Abstract
This chapter examines some spaces of learning in inner London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These informal settings were brought into being by immigrant Jews to foster dialogue and exchange. The figure of the organic intellectual is, I will argue, an appropriate description of the role of the men and women who inhabited these spaces. The spaces they created enabled a proletarian pedagogical culture through which emerged a counterculture of modernity. The contemporary relevance of this historical case lies in its anticipation of features typical of the global city today: the dense web of interactions through within mobile, complex diverse populations.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of a culture of translation has been used, for example, by the Portuguese historian and translator Luís Filipe Barreto (1996) in relation to the cosmopolitan colony Macau; by Croatian writer Andrea Zlatar (2001) in relation to the antinationalist counterculture in the Balkans; by Maria Rosa Menocal (2002) about medieval Andalusia, a ‘culture of translation, [and therefore] perforce a culture of tolerance’ (p. 197); and by the Islamist and culinary scholar Sami Zubaida (e.g. 2002), who has used the term to describe the interstitial cosmopolitan worlds of the Ottoman empire, which he argues still survive in some crevices of the Islamic world. See also the work of Anthony Pym (e.g. 1992) and Bhabha (1994, pp. 18–28) on ‘the space of translation’.
- 2.
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was translated by Rudolf Rocker as Azoy hot geredt tsarathustra in 1904. The pillars of the community was translated as Di shtitsen fun der gezelshaft, 1906, and The lady from the sea translated as Di froy fun yam by S. Dobrik. When we dead awaken was translated as Ven mir toyte ervakhen by Rocker’s close collaborator Abraham Frumkin with an introduction by Rocker, both in 1908. Frumkin translated Slaves of love as Shklafn fun liebe, published in 1904 with a second edition in 1906, and Mysteries as Misteryen in 1911. Hamsun was highly regarded in the Yiddish-reading world until his support for Quisling’s Nazi puppet government in Norway during World War II. His reputation was partly due to Rocker and Frumkin. Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer later described him as ‘the father of modern literature’.
- 3.
I am thinking here of Braidotti’s (2010) work on ‘nomadology’, and particularly of much of the work on diaspora and exile from the literary disciplines, such as Rapport (1995), or many of the contributions to collections such as the 1993 double issue of Yale French Studies on ‘Post/colonial conditions: Exiles, migrations, and nomadisms’, or Barkan and Shelton (1998) or Broe and Ingram (1989). See criticisms by Mitchell (1997), Anthias (1998) and Lavie and Swedenburg (1996).
- 4.
According to Hansen (1993, p. xxxvi), the discourse of ‘counter-public’ and ‘proletarian public sphere’ cannot be equated with the discourse of ‘community’ (the dominant discourse within black, gay, Jewish and other ‘identity’ politics). The counter-public is a radical, new, modern form of solidarity, grounded in collective experience of marginalisation and expropriation, not in (real or fictive) kinship, affection, loyalty, nostalgia, love and in-group status.
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Gidley, B. (2018). Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End. In: Nichols, S., Dobson, S. (eds) Learning Cities. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_11
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