Ethnicity as a Primordial-Situational-Constructed Experience: Different Times, Different Places, Different Constellations

This essay argues for a flexible, context- and actor-dependent understanding of ethnicity, and illustrates this proposition by means of three sets of historical cases of Jewish communities compared and contrasted over time and across space. The first set examines the same group compared over time: commercial middle-class Jews in Venice during the period of residential dispersion (14th and 15th centuries) and in the ghetto era (early 16th through 17th centuries). The second comparison reconstructs the changed compositions of ethnicity over time among the same people, German Jewish intelligentsia in the Socialist movement in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century and in the interwar period. Finally, the third set compares the same group across space: Soviet/post-Soviet Jews in Tel Aviv and in Philadelphia from the late 1980s until the present.