‘Carried to his last rest’: public funerals as Jewish/non-Jewish spaces in modern Stockholm

ABSTRACT

20 Swedish-Jewish elite funerals between 1870 and 1939 presented individual combinations of Judaic, bourgeois, Christian, national and modern affiliations through their ritual and musical practices, performing a fragmented Jewishness to a partly non-Jewish audience, partly aided by non-Jewish soloists, musicians and eulogists. As locations for funeral services, the synagogue, the street and the cemetery were placed on the conceptual ‘frontier’ of Jewish/non-Jewish interaction, and thus functioned as temporary, public spaces for the renegotiation of the Jewish elite’s position in the Swedish society. Consequently, Jewish elite funerals allowed for the temporary coexistence of Jewish distinctiveness and national belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Public spaces
• Jewish rituals
• Jewish performativity
• Swedish-Jewish history
• funerals
• urban Jewishness

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Emmie Olson, Florian Zabransky, Jennifer Ruggier, Alessandro Grazi and the anonymous reviewers for their illuminating and constructive feedback. I would also like to acknowledge the great support of late Professor Andrea Reiter during my first doctoral years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Oscar Levertins sista färd,” Dagens Nyheter, 26 September 1906. (My translation. Slight changes of tempus have been made to ease the reading.)

2. The 20 deceased Jewish individuals were Henrik Davidson (d.1895), Oscar Levertin (d.1906), Ernst Josephson (d.1906), Louis Fraenckel (d.1911), Eduard Fränckel (d.1912), Abraham Nachmanson (d.1912), Gottlieb Klein (d.1914), Carl L. Bendix (d.1916), Wilhelm Josephson (d.1917), Isaak Hirsch (d.1917), Karl Valentin (d.1918), Karl Warburg (d.1918), Georg Levy (d.1921), Axel Raphael (d.1921), Isidor Bonnier (d.19125), Joseph Nachmanson (d.1927), Oscar Hirsch (d.1931), Axel Wahren (d.1931), Axel Eliasson (d.1932), and Arthur Fürstenberg (d.1936).

3. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–34. The term ‘identification’ is used because Brubaker and Cooper correctly argue that it explicitly focuses on the continuous developments taking place within individuals, rather than fixating the researcher’s gaze on imagined, stagnant conditions. Inspired by Brubaker and Cooper, I understand ‘identification’ as an individual’s specific (in this case, Jewish) perspective on the world. The perspective is never static, and can therefore incorporate, and remove, other attributes according to individual agency. The term ‘identity’ is only used in reference to fixed socio-cultural narratives.

4. Michael A. Meyer, Responses to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995); Erik H. Cohen, “Jewish identity Research: A State of the Art,” International Journal of Jewish Education Research no. 1 (2010): 7–48; and Tobias Metzler, “Secularization and Pluralism: Urban Jewish Cultures in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 6 (2011): 871–96.

5. Tullia Catalan, “The Ambivalence of a Port-City: The Jews of Trieste from the 19^th to the 20^th Century,” in Modernity and the Cities of the Jews, ed. Cristiana Facchini, Quest. Issues on Contemporary Jewish History: Journal of Fondazione CDEC no. 2 (2011), http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=232 (accessed December 13, 2018); Hagit Cohen, “The Jewish Book Shop in the Urban Landscape of Eastern Europe at the End of the 19^th Century,” in Jewish Space in Central and Eastern Europe: Day-to-Day History, eds. Jurgita Sianciunaite-Verbickiene and Larisa Lempertiene (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 195–210; François Guesnet, “The Emergence of the First European Jewish Metropolis in Warsaw, 1850–1880,” in Jewish and non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context, eds. Alina Gromova, Felix Heinert and Sebastian Voigt (Berlin: Neofelis Verlag, 2015), 183–95; Klaus Hödl, “The Blurring of Distinction: Performance and Jewish Identities in late Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 3, no. 2 (2009): 229–49; and Miklos Konrád, “Music Halls and Jewish Identities in Budapest at the turn of the Century,” in Jewish Space in Central and Eastern Europe (see above), 143–55.

