines, Margaret Pearce , also a geographer, argues that place is space »shaped by experience.«⁶ Pearce suggests that place »is created by identity and intimate connection, as well as the creator of identity and intimate connection.«⁷ (Jewish) places are therefore inherently tied to (Jewish) identities and their formation. Doreen B. Massey also engages with the meaning of place in her seminal essay »A Global Sense of Place« (1994). Massey proposes

4 Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Eric B. Steiner: Geographies of the Holocaust. Bloomington 2014, p. 4.5 Ibid.6 Margaret Pearce: Framing the Days: Place and Narrative in Cartography. In: Cartography and Geographic Information Science 35 (2008) 1, pp. 17–32.7 In addition to Tuan, 1977, Pearce also refers to Massey 1997, Casey 1993 and Creswell 2004.


Europe’s Jewish Places 211

an understanding of place, where »what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.«⁸ In this sense places are neither fixed nor permanent. Instead places, like identities, also »are full of internal conflicts.«⁹ Needless to say, this also applies to Europe ’s Jewish places. While scholars often use the term »Jewish space« in order to discuss what I here call »Jewish places,« establishing this conceptual dif-ference remains useful in order to articulate the ways in which places and iden-tities result from complex negotiations. The expression »Jewish space,« would, according to the definition provided here, necessarily point to »Jewish places« since understanding these locations as Jewish (in one way or another) implies that a more abstract and undifferentiated space has become a specific place – a place that nevertheless will change over time and according to historical cir-cumstances. As Aleida Assmann writes, »places can be defined as condensation of historical events, as thickening and materialization of history, as a tangible carrier of signs and traces which are eventually destroyed or preserved, discarded or deciphered, marked or unmarked, forgotten, or remembered.¹⁰ Memories of lived experience coalesce and congeal in specific places – sometimes by choice, sometimes by force. Thus, the meanings of places often are contested, becoming »the focus of divided memories and competing narratives.¹¹

It should be noted that in Jewish Topographies the notions of space and place operate differently, not because in that case the essays engage specifically with Jewish places and Jewish space, but because the earlier mentioned concepts are not universals, rather, they represent just one way of understanding these cate-gories along a continuum. In the book’s introduction the authors define the dif-ferences between both terms in the following manner: »Jewish place is defined by location, Jewish space by performance.«¹² Briefly, space and place ultimately

8 Doreen Massey: Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis 1994, p. 154.9 Ibid., p. 155.10 Aleida Assmann: How History Takes Place. In: Memory, History and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts. Ed. by Indra Sengupta. London 2009, pp. 151–167.11 Ibid., p. 156.12 Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke (ed.): Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place. Aldershot 2008, p. 4. For the editors of the volume, Jewish places are »sites that are geographically located, bound to a specific location, such as the Jewish quar-ter in Fez, Morocco, or the gravesite of Baba Sali in Netivot, Israel. Jewish spaces are understood as spatial environments in which Jewish things happen, where Jewish activities are performed, and which in turn are shaped and defined by those Jewish activities, such as a sukkah or a Bun-dist summer camp for children.« (Ibid., p. 4.)



are fluid categories, as the authors indicate: »Rather than insisting on clear-cut distinctions between the two concepts, the focus […] is attune to their interde-pendence.«¹³ While the meanings of »Jewish place« and »Jewish space« are there-fore bound to overlap, the crucial matter here is that a place (Jewish or not) does not emerge spontaneously, but that it results from ongoing interactions between landscape, history, and memory.

