“Matters have improved beyond description”: Archaeology of Alexandria, Virginia’s German Jewish community

This study seeks to understand the cultural processes by which Jewish individuals and communities formed and negotiated social identities in Alexandria, Virginia between the 1850s and 1920s. For the purposes of this study, Jewishness is defined as a social identity shaped by religion, ethnicity, and race. One cultural process includes the dynamics of religious interpretation and practice. This process was reinforced and cross-cut by another process, the development and maintenance of diasporic social networks. Finally, these first two processes were complicated by the prevailing and changing racial ideologies of the time period, which were perpetuated and challenged by both outsiders and American Jews. I explore the entanglement of these three processes as Jewish Alexandrians obtained and used household goods and foods in ways that reflected and created religious and diasporic identities and signaled aspirations which implicated socially created racial categories. In this work, I examine the ways in which material culture, spatial patterns, and historical trends reflect broader changes and continuities in the American Jewish experience. The theoretical and methodological approach developed in this work examines the negotiation of Jewishness at both the household and community level. By tacking back and forth among historical records, spatial data, and archaeological remains, this analysis provides a robust portrait of life in the diaspora beyond what was known from congregational histories and beyond large urban centers. By taking an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach, I seek to systematically test many of the long-held assumptions about American Jewish household and community identities using archaeological and documentary evidence. Specifically, I explore how households negotiated their religious identities, how households and communities created and reinforced diasporic networks through material remains and social and economic relationships, and how households and communities used material goods, space, and documents in negotiating their place within a racialized American landscape.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Niculescu, Tatiana

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fennell, Christopher
• Ambrose, Stanley
• Frankenberg, Susan
• Bishop, Katelyn J.
• De Lucia, Kristin

• Historical Archaeology
• Jewish History
• Virginia

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Tatiana Niculescu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115480

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115480