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.