Jewish Genealogy as Mnemonic Palimpsest

I take as my starting point the idea that the practice of genealogy is itself a mnemonic palimpsest, enabling faint traces of the family past to become visible in the present, thus enabling them to live on into the future. Using extracts from interviews I have conducted with two British people researching their Jewish ancestry in Austria, I will explore the convergence between memorialisation and genealogical place attachment, defined by Setha M. Low as 'a correspondence between people and place based on family and historical ties that are encoded in language and cultural practice.' [1] When this correspondence breaks down because of the loss or destruction of place it can be recreated through memory and memorial practices. When people who have grown up in an environment in which Jewish identity has been absent, and then discover as adults that they had Jewish ancestors, they seek to replace their formative environment with memorial practices which reflect their ancestral heritage. In this paper I will examine how such practices have helped to reshape these descendants' cultural identity, thus enabling them to reconstruct their relationship with ancestral places.