The entry point for my response to Bryan Cheyette’s thought-provoking essay on the difficulties of bringing together Jewish studies and postcolonial studies is a discussion of a recent national controversy in South Africa that, at first glance, seems to endorse Cheyette’s cautionary tale about how “actionism” tends to negate nuance and critical engagement. The response draws on this controversy to make some tentative observations about why Cheyette’s argument does not adequately acknowledge the consequences of the profound political, ideological, and economic transformations of post–World War II Jewry.

This essay responds to Bryan Cheyette’s “Against Supercessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora.”1 It argues that Cheyette fails to evade certain forms of binary thinking, in particular those that polarize thought and action, theory and praxis. We see this persistence of binary logic in his discussion of my book Multidirectional Memory and in his engagement with the critic Aamir Mufti on the topic of Israel/Palestine and the legacies of Edward Said.

While histories of ideas in premodern perspectives habitually understood history as divisions of fixed periods, modernists tend to narrate these histories in terms of flowing streams curving through timelines, intersections, and junctions. Crucial moments, accordingly, are turns and returns, shifts and orientations. I am not sure what it takes to diagnose and proclaim an intellectual turn or how to affirm or refute such a phenomenon, but I take the audacious risk and argue that the last couple of decades have seen a “legal turn” in the study of religions—a renewed focus on legal aspects of religion that includes legal concepts, theories, and practices.

The article traces Central European Jewish visitors of Paris during the Weimar Republic and the 1930s and analyzes the shifting meaning of travel, exile, and the figure of the flaneur. Their travelogues articulated their affection for Paris in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, marking them as border crossers in multiple ways. Writing about modern capitals such as Paris became a way to temporarily belong to them, to reimagine modernity.

The introduction to this special issue makes the case for seeing Jewish studies and postcolonialism as part of a historical constellation that has mutual filiations and genealogies in the two fields. It calls for the imperative to see the world’s problems historically but also through the mutually illuminating perspectives of the two fields.