Sacred Rhythms and Political Frequencies: Reading Lefebvre in an Urban House of Prayer

In recent years, Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm analysis has been implied in various ways to critically examine how rhythms are formed, disrupted, and reformed through different urban venues. One theme that this body of knowledge has yet to comprehensively examine, however, is how changes in the urban sphere impact the spatial rhythms of religious institutions in cities, which can be pivotal for understanding how religious institutions are formed as urban public spaces. This article addresses this issue with a rhythm analysis of a particular religious urban locus: a synagogue in the mixed Palestinian and Jewish city of Acre in northern Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and an urban survey, the article discusses how different forms of rhythm making undergo a process of contested synchronization with linear and cyclical rhythms of the city. More specifically, how the ability to forge a space hinges on the ability to maintain a rhythmic cycle of attendance, which, in turn, is not only dependent on the ability to achieve synchronization amongst the needs of the different participants but is also intertwined with the larger linear cycle of urban life as a rhythmic equation that fuses the personal with the political, the linear with the cyclical, and the religious with the urban

La communauté juive de Bagdad à la fin de l'époque ottomane : l'émergence de classes sociales et de la sécularisation.

Baghdad Jewry in Late-Ottoman Times : The Emergence of Social Classes and of Secularization. The study presents socio-cultural portrait of late-Ottoman Baghdad Jewry. It is based mainly on internal sources legal rabbinical responsa and religious sermons. The thesis is that since the population of the community grew dramatically and became heterogeneous its social organization became increasingly complex New strata emerged and new organizations were founded People developed an image of their society as being highly stratified. The upper stratum the great merchants began to develop practices that clashed with tradition Crucially however there evolved no accompanying secular ideology in glaring contrast to European Jewry. The reaction of the Baghdad rabbis was accordingly mild. In conclusion Baghdad Jewry is placed in comparative context with other Jewish societies.Deshen Shlomo, Tomiche Anne. La communauté juive de Bagdad à la fin de l'époque ottomane : l'émergence de classes sociales et de la sécularisation.. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 49ᵉ année, N. 3, 1994. pp. 681-703