The focus on borders and boundaries is part of the postmodernist trend in history writing in which historians of Jewish history in general and Dutch Jewish history in particular have belatedly taken part. While this postmodern boundary discourse represents an innovative and conscious move away from an essentialist approach to history and identity, the focus on borders may hardly be said to be new. Geographically speaking, Jews have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Even there where their places of residence remained the same for centuries, the countries and regimes that ruled over them were rarely as constant. These shifts in power were never without repercussion, leading at times to the crea - tion of new national borders that divided communities once united.

Acknowledging these processes of dispersion and integration, decades have already passed since the last encyclopedic projects were undertaken. Present-day students of Jewish history, unlike their illustrious predecessors, usually limit their areas of study, mastering the language(s), history, and culture(s) of one country or another. The plethora of area studies published during the past fifty years has slowly led to the erosion of widespread and long held preconceptions, including the notion that prior to the Enlightenment all Jews lived in ghettos and were subject to discrimination. Salo Baron and Cecil Roth already emphasized the interaction between the Jews and their surroundings in the early decades of the twentieth century. Protesting against the lachrymose version of Jewish history, they denied the Jews any degree of suffering beyond that of other groups in the Middle Ages. Needless to say, their approach was not unanimously welcomed, least of all by Zionist historians whose grand narratives depended on this negative interpretation of the diaspora.

If identity is no longer to be regarded as something set but rather something that is subject to change and negotiation, then logically attention should be paid to the “continuous construction, maintenance, or transgression of boundaries between ethnic and other collective identities”. Postmodernist historians have been turning their gaze to a wide range of identities once taken for granted, identities located on the borderlines between Jews and non-Jews as well as on those between one group of Jews and another