1 October 2003 - expected, autumn 2006
University Scholarship
In recent debates on the integration of migrant groups into British society, notions of national identity, citizenship and race/ethnic relations have become entwined with the many-sided concept of 'community'. Since citizenship includes both institutional and cultural dimensions, the process of immigrant integration is also multidimensional: it includes (1) the acquisition of formal rights and obligations, (2) socio-economic mobility, (3) the acceptance of cultural norms and everyday practices, as well as (4) the reworking of identities and loyalties. Contesting views on the virtues and faults of multicultural policies, nevertheless, agree that the discursive and institutional policies of the host country shape integration trajectories and mould new identities of immigrants. A minority group, despite its internal diversity and intersectionality, is constructed as an 'imagined community' from inside and from outside of the group. It is associated with a number of cultural signifiers, - social and institutional 'trademarks' of a minority group, - which delineate a group's boundaries vis-à-vis the rest of society. The signifiers depend not only on the cultural heritage of the group in question, but, to a great extent, on the recipient society's interpretation of citizenship and national identity. Hence, as a 'community', the immigrant group becomes embedded in the institutional settings of a host country and integrated into its discursive spaces. As individuals, members of a minority group define their identities in relation to the host society as well as in relation to their own community.
Whereas many studies have been exploring these issues in relation to new immigrants, the impact of citizenship policies on the rest of the society, including the so-called settled and 'successfully integrated' minority groups, have been largely ignored. This research focuses on the latter issue and argues that established religious and ethnic minorities are just as susceptible to changes in institutional and discursive settings of citizenship as new immigrant groups. Drawing on a case study of the Leeds Jewish community, it demonstrates the dynamics of personal and group negotiations of 'Jewishness' and 'Britishness'. The project employs historical and sociological analyses of narratives of Jewish life in Leeds, looking at past accounts, memories and current representations of self and community. Historically, it seeks to establish how the evolution of British identity, which has progressed from a racialised and imperial vision of English supremacy to a multi-cultural and inclusive self-identification, changed public-private representations of 'otherness ' and impacted on Jewish identity. In these circumstances, Jews, individually and as a group, just like any other established minorities, faced growing inconsistencies between the new socio-political reality and their old identities. An additional feature of societal changes in the 1980s was the fragmentation of the British middleclass due to a decline in class-based politics, the rise of secularism and increasingly consumer-oriented attitudes to social policies and identities. Jewish people, being already well integrated into the host society, experienced similar pressures and began to discover new ways of expressing their Jewishness. The sociological part of the research seeks to establish and understand the diversity of Jewish representations in the contemporary Jewish diaspora.
The research uses a multi-methods approach: the primary research methods are qualitative (narrative and document analysis, participant observation). These are complemented by a questionnaire survey.