Defining what exactly makes an identity Jewish, or perhaps non-Jewish, is far beyond the scope of this brief essay. It should suffice to state at this point that places and identities result from complex negotiations (informed and shaped by specific historical contingencies) between individuals and communities and that they change over time. The case of Castrillo Mota de Judíos , a small town in the Spanish province of Burgos , illustrates the ways in which different and even contradictory meanings associated with places evolve. A 2014 referendum led to a name change for this small town with less than seventy inhabitants: for four hundred years the town’s name had been Castrillo Matajudíos (»Fort of Jew Killers«). Originally named Castrillo Motajudíos, the town’s (now former) unfor-tunate name was registered in 1623. Some argue that Matajudíos was simply the result of a clerical error. However, in one version of the small town’s history, con-versos were responsible for the change from Motajudíos to Matajudíos in the sev-enteenth century: the new name would ensure protection from the Tribunals of the Inquisition, since calling one’s home Fort of Jew Killers would shield the local conversos from any form of suspicion.¹⁴

The fact that the referendum for the more recent name change coincided with elections to the European parliament should not be taken lightly, since a name like »Fort of Jew Killers« conjures up an ugly past from which the nations that today belong to a united Europe commonly prefer to sever their ties. Yet one of course does need to go as far back as the seventeenth century if a violent past is what is at stake, as a shared memory of World War II and the Holocaust often are considered to be the foundations of a united Europe .¹⁵

13 Ibid.14 Ignacio Cembrero: Matajudíos o el error de un escribano. In: El País, April 21, 2014; J. Jiménez Gálvez: Castrillo no quiere ser Matajudíos. In: El País, May 25, 2014; Raphael Minder: A hard sell to tame a name in Spain. In: The New York Times, May 10, 2014; Ashifa Kassam: Why Spain’s goal to leave racism behind could be decided by 56 villagers. In: The Guardian, May 24, 2014.15 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider: The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadel-phia 2006. The authors argue that the Holocaust has becomes the »new founding moment for the idea of European civilization« (ibid., p. 102). See also Dan Diner: Restitution and Memory: The Holocaust in European Political Cultures. In: New German Critique (2003), pp. 36–44.



As the reference to Geographies of the Holocaust may have anticipated, during World War II, places in Europe intersected with Jewish history with great violence in specific locations that include, Oświęcim , Babi Yar , the network of train tracks that crisscross Europe , or Portbou (to only mention a few). Today, these different locations are Jewish places: they are intimately connected with Jewish experi-ences and memories. From this should not be inferred that only those locations where the violence of the Holocaust reached are Jewish places, and much less or that these are exclusively »Jewish« places – as they clearly also are part of the historical experience of other groups. Instead, a relationship between respective national memories and the memory of the Holocaust is one of the defining char-acteristics of Jewish places in Europe today. Gantner and Oppenheim explain that Jewish space »results from the incorporation of the Holocaust into national his-tories. It represents a country’s acknowledgement of the disappearance of a local Jewish culture, recognizing what has been lost, what remains missing and has not been recovered.«¹⁶ Yet not all Jewish places have a direct relationship with the Holocaust. Again, following Gantner and Oppenheim , Jewish places would contain »›things Jewish‹, ethnically marked cultural and social products that can take shape independently of Jews or a Jewish community.«¹⁷ In light of the earlier discussion of space and place, it is important to point out that there are multi-ple and varied ways in which more undifferentiated space in Europe can become Jewish places.

One of the problems that arise is that focusing exclusively on Holocaust memory and on the places that have been destroyed during World War II may eclipse places that became Jewish by choice and not by force, as not all negoti-ations that shape places and identities are violent and deadly. Thus, objecting to the provocative statement mentioned above (»Dani Karavan ’s »Passages« is Europe ’s foremost Jewish place«) becomes quite easy: the monument commem-orates the death of a man who took his own life before the Nazis could murder him. Benjamin was forced to flee, first from Germany and then from France , like so many others, both renown and nameless individuals. He did not elect to come to Portbou as he did: on foot, afraid, exhausted, and hiding from the authorities in France and in Spain . Confronted with, to use Lawrence Langer ’s expression, a »choiceless choice« Benjamin took his own life before others could do so.¹⁸ »Pas-

