Here goes.
For the PhD I have managed to get in touch with every living descendent of Rabbi Zvi David Hoppenstein and Sophia Hoppenstein, a couple who arrived from Russia in Edinburgh in about 1872. What I was looking for was evidence of 'transmission of Jewish culture' - ie how, or whether, the religious tradition of Sarah and the extreme orthodoxy of the Rabbi* would play out in the rest of the family.
I knew some of them already - my aunt Hannah Frank was married to the couple's third grandchild, Lionel Levy; and through my aunt and uncle I'd met another grandson, Fred Stone, and great granddaughter, Doreen. There was a bit of detective work involved infinding some of the rest of the family, especially those who had 'married out' - ie 3 of the grandsons who had married non-Jewish spouses and, interestingly, were no longer in touch with the rest of the family.
Although I had started looking at 'transmission of culture' and all my thematic chapters are organised like that ('Jewish life in the home; Jewish public life') people talked lots about life at school and in higher education and I'm very interested in that. But mainly I found lots of people talking about being an 'outsider' - and not just the descendents of those who had married out!
So this week I've been reading and writing about being an insider-researcher (because I'm Jewish too) but also an outsider-researcher (because I'm not Scottish, or not quite Jewish enough to understand all the Hebrew used by some of the informants, or not male, or not in my eighties.... or, being Jewish, I'm an 'insider' for some of the people who might see themselves as 'outsiders'..)
hopefully by the time THAT gets to my supervisors it will be clearer. But it's quite exciting for me!
anyway back to work. (I use 'Phinished' for support and there are lots of phd students all over the world working away in the chat rooms and checking in for 5 or 10 minutes every hour or half hour.... a brilliant way to be on my own but not on my own. As is this blog, of course - especially if I start getting a following!)
(*extract from his obituary: "Even when he had reached an age at which many men seek rest, he did not hesitate to officiate on Yom Kippur, reciting all the prayers, reading the portions of the Law, preaching at Kol Nidrei, Musaph and Neila, and finally blowing the Shofar triumphantly. ... His Hebrew scholarship was of no mean order. " The obit also mentioned the fact that he "never sought easy popularity and throughout his life he maintained uncompromisingly the high principles in which he believed" .....which gives an idea of what he was really like!)
