In 1991 a group of orthodox Jews applied to the London Borough of Barnet for permission to erect small groups of structures resembling telephone poles, connected - at a height of about twenty feet - by fine nylon filament, at thirty nine locations in the borough. Overall, the number of such structures was to be about eighty. Given that such structures closely resemble common 'street furniture', it was argued by those supporting the proposal that these items would be virtually unseen among the tens of thousands of lamp posts, telephone poles, and the like already in the area. Yet, far from remaining a routine matter for Barnet's Planning Officers, the application became an issue of heated public controversy, engaging the attention of the national and international media. The nature of that opposition is the major focus of this thesis. The religious driving force which lay behind the application relates to the laws of the Jewish shabbat. In order to overcome specific restrictions arising from those laws, Jewish sages long ago devised legal 'solutions'. Among these solutions is one which requires the creation of the physical structures which were the subject of the planning application. In everyday usage the legal solution is referred to by the Hebrew word eruv. It might be argued that this faintly absurd controversy represented in symbolic form the basic dilemma of Jewish life in liberal societies in the late twentieth century. This thesis analyses the eruv conflict in terms of space and place, modernity and post-modernity, and contemporary identities and concludes that the eruv proposal was greeted with hostility because it was seen as a disordering of space which threatened identities within a context of the operation of 'banal nationalism'.

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions la relation entre la population juive et l'espace urbain de Londres comme forme de territorialisation d'une communauté en milieu urbain. Notre objet de recherche est d'une part la manière dont les représentations et les projets d'un groupe investissent l'espace urbain en l'investissant de signification et en modelant la géographie du groupe. De l'autre, on étudie l'interaction entre ces représentations et ces projets produits par le groupe et ceux produit par la société plus vaste - en relation à l'espace urbain tout comme à la place des groupes ethno­religieux dans cet espace. A cette fin, en introduisant la géographie talmudique de l'érouv et ses effets sur les pratiques des juifs qui les observent, on analyse tout d'abord ! 'évolution de la distribution de la population juive dans Je Grand Londres, du début du siècle XXème jusqu'à l'époque contemporaine, en soulignant la relation entre besoin rituels et équipements communautaires. Ensuite, on démontre Je processus de territorialisation de la communauté juive dans le nord-ouest de la ville et les effets de la création dans la municipalité de Barnet d'un nouvel équipement rituel, l' « érouv », au sein d'un grand débat public sur le rôle des communautés dans l'espace urbain. Cette étude souhaite apporter un regard sur les principales questions contemporaines autour des communautés ethno­religieuses dans les villes européennes, à savoir la concentration résidentielle, le retour du religieux comme facteur important dans l'orientation des identités et l'apport des politiques envers les communautés, ainsi que la signification religieuse de l'espace public. / This thesis explores the relation between the London Jewish population and urban space as a form of community territorialisation. The research aims to bring together two completing perspectives. Firstly, how cultural representations and projects of a group signify the urban space and affect its social geography. And secondly, the interaction between those representations and projects produced by a group and the representations of the urban space and the place of ethno-religious groups in it produced by the larger society. Having introduced the Talmudic geography based on the ritual time of Shabbat, the text analyses the evolving geography of Jewish presence in London. The shift from an initial concentration in the East End at the tum of the 201h century to the current settlement in North West London shows the relationship between ritual needs, community facilities and Jewish concentrations. The text demonstrates the distinctiveness of the Jewish population's dynamic in urban space, which seems to be a unique case among the contemporary London ethnic and religious groups, an example of Ceri Peach 's positive segregation rather than a ghetto. The text subsequently explores the creation in the 1990s of a new facility, the North West London Eruv, aimed at a local Jewish community. This project is analysed for the debate it raised about its potential demographic implications and the right of communities to religiously signify urban (public) space in a multicultural society.