Jews as Postcards, or Postcards as Jews: Mobility in a Modern Genre

The picture postcard is a concrete expression of mobility in modern times. Their illustrations include many themes explicitly referring to travel, emigration and uprooting that will be highlighted in the article. As a cultural practice postcards in general may also serve as concrete indexes of the mobility of their documented senders and receivers. Postcards became very early objects of systematic collecting. Most of the Jewish postcards to be discussed in this study belong to the Joseph and Margit Hoffman Collection of the Folklore Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, over seven thousand picture post cards, stemming predominantly from the period before the Shoah. The postcards discussed in the article encompass large parts of the Jewish world of the period including East, Central and West Europe, Palestine, the United States, and North Africa. Based on a semiotic explication of the illustrations of the postcards, as well as in a number of cases the personal texts on their verso side, they are here discussed as part of an attempt to interpret figures of mobility in and with regard to Jewish culture. A major European tradition shared by Christians and Jews, the Wandering Jew, is presented as a possible interpretative key for the postcards. In their particular combination of the visual and the verbal as well as of individual art and folk and popular culture, postcards are shown to present a rich source for illuminating the cultural interactions between Jews and their neighbors