ABSTRACT
Can smell as memory serve as an archive of Jewish knowledge and experience? Scholars note that the notion of ‘Proustian memory’ has become a category in a number of disciplines within humanities and the sciences, including biology and cognitive psychology.2 Scientific experiments show that it is possible to improve autobiographical memory by being exposed to various smells of the past. Smells from childhood can serve as cues to recollections/revelations of otherwise forgotten events and spaces. This olfaction-induced memory serves as a powerful prompt in Jewish experience. Smells become depositories of knowledge and in this way are quasi-archives. The olfactory sphere in Jewish experiences is culture-specific – for centuries Jews in Europe were perceived as embodiments of unpleasant odours. In Proustian mode, odours are ‘drops of essence’, constructs of the Jewish body. Proust’s own anxiety around his partly Jewish origins has been identified as a factor in his interest in smell-memory.3 Moreover, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno developed their hermeneutic of anti-Semitism on this notion of smell, olfaction and the construct of Jewishness in modernity by
*Email: henrietta.mondry@canterbury.ac.nz
and History, Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2, 43-54, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2014.898491
JEWISH MIGRATION AND THE ARCHIVE
Gentile and Jewish intellectuals.4 The latter included such seminal figures as Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin.5
