Muslim-Jewish encounter, diversity & distance in urban Europe: religion, culture and social model (ENCOUNTERS)

This proposal is for a study of intercultural, interethnic and interreligious encounters as exemplified by Jews and Muslims in urban Europe. The largest European populations of these two groups - overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in the same cities, and, strikingly, often in the same neighbourhoods - are in France, Germany and the UK, countries which on the face of it have followed different national models of framing majority-minority relations, creating ideal conditions for a comparative study of the possibilities of living together in urban Europe.

Although the academic evidence indicates negative attitudes to Jews and to Muslims correlate with each other in wider society, in the current century public discourse has instead emphasised growing antagonism between them, relating to events in the Middle East (including the intractable Israel/Palestine conflict) and to the rise of Islamist terror and consequent war on terror. For example, commentators have pointed to Muslims as key perpetrators of antisemitism. Ethnographic research, however, suggests that relations in urban neighbourhoods are often more complex: everyday commercial exchange, cultural traffic within music and arts scenes, both spontaneous and institutionalised interfaith initiatives, nostalgic attempts to retrieve earlier (real or imagined) periods of conviviality, and banal contact in the street are among the many - but not necessarily conflictual - forms these relations can take.

To address the lack of both empirical and conceptual research dedicated to comparative study of these two minorities, we will bring together a breadth of quantitative attitudinal data with a depth of qualitative (ethnographic and discourse analysis of community media) research. To do this our transnational collaboration will explore the specificities of and commonalities between the countries, shaped by different national histories and philosophies of integration and different traditions around the place of religion in social and political life, but also by local variations on national policies, to better understand how different types of positive, neutral and negative relations might arise.

At the national scale, this includes an examination of the varied migration and colonial histories, and of the classical models often attributed to European countries-British "pluralism", French "republicanism", German "federalism", each involving a different settlement between confessional life and public life and between national and ethnic identities. However, the picture can look radically different zooming in from the national to the local level. Thus the project will be grounded in specific urban sites: two city-regions in each country, with diverse populations, including significant Jewish and Muslim populations or histories, distinctive patterns of settlement, and distinctive approaches to urban governance.

We propose an interdisciplinary collaboration across six leading European research universities, involving sociologists, anthropologists, urbanists and migration policy experts, with a proven history of collaboration. The core of the project methodologically will be intensive, granular participative observation in areas of potential Muslim-Jewish encounter, combined with quantitative analysis of attitudes and discourse analysis of public discourse in the sites. The project will foster dialogue across academic disciplines and with societal stakeholders, drawing on local urban knowledges and skills from the cities and their neighbourhoods. We build on complementary academic expertise - urban and postcolonial studies (Britain), quantitative data, media discourse analysis and interfaith studies (France) and the curation and management of diversity/pluralism (Germany). Public engagement is vital to the research too, given scholarship's potential to address the silo working among Muslim and Jewish community stakeholders, and the urgent need to foster better relations.