6. David Biale has conceptualised the existence of ‘Jewish cultures.’ Arguing that the term ‘Judaism’ upholds a hegemonic discourse, and proving that Jewish populations throughout time have always lived in a give-and-take relationship with the non-Jewish environment of their habitation, he argues that local customs are absorbed, with the consequential bend of some Talmudic laws. Affected by their historical and spatial locality, each Jewish population thus constructs its own version of ‘Jewishness.’ The concept of Jewishness has, furthermore, been argued as more encompassing than Judaism, as it includes real, imaginary and representative elements of Jewish constructions and reproductions of cultural elements. See, for example: Leora Auslander, “The Boundaries of Jewishness, or When is a Cultural Practice Jewish?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 47–8; David Biale, “Confessions of an Historian of Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 1 (1994): 41–5; David Biale, “Preface: Toward a Cultural History of the Jews,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), xvii–xxvi; Klaus Hödl, “The Elusiveness of Jewishness: Jews in Viennese Popular Culture around 1900,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 12, no. 3 (2013), 382–7; and Paul Lerner, “Round Table Introduction: Jewish Studies Meet Cultural Studies,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 44–5.

7. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (New York: Pelgrave Macmillan, 2003); Bettina Hitzer and Joachim Schlör, “Introduction to God in the City: Religious Topographies in the Age of Urbanization,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 6 (2011): 819–27.

8. For example; Lars M. Andersson, En jude är en jude är en jude … : Representationer av ‘juden’ i svensk skämtpress omkring 1900–1930 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2000); Henrik Bachner, ‘Judefrågan’: Debatt om antisemitismen i 1930-talets Sverige (Lund: Atlantis, 2009); Anna Bessermann, “‘… Eftersom nu en gång en nådig försyn täckts hosta upp dem på Sveriges gästvänliga stränder:’ Mosaiska församlingen i Stockholm inför den östjudiska invandringen till staden, 1860–1914,” Scandinavian Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (1984), 13–38; Göran Blomberg, Mota Moses i grinden: Ariseringsiver och anti-Semitism i Sverige, 1933–1943 (Stockholm: Hillelförlaget, 2003); Rita Bredefeldt, Judiskt liv i Stockholm och Norden: Ekonomi, identitet och assimilering, 1850–1930 (Valdemarsvik: Stockholmia förlag, 2008); Hugo Valentin, Judarna i Sverige (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1964); Per-Martin Meyerson, Judiskt liv i Europa, 1786–1933: Integrationsprocess med förhinder (Stockholm: Dialogos, 2012); and Joseph Zitomersky, “The Jewish Population in Sweden, 1780–1980: An Ethno-Demographic Study,” in Judiskt liv i Norden, eds. Gunnar, Harald Runblom and Mattias Tydén (Västervik: Ekblads, 1988), 99–125.

9. Guesnet, “The Emergence of the First European Jewish Metropolis in Warsaw;” and Aline Schlaepfer, “The King is Dead, Long Live the King!: Jewish Funerary Performances in the Iraqi Public Space,” in Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, eds. Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah and Heleen L. Murve-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 185–204.

10. ‘Spatial practices’ is one of the three legs in Henri Lefebvre’s conceptual triad of space. It relates to the daily uses of the urban landscape. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 33.

11. Agneta Lundin, ed., Till minne av livet: Kyrkogårdar och begravningsplatser i Stockholms stift (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2012).

12. Hedvig Schönbäck, Det svenska städernas begravningsplatser, 1770–1830: Arkitektur, sanitet och det sociala rummet (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2008), 261.

13. Ibid., 261–3.

14. Elizabeth Hallam, “Introduction: Remembering as Cultural Process,” in Death, Memory and Material Culture, eds. Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 3.

