Stumbling Upon the Archive

Abstract

My title is inspired by the image of the Stolpersteine, protruding bricks set into the sidewalks of German cities and commemorating Jewswho had lived in those places prior to the Great Destruction, which are intended to interrupt not only a smooth passage through space but also through time. Even those of us whose professional efforts are devoted to documenting and analyzing such interruptions are inevitably, beyondworking hours, caught up just like others of our class in the ongoing time-flow of progress (we have no desire to see our retirement accounts forming “constellations” with the Great Recession). Hence evidence from beyond the occasionally claustrophobic discourse of critical theory that time really is not only continuous and progressive comes as a bracing reminder. I am a scholar of modern Jewish studies, with a deep commitment to understanding both the dynamics of Jewish diasporic existence transnationally and transhistorically, and especially the relationship between the politics of Jewish difference inside Europe on one hand and “the colonial encounter” on the other. I therefore read Geraldine Heng’s chapter 2, titled “A Case Study of the Racial State: Jews as Internal Minority in England,” as an important intervention in a broader conversation about the relations among Christianity, Jewishness, and the rhetorics and techniques of the modern nation-state.1 Making that intervention as one of a set of case studies of racialization also sets the question of Jewish difference in premodern Europe squarely within another broad conversation about the links between racialization (in the broad definition that Heng proposes) within and beyond Europe’s boundaries.2 Moreover, whatever the critical consensus about the merits of that broad definition may turn out to be, it