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This paper proposes a multi-sited discussion of contemporary placemaking practices along Jewish heritage routes in Europe and the Mediterranean, drawing on original ethnographic research conducted at archaeological immersion pools (mikva’ot) in historic Jewish quarters. Now preserved by museums and municipal authorities as sites of national cultural and historical patrimony, hundreds of former immersion pools are largely memorialized as sacred spaces. Theatrical reenactments, graphic novels, and holographic projections featuring nude or semi-nude women bathing in stepped pools in France and Catalonia, for example, speak to deeply held fantasies of the “Jewess” descending to her mysterious bathing rites in distant times.
This paper throws light on the boundaries of archaeological knowledge production vis-à-vis modern interpretations of the historic built environment and the generative but considerable limitations of ethnographic methodologies in attempting to reconstruct the phenomenological and embodied experiences of purity rites in ancient contexts.