15. Philip V. Bohlman, “Introduction: The Transcendent Moment of Jewish Modernism,” in Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), quote from 16; Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Introduction,” in Emotions in Jewish Music: Personal and Scholarly Reflections, ed. Jonathan L. Friedmann (Plymouth: University Press of America, 2012), 2; and Amnon Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 78.

16. Andy Bennett, “Music, Space and Place,” in Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity, eds. Sheila Whiteley, and Andy Bennet (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 2–3; Veit Erlmann, “But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound and the Senses,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sounds, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 3–5; Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 13–26; and Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 48–52.

17. Tasaw Lu Hsin-Chun, “Performativity of Difference: Mapping Public Soundscapes and Performing Nostalgia Among Burmese Chinese in Central Rangoon,” Asian Music 42, no. 2 (2011): 21; and Martin Stokes, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music,” in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 2–5.

18. R. Murray Schafer, “Soundscapes and Earwitnesses,” in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 4.

19. Sara Cohen, “Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensous Production of Place,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 4 (1995): 445; and Thomas Solomon, “Dueling Landscapes: Singing Places and Identities in Highland Bolivia,” in Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Jennifer C. Post (London: Routledge, 2006), 311–2.

20. Metzler, “Secularization and Pluralism.”

21. Meyerson, Judiskt liv i Europa, 355.

22. 312 funeral notices were also found, but they are not included in this study because of their shorter nature.

23. Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, “Never in Place: Eliade and Judaic Sacred Space,” Archives des sciences sociales des religions 87 (1994): 135–52; Martha Himmelfarb, “The Temple and the Garden of Eden in Ezekiel, the Book of the Watchers, and the Wisdom of ben Sira,” in Sacred Places and Profane Spaces: Essays in the Geographics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, eds. Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), quote from 63; and David Kraemer, Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place (London: Routledge, 2001), 2–7.

24. Andreas Gotzmann, “Out of the Ghetto, Into the Middle Class: Changing Perspectives on Jewish Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Germany – The Case of Synagogues and Jewish Burial Grounds,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, eds. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York: Berghahn Books 2016), 145; Rudolf Klein, “Nineteenth-Century Synagogue Typology in Historic Hungary,” in Jewish Architecture in Europe, eds. Aliza Cohen-Mushlin and Harmen H. Thies (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010), 117–30; and Kraemer, Rabbinic Judaism, 4–9.

25. Saskia Coenen Snyder, Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–14.

26. Valentin, Judarna i Sverige, 156; Bredefeldt, Judiskt liv i Stockholm och Norden, 49. Valentin argues that the Jewish religious life was ‘weak,’ and Bredefeldt claims that the Jewish community was socio-economically public and religiously ‘introverted.’ (My translation.)

27. Petr Zupanc, “Nutida judisk begravningssed,” in Gravstenar berättar: Judiskt liv i Stockholm, 1775–1875 (Stockholm: Helgraf Media, 2018), 40.

28. “Jordfästningar,” Dagens Nyheter, 22 February 1895. (My translation. Some changes have been made to the tempus to aid the reading.)

29. As can be seen in a photograph from: “Barnendagsgeneralens stoft vigt till griftero: stora högtidligheter,” Svenska Dagbladet, 28 January 1932.

30. Klagsbrun Lebenswerd, Patric Joshua, “Jewish Swedish in Sweden,“ in eds. Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor, Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 431–52.

31. Nemtsov, Jascha, ‘“Kol Rinnah u-T’fillah’,” in eds. Jascha Nemtsov and Hermann Simon, Louis Lewandowski: ‘Liebe Macht das Lied unsterblich!’ (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, 2011), 34–8.

32. Tina Frühauf, “Introduction,” in Jewish-German Organ Music: An Anthology of Works from the 1820s to the 1960s, ed. Tina Frühauf (Middleton: A-R Editions, 2013), ix–x.

33. Mia Kuritzén Löwengart, En samhällelig angelägenhet: Framväxten av en symfoniorkester och ett konserthus i Stockholm, cirka 1890–1926 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis), 195–9, quote from 199. (My translation.)