16 It should be noted that while Gantner and Oppenheim use the expression »Jewish space« here, their definition applies to the earlier defined notion of »Jewish places.«17 Eszter Gantner and Jay (Koby) Oppenheim (ed.): Jewish Space Reloaded! In: Anthropoligi-cal Journal of European Cultures 23 (2014) 2, pp. 1–10.18 Lawrence Langer: The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps. In: Centerpoint 5 (1980), pp. 222–231.



sages« therefore becomes a »Jewish place« (before even considering whether it may or may not be Europe ’s foremost place) because it is part of a wide network of monuments and memorials built to honor the victims of the Holocaust. However, an exclusive consideration of the places where Jewish lives were destroyed only tells a one-sided story, in which Jewish places solely have a relationship with the past, and appear disconnected from the present and the future.

The future precisely is what concerns Diana Pinto , who in many ways pio-neered the study of »Jewish space« in Europe with her influential article »A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe .«¹⁹ While Pinto emphasizes the centrality of the Holocaust memory within a broader European common memory, she also states that what marks post-1989 Europe with regards to a Jewish space and Jewish identities is the fact that these are no longer imposed by others: »Jews in today’s Europe are ›voluntary‹ Jews: they are no longer anywhere defined by the state or officially constrained in any way. Jews are free to stop being Jews, to emi-grate and, most importantly, to define their Jewishness in whatever terms they like.«²⁰ The question of what renders space »Jewish space« (and specific places »Jewish places«) remains deeply tied to debates over Jewish identities. As Pinto observes, what is at stake here is who will have the right and the responsibility to define how Jewish space or Jewish places will look like, particularly with regards to the discrepancy between the increasing number of Jewish places in Europe (especially when considering memory tourism and heritage travel) and the actual numbers of Jews in Europe .

A key question facing Jews today is how to interact with this ›Jewish space.‹ Should they fill it, accompany it, complement it or distance themselves from it? It is crucial for the crea-tion of a new European Jewish identity that such a space not be monopolized by Jews, that it be open and open-ended. Without living Jews, however, such a space could become a museum.²¹

The concern that Pinto expresses here – the risk of »Jewish space« becoming a museum – also lies at the heart of a phenomenon that Ruth Ellen Gruber has called »virtually Jewish.«²² Gruber establishes the ways in which Jewish herit-age tourism in Europe today in many ways functions »without Jews«. She argues that, »what passes for Jewish culture, or what is perceived or defined as Jewish culture – has become a highly visible component of the popular public domain

19 Diana Pinto: A new Jewish Identity for post-1989 Europe. London 1996.20 Ibid., p. 2.21 Ibid., p. 7.22 Ruth Ellen Gruber: Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe. Berkeley, Los Angeles 2001.



in countries where Jews themselves are practically invisible«.²³ Gruber explains that her term »virtual Jewish world« and »virtual Jews« stem from the virtual com-munities of cyberspace. These are worlds where »people can enter, move around, and engage in cyberspace virtual worlds without physically leaving their desks or quitting their »real world« identities«.²⁴ The risk here, as Gruber addresses it, is that Jewish places, especially those that belong to heritage tourism, may per-petuate how a specific, even desired »Jewish presence« and even a Jewish space should look like.

Europe ’s Jewish places today, it turns out, may sometimes bear little or no relationship at all to Jewish life, especially when considering tourism and »her-itagization«, a term that Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa use in their analyses of Jewish heritage travel in contemporary Spain and that refers to the contemporary production of Jewish heritage (or what passes for Jewish heritage) in Spain into a visible and easily accessible destination.²⁵ This does not mean that travelers who visit Europe ’s Jewish places today will merely encounter artifi-cial worlds or simulacra, completely unrelated to Jewish lived experience in these specific locations. Rather, it is important to recognize that Jewish heritage is (like places and identities) part of a process of negotiation, and even a production, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues in Destination Culture: »by production, I do not mean that the result is not ›authentic‹ or that it is wholly invented. Rather, I wish to underscore that heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. It is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.«²⁶ Yet such a production will not operate in the same way in most Jewish places. The production of Jewish heritage in Spain , where Jews have been mostly absent since the fifteenth century entails a very different relationship to the past than, for example, the production of Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe , where the destruction brought about during World War II is the dominant narrative.²⁷ More-over, the meaning of sites where Jews once lived (and continue to do so) by choice and by force is not equivalent to the meaning of sites where Jews were killed, or of those places from where Jews were deported and taken to concentration camps and death camps. The island of Rhodes comes to mind here: the Rhodesli Jews

