On Learning from the Margins: Jewish Nonreligious Grammars within a Secular-Protestant Landscape

Abstract

This contribution to the special issue draws on ethnographic fieldwork exploring pluralities of Jewish life across adjacent urban neighbourhoods in London in order to engage with the conceptual questions and empirical omissions that are currently of concern to scholars of nonreligion. Learning from some illustrative moments in my fieldwork in which articulations of non-belief in God serendipitously arose, I first consider how marginal Jewish perspectives trouble the conceptual framing of 'religion/nonreligion' within (post)Protestant cultures. I then show how an ethnographic approach focused on the specific contexts in which piety or belief in God is othered can deepen understanding of the heterogeneous formations of 'nonreligion', even within relatively well-researched settings such as contemporary London.

Psychoanalytic Judaism, Judaic Psychoanalysis

“…Indeed, from a Jewish point of view, the idea that the sphere of the religious is a spiritual one is oddly limited and fails to take account of the many ramifications of what is nowadays termed 'lived religion' -the set of personal and communal practices and affiliations characterising individuals and groups that may have little or nothing to do with belief at all. 5 Celia Brickman describes one effect of this in relation to what she sees as Freud's own tendency to unite Judaism and Christianity under the general heading of 'religion', in this way obscuring the specificity of Jewish affiliations:…”