34. Letter from Arthur Fürstenberg, Marcus Ehrenpreis and Max Hüttner to the Municipality of Stockholm City on 4 February 1931, file SE/RA/730128/01/A/A_1/A_1_a/101, Jewish Community in Stockholm, 1771–2000, Riksarkivet. (My translation, some changes have been made to ease the reading.)

35. Svante Hansson, “Antisemitism, assimilation och judisk särart. Svenskjudisk elitdebatt vid Hitlers maktövertagande 1933,” in Judiskt liv i Norden (see note 8), 307–27.

36. “Invigningen af nya synagogan,” Aftonbladet, 17 September 1870.

37. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82; Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–12; Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1969), 270–82; and Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).

38. See, for example: Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” 6–7.

39. Axel Cronquist, Ekipage (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1952), 90–8, 181–2.

40. “Frödings sista färd,” Populär Historia 2 (2011), http://www.popularhistoria.se/kultur/konst/konstnarer/frodings-sista-fard (accessed December 13, 2018).

41. “Högtidlig Mosaisk Begrafning,” Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 15 February 1892.

42. The hearse is stored at Stockholm Stadsmuseum as SSM 26407.

43. “Jordfästningar,” Dagens Nyheter, 22 February 1895. (My translation.)

44. “Oscar Levertins sista färd,” Dagens Nyheter, 26 September 1906. (My translation. Some changes have been made to the tempus to ease the reading.)

45. Cordelia Hess, “Eine Fussnote der Emanzipation? Antijüdische Ausschreitungen in Stockholm 1838 und ihre Bedeutung für eine Wissensgeschichte des Antiemitismus,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2018), 65–87.

46. “Jordfästningar,” Dagens Nyheter, 22 February 1895. (My translation.)

47. Avriel Bar-Levav, “Jewish Attitudes Towards Death: A Society Between Time, Space and Texts,” in Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs Among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities, eds. Stefan C. Reif, Andreas Lehnardt and Avriel Bar-Levav (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 3–15; and Bar-Levav, “We Are Where We Are Not: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture,” Jewish Studies 41 (2002): 15–46.

48. Gotzmann, “Out of the Ghetto, Into the Middle Class,” 150.

49. “Oscar Levertins sista färd,” Dagens Nyheter, 26 September 1906. (My translation.)

50. “Ernst Josephsons begrafning,” Dagens Nyheter, 26 November 1906. (My translation.)

51. “Stora donationer till mosaiska församlingen,” Aftonbladet, 29 January 1926.

52. “Karl Warburgs jordfästning,” Dagens Nyheter, 19 September 1918.

53. “Folkskolebarnen hyllade barnens dag-generalen,” Dagens Nyheter, 28 January 1932.

54. “Barndagsgeneralens stoft vigt till griftero: stora högtidligheter,” Svenska Dagbladet, 28 January 1932.

55. “Oscar Levertins sista färd,” Dagens Nyheter, 26 September 1906. (My translation.)

56. Annika Lindskog, “On Summer, Seasons, Seas and Sweet Melancholy: Exploring Landscape in Swedish Song,” CMC Newsletter (October 2017): 1.

57. Bar-Levav, “We Are Where We Are Not,” 31–9.

58. Lundin, Till minne av livet.

59. “Bankdirektör Louis Fraenckels jordfästning i går,” Dagens Nyheter, 25 August 1911. (My translation.)

60. Ibid. (My translation.)

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously supported by the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte; Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse; and Gertrude och Ivar Philipsons stiftelse.

Notes on contributors

Maja Hultman

Maja Hultman received her doctorate in history from University of Southampton, U.K. in 2019. Her doctoral thesis examined spatial strategies of Swedish-Jewish religious diversity and national belonging in modern Stockholm. She held a doctoral fellowship at Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz during 2019. Maja currently works at the Jewish Museum in Stockholm, and continues to explore Jewish culture, spatiality, migration and urban performance through digital, geographical and architectural aspects.