23 Ibid., p. 5.24 Ibid., p. 21.25 Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa: Hervás, convivencia and the heritagization of Spain’s Jewish past. In: Journal of Romance Studies 10 (2010) 2, pp. 53–76.26 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, Los Angeles 1998, p. 150.27 For an analysis of Jewish quarters, see Eszter Gantner: Interpreting the Jewish Quarter. In: Anthropological Journal of European Culture 23 (2014) 2, pp. 26–42.



were deported in the summer of 1944, only three months before the Nazi occu-pation of the island ended. Visiting »La Juderia,« the Jewish quarter in Rhodes is still possible, yet, as shown on the web page of Rhodes Jewish Museum, what the visitors will encounter in this Jewish place is a striking absence of Jewish life.²⁸

As mentioned earlier, the discussion of Jewish space and Jewish places in Europe today necessarily entails an engagement with Holocaust memory – which has become in many ways a common ground for a European memory culture. Yet it is also true that Holocaust memory continues to evolve, especially with regards to the ways in which migration is changing and will continue to change Europe , shaping identities and places. Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz study the ways in which Holocaust memory operates and also changes over time in Germany , given the country’s immigrant population: »Collective memory of the Holocaust has functioned as a point of reference for a post-fascist Europe and the basis of a new human rights regime at the same time that migrations have complicated the ›unity‹ of Europe ’s population and posed challenges to Europe ’s liberal model of rights.«²⁹ Europe ’s Jewish places today have a relationship with the past and with the weight the past carries in the present—for those who have direct, indirect and even unexpected relationships with the Holocaust and its aftermath.

While Pinto ’s vision (in 1996) of what a Jewish space is and can be in Europe certainly puts forth a hopeful understanding, in the current political climate Pinto ’s vision may have become outdated, as Gantner and Oppenheim point out: »her optimism and the sanguine formulation of the concept no longer appear to be suited to subsequent political developments, such as the increasing anti-Sem-itism in Europe and the collapse of the Oslo peace process.«³⁰ In light of recent events, including the attacks on Jewish places and Jewish individuals in Denmark , France , or Belgium , the state of Jewish places in Europe continues to be fraught with past and present conflicts that at times occur far from Europe , but continue to literally and figuratively bleed into the continent.

A quick study of »Passages« therefore provides an interesting vantage point that helps to examine the significance of Jewish places in Europe . Similar to Hans Haacke ’s »Der Bevölkerung,« a controversial art installation that Rothberg and Yildiz discuss in the above-quoted essay, Karavan ’s monument reveals how »a singular site of memory can accommodate a diversity of histories that resonate

28 See »La Juderia.« Rhodes Jewish Museum. http://www.rhodesjewishmuseum.org/ (last ac-cess June 2015).29 Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz: Memory citizenship: Migrant archives of Holocaust remembrance in contemporary Germany. In: Parallax 17 (2011) 4, p. 34.30 Gantner/Oppenheim, Jewish Space Reloaded! (see note 17), p. 2.



with each other instead of erasing each other.«³¹ »Passages« was commissioned in 1992 by the German and the Catalan governments, and inaugurated in 1994. Before creating »Passages,« Karavan was known for his memorial to victims of the Hol-ocaust at the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot in Israel and for the Israeli Pavilion at the 1976 Venice Biennale, dedicated to peace between Israel and Palestine .

