When the Text Draws You In: Literacy Assemblages in a Luxembourgish Synagogue

The Hebrew language learning process amongst students in a Liberal Jewish congregational school in Luxembourg presents a compelling case for attending to the materiality of literacy. This article draws on new materialist perspectives and the concept of the assemblage to understand how the powerful pull of objects, in particular a children’s a prayer book, brought students, things, and language into new relations that enabled the emergence of new literacies. Zooming in on the clash between schooled literacy and synagogue-based Hebrew literacy and the ways this clash was resolved by taking literacy as an assemblage, this article explores how material objects made possible alternative modes and aims of literacy and ways of being and being perceived as literate. In doing so, this article troubles the supposed centrality of text-in-itself amongst Jewish communities and seeks a middle ground between recent literacy studies that tend to focus on language ideology while ignoring the material and vice versa.