ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how self-guided tours of Jewish Amsterdam construct Jews as liminal beings, portrayed as integral players in the history and culture of the city at the same time as they are distanced from the body politic. Through the linguistic strategies of infrastructure reference, erasure, discursive anchoring, and Yiddish loanwords, as well as a focus on the pre-war and wartime period, the tours refract historical and present-day understandings of Amsterdam’s Jews through the lens of the Holocaust (and to a lesser extent, the Inquisition). As a consequence, Jews are portrayed as a vulnerable population, and this portrayal helps to produce Amsterdam as a tolerant city. Paradoxically, however, these same strategies also create a geography of absence; though the materials often talk of Amsterdam as a Jewish city, it is described largely as a city without Jews.