Today, the monument is administered by the Catalan Exile Museum and Memorial (Museu Memorial de l’Exili, MUME), an institution located in La Jon-quera , a border town not far from Portbou , and primarily dedicated to the memory of exile and diaspora during the Spanish Civil War. Yet the fact that Benjamin and thousands of other Jewish refugees crossed into Spain illegally, brings Jewish history and Jewish memory back to Catalonia , which in the medieval period was home to important centers of Jewish life and Jewish learning.³²

The monument, forged out of rusted iron and placed across from the grave-yard, overlooks the Mediterranean. A downward staircase cuts through the cliffs, leading down to the sea. It is here where the earlier mentioned glass wall, with the inscription is located. The monument does not end with the glass wall, as it also includes a winding path leading to a viewpoint on platform, an ancient olive tree, and eventually to the Portbou cemetery. If place is space shaped by expe-rience, »Passages« certainly aims to recreate a specific experience of place. Yet the monument also leads its visitors to question the significance of place and of the relationship between the present and the past, as Rosenberg observes: »For the recent generation of memorials, grounded in the present, place is continually shifting; rather than evoke a fixed idea of the past, places are physical situations that are always ambiguous and contested.«³³ An increasing number of scholars have captured this ambiguity in narrations of their visits to Portbou .

Svetlana Boym paraphrases Benjamin ’s writing in her description of the mon-ument: »There is no wall at the end of the passage reminding us of the wreckage of the past, but a reflective glass, a screen for transient beauty, a profane illumi-nation. A homage to modern nostalgics.³⁴ For John Collins , Karavan ’s monument is a piece that »promises to haunt forever,« and that evokes the plight of current migrants in the Mediterranean.³⁵ Les Back connects Benjamin ’s fate with the plight of today’s migrants. As he narrates his own account of a visit to Portbou ,

31 Ibid., p. 33.32 See Rosa Sala Rose: La penú ltima frontera: fugitivos del nazismo en Españ a. Barcelona 2011; Patrick von zur Mühlen: Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal: Die deutsche Emigration und der Exodus aus Europa 1933–1945. Bonn 1992.33 Rosenberg, The Geography of Memory (see note 3), p. 60.34 Svetlana Boym: The Future of Nostalgia. New York 2001, p. 32.35 John Collins: From Portbou to Palestine and Back. In: Social Text 24 (2006) 489, pp. 67–85.



he reflects on the checkpoints of the past and those of the present: »The nameless today do not pass through here because the border guards have moved to them. More than this, the checkpoint is drawn around the outlines of the unwanted persons, defining their identity and ranking them within an order of humanity.«³⁶ The monument therefore makes it possible to establish a connection between the death of the renowned philosopher, which followed his thwarted attempt to cross a border illegally, and the fates of countless others – today’s nameless migrants. In this sense, »Passages« links past and present forms of border crossing and exile.

Scholars have also reflected on the ways in which Karavan ’s monument calls to mind the ongoing crisis in the Middle East. To be clear, my point is not that a place in Europe needs to engage with the conflict between Israel and Palestine in order to be considered a »Jewish place.« Instead, a relationship with Israel and Palestine often characterizes Jewish places, precisely because of the ways in which the conflict in the Middle East permeates, even monopolizes all references to Jewish life in Europe . Gantner and Oppenheim raise precisely this question: »How does the conflict in the Middle East influence what is regarded as ›Jewish‹ as the conflict for many represents the sole representation of what is Jewish?«³⁷ With regards to »Passages,« Collins wonders: »how does Palestine look when viewed from Portbou ?« He focuses specifically on the ways in which Karavan ’s monument faces the Mediterranean, thereby also facing Israel and Palestine . He then continues to reflect: »Were he still alive, however, the iconoclastic thinker buried at Portbou would undoubtedly ask us to take this picture and, in his famous phrase, brush it ›against the grain.‹«³⁸ Anthropologist Michael Taussig takes these reflections into a different and perhaps more radical direction, as he speculates about whether Benjamin »could have been the first suicide bomber.«³⁹ No matter how one chooses to interpret »Passages« itself and its location, sur-rounded by olive trees, it is true that in contemporary Europe it is increasingly difficult to think about Jewish space and places without considering Israel and Palestine .

