Parkes Institute, Elisabeth Becker

In this talk, Elisabeth Becker invokes Stuart Hall’s concept of a “fateful triangle”, turning to the intersection of Jewish, Muslim, and European identities, specifically highlighting the ways in which Jewish-Muslim intersections shape European societies: both in terms of contemporary life and in terms of collective memory. Drawing from research in European metropoles, the narratives of Jewish and Muslim Europeans are placed at the centre of a distinct understanding of Europe as made with, through, and by its ethnoreligious minorities, rather than (by setting itself) apart, as (post)Christian and secular, from them. Tracing such debates as those over religious rites (e.g. circumcision), religious representation in public life, and restitution of looted art and artefacts (both Nazi-era and colonial), it ultimately illuminates the agency of Jews and Muslims in (re)imagining and inhabiting Europe as dynamic space/place and idea.

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