With the special issue entitled Jewish Migrations and their Effect on Modern Urban Cultures of Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal (8, 2024), we take a variety of experiences of and reflections on mobility as a starting point to ask how urban webs are and have been changed and influenced by Jewish migrations.

At the edge of modernity, the metropolis was characterized by the mobility of people. Telegram wires, telephones, railways, bicycles, trams and automobiles moved people and/or their ideas ever faster in and in-between cities around the globe. Jewish protagonists and groups were also caught up in these migration patterns and flows across continents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As part of the European migration towards the Promised Land of the US, or as a result of transnational networks, urbanization, or projects of colonization, Jews sought economic opportunities, freedom from antisemitism, proximity to family members, or political and cultural liberty and exploration in new cities. Arriving in different urban amalgamations, they shaped local neighborhoods and larger urban structures, reformulating both the urban social framework and identifications of already established Jews (Brinkmann 2013). Interactional spaces between Jewish migrants and urban populations – including both Jews and non-Jews – evolved, expressing multifarious cultural articulations of the diverse and complex experiences of the ever-expanding and ever-transforming city.

The articles published in this special issue gather newest discussions on the dynamics between Jewish migration and its effect on urban environments. The authors seek to examine different spatial dimensions of the influence of migration on urban makings from the beginning of the twentieth century to present day. Avital Ginat concentrates on the allure of Moscow for Jewish single womenin the Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, in analyzing the memoir The Story of a Life, penned by the Montessori educator Anna Pavolovna Vygodskaia (1868–1943). Katrin Sippel turns our attention to how the presence of these Jewish refugees shaped public life in Lisbon, inviting us to squares and urban neighborhoods, post offices and consulates, cafés and a Jewish soup kitchen, and cabarets and beaches where refugees and locals frequently encountered each other. Sippl argues that Lisbon’s inhabitants noted the influx of refugees in the city center, and with them a variety of spoken languages, but it was the presence of female refugees that drew most attention as well as disturbed the morality and public culture of the Portuguese society. Felicitas Remer explores the notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to add a fresh perspective on how migrants shaped Palestine’s urban landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century, their impact resonating even today. Ruthie Kaplan, however, reminds us that intracity migration also constituted a big major part of European Jewish movements in the twentieth century. With Łódź Lodz as a case study, Kaplan uses the digital approach of HGIS to map its Jewish middleclass population over time, tracing its settlement patterns from 1921 to 1939. Anna Michaelis visits Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzes the spatial strategies of already established Jews toward Eastern European migrants. Lastly, leaning into the past from her position as a Jewish poet and writer in today’s Gothenburg, Karin Brygger contemplates the relationship between Jewish history and movement through her artistic project The Scrolls Project. Part essay, part performance and part exhibition, Brygger’s contribution to this special issue provides a multimedial exploration of Jewish migration from past to present.