ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between community and space. More particularly, it is about orthodox Jews' attempts to create communal domains within urban neighbourhoods through the device of the eruv. The chapter argues that opponents saw the eruv as territorializing public space. It considers the way in which opposition focused on the publicizing, as well as privatizing, qualities of the eruv. The public aspect of the eruv, critics claimed, undermined the cultural contract in several primary ways. First, the eruv transgressed the requirement that minority expression be contained within the private domain. Second, the eruv attacked and reconstituted the relationship between soil and cultural identity. Opponents perceived the eruv as transgressing the public/private divide largely through its identity as a spatial perimeter. While opponents tended to treat minority faiths as irrational and potentially dangerous unless contained within the private domain, Protestantism was, by contrast, cool and level-headed.