However, »Passages« still can function as Europe ’s foremost Jewish place not only because it has a relationship with the Holocaust or because it evokes conflicts on the other end of the Mediterranean, but also because of the mon-ument’s intricate relationship with boundaries. Establishing the boundaries of

36 Les Black: Beaches and Graveyards: Europe’s Haunted Border. In: Postcolonial Studies 12 (2009) 3, pp. 329–340.37 Gantner/Oppenheim, Jewish Space Reloaded! (see note 17), p. 5.38 Collins: From Portbou to Palestine and Back (see note 35), p. 72.39 Michael Taussig: Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago 2010, p. 7.



»Passages« is tricky, precisely because multiple boundaries traverse the monu-ment: the border bet ween France and Spain , the border between land and sea, the border between past and present, and of course the boundary between life and death—»Passages« leads back to the cemetery where Benjamin was buried in a niche for five years, before his remains were taken to a common grave. The monument therefore not only evokes the memory of the renowned and the name-less, it also conjures borders and frontiers. With regards to the history of Europe ’s Jewish places, boundaries immediately come to mind: the walls of medieval Jewish quarters that today form part of Jewish heritage tours, an eruv, the barbed wire used in concentration camps, or the »Iron Curtain,« to only mention a few.

As Massey writes, one may assume that places are defined by their borders: »Geographers have long been exercised by the problem of defining regions, and this question of ›definition‹ has almost always been reduced to the issue of drawing lines around a place.« Furthermore, a boundary around an area »pre-cisely distinguishes between an inside and an outside« and can therefore »so easily be yet another way of constructing a counterposition between ›us‹ and ›them.‹«⁴⁰ While it may be easy to assume what produces places are the bound-aries drawn around them, Massey understands places not as limited by bounda-ries that include and exclude, but as constituted by dynamic relationships with other places. Places become such because they connect chronologically, spa-tially and even linguistically with others – as »Passages« certainly does. Thus, the monument could be considered Europe ’s foremost Jewish place because 1) it evokes the memory of the Holocaust, specifically with regards to the fate of the displaced, 2) it speaks to the plight of today’s migrants, 3) it conjures up conflicts on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and 4) it makes visitors question the roles that boundaries and frontiers have shaping specific experiences and specific places. However, »Passages« could also be considered a virtually Jewish place, since even the remains of the Jewish man who was once buried near where the monument was erected have long been moved to a common grave.⁴¹ In fact, the only Jewish visitors today may be those who decided to add Portbou to their itinerary of Jewish heritage in Catalonia : South of Portbou lies the city of Girona , once a vibrant center of Jewish life and now home to a Jewish heritage site.⁴²

»Passages« may not be the most obvious example that may come to mind in an inquiry about Jewish places today, and synagogues, schools, cemeteries,

40 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (see note 8), p. 152.41 Walter Benjamin, who killed himself with a morphine overdose, was buried as Benjamín Wal-ter, victim of a brain aneurism in Portbou’s cementery.42 For more information, see Patronat Call de Girona, www.girona.cat/call/eng/ (last access June 2015).



ghettos, (or what is left of them) may be a more evident choice. Be that as it may, what makes this monument so interesting when considering Jewish space and Jewish places is that it evokes the ways in which identities are intrinsically connected to the physical landscapes that individuals cross, shape, and leave behind. »Passages« could be Europe ’s foremost Jewish place because it forces us to continuously raise the question of what makes a place Jewish and why this question carries weight in Europe today – no matter where we stand and from where we look at it.


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Europe's Jewish Places