The Great Jewish Transformation: the marketplace and the Jewish experience from pre-emancipation to the post-holocaust period

ABSTRACT This article seeks to offer a bird’s-eye overview of the ways in which the marketplace was imagined and experienced by Jews from the pre-emancipation to the post-Holocaust periods. It highlights dramatic transformations of the marketplace from a progressive site of promise, to a place of exclusion and persecution, into a site of healing and rehabilitation after the Holocaust. Studying these changes in the context of the Jewish expirence provides fascinating insights into the ways by which Jews generated and reinforced notions of belonging, exemplifying the significance the marketplace as a site re-defining the relations between Jews and other moderns.