Diaspora religion shifts from lived memory environment to reconfigurable place of memory.

Evidence

Religion for the Jews of pre-Enlightenment Europe and for much of contemporary Islam, which has its immediate roots in majority Islamic states, became for many a ‘heritage’ in the Western, secular Diaspora. What had been lived experience in milieux de mémoire (environments of memory), to use Pierre Nora’s often-cited phrase from 1994, becomes lieux de mémoire (places of memory) that re-configure meaning constantly within the Diaspora. What is it that such memory of ritual and practice can or must abandon? What must it preserve to maintain its coherence for the group? The answer depends on time and place, and yet the experience of Jews in the Western European Diaspora seems to offer a model case, clearly because of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ among the three Abrahamic religions. Jews maintain, in different modalities, their religious identity, even if the nature of the options explored created ruptures that produced new problems and, over time, partial resolutions and yet further conflicts and resolutions. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 926

Categorization

• DEFINE: Deploys Pierre Nora’s milieux de mémoire vs. lieux de mémoire distinction as an analytical lens for diaspora religiosity.
• XREF: Uses Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor differences’ alongside Nora’s memory framework; connects to the reader’s prior work on identity and group differentiation. — connects to: Living memory of expulsion decays and must be replaced by institutional commemoration — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 957