Worlds project, Jewish Country Houses, Univ. of Groningen / Kasteel de Haar; Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah (Univ. of Groningen), Laurien Vastenhout (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies), and Sietske van der Veen (Univ. of Amsterdam) (Web)
Time: 28.-30.06.2027
Venue: Groningen
Proposals by: 31.10.2026
Organised as part of the Jewish Country Houses & their Worlds project — the international and interdisciplinary initiative exploring Jewish country houses as sites of European memory, mobility, and cultural exchange — this conference examines the role of marriage, kinship, and intimacy in shaping Jewish social worlds in the modern period. It seeks to reconsider marriage not merely as a private or communal institution, but as a key mechanism through which Jews navigated religious affiliation, class, cosmopolitanism, social aspiration, political allegiance, kinship and family networks, cultural belonging, notions of empire and processes of inclusion and exclusion across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Marriage alliances often functioned as vehicles for mobility, integration, diplomacy, economic strategy, and the consolidation — or disruption — of transnational Jewish networks. At the same time, they exposed tensions around communal boundaries, religious continuity and traditions, gender norms, and racialised understandings of identity within both Jewish and non-Jewish societies.
Endogamy — the practice of marrying within one’s own religious, ethnic, or social group — has long been a defining feature of Jewish communal life. Historically, Jewish marriage patterns often reflected not only religious boundaries, but also distinctions of class, geography, language, and communal affiliation, including divisions between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and other Jewish subgroups. Yet exogamy, or “marrying out,” has always existed within Jewish societies, becoming increasingly visible and socially consequential in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of emancipation, secularisation, urbanisation, socio-economic mobility, imperial expansion, colonial encounters, and the emergence of modern nationalism. Read more … (PDF)
Source: HSozKult (Web)
Katholische Stiftungshochschule München; Raika Lätzer und Marion Gerards 
Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (AKHFG); Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Geschlechterforschung (IZG); Abteilung für Geschichtswissenschaft der Univ. Bielefeld 
The European Rural History Organisation (EURHO); Univ. of Primorska in Koper, Faculty of Humanities