Language:
English
Year of publication:
2023
Titel der Quelle:
Contemporary Jewry
Angaben zur Quelle:
43,3-4 (2023) 711-732
Keywords:
Jews Identity
;
Sephardim
;
Jews Attitudes
Abstract:
This article deals with the position occupied by Québec’s Sephardic community within the transnational francophone Jewish field. On the one hand, it examines the roles and contributions played by nonlocal actors (rabbis, academics, journalists, etc.) within Québec’s French-speaking Sephardic public sphere. On the other, it offers insights into what specific ideas and conceptions of Jewishness might be “exported” out of Québec to the rest of the francophone Jewish world. Drawing from sociological literature on ethnic boundary-making and field theory, it aims to offer new insights into the specificities of francophone, Canadian, and Québécois Jewry. A geometrical data analysis of the articles published between 2018 and 2021 in the community’s flagship magazine, La Voix Sépharade, reveals that French- and Israeli-trained authors tend to be producers of abstract, international, and intellectual content. However, this is not synonymous with an “intellectual vacuum,” as Québec-trained authors also heavily contribute to these issues, although less so proportionately, and are more concentrated on practical and local issues. Following a more qualitative look at the magazine’s content and interviews with local actors, this article also makes the hypothesis that Québec’s “speciality” in the transnational francophone Jewish field is a heightened sense of equivalence between Sephardicness and Francophoneness on the one hand, and an idea of Sephardism as being a self-sufficient category of Jewishness on the other. Yet, given the small size of this Jewish population, this idea has to be seen more as an ideal rather than an institutionalized reality.
DOI:
10.1007/s12397-023-09517-7
URL:
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