Creating and Crossing Boundaries of “Being” and “Doing” Jewish in Finland

The paper presents a recently initiated research project entitled “Boundaries of Jewish Identity in Contemporary Finland” and outlines the overarching theoretical and empirical assumptions to be developed within the research project. The project seeks to examine central ideas of boundaries as they are negotiated and interpreted among Jews living in Finland today on the basis of a vast ethnographic investigation. Boundaries are understood as both symbolic, embodied, organisational, spatial and temporal. Hence, the boundaries to be examined relate to encounters between the Jewish community and the Finnish context as well as to the customs of everyday religion. Theoretically and methodologically, the ethnographic research project ties on to the most recent developments within research on lived religion (e.g. Ammerman 2013) and vernacular religion (e.g. Bowman & Valk 2012) as well as research on identity and change in Jewish communities worldwide (e.g. Huss 2012; Summit 2016). The paper presents the theoretical models for investigating religion and change to be used in the project and especially highlights issues of interreligious relations and the inter­nal diversity of the Jewish community and its relationship to secularised Finland.