The Jewish Mahallah of Singapore as a Site of Transcultural Memory
The Jewish quarter in Singapore, from the 1870s until the 1960s, was known by its residents
as the mahallah. From the Arabic for “stopping place,” the term and many of the cultural
practices of its residents were transported to Singapore from the Middle East, mostly from the
Ottoman Empire, specifically Iraq, as Jews migrated from this region to Singapore. Drawing
predominantly on oral histories of Singapore Jews, this essay establishes how the Singapore
mahallah was shaped by transcultural memory. Never appearing on a map, the mahallah did
not conform to the racial divisions expressed by British imperialist Singapore in the Jackson
(or Raffles Town) Plan. However, I show how the mahallah disintegrated, as the Singapore
Jewish community divided along the lines of class and racial identification informed by
British imperialism. The mahallah is now wholly memorialized, in the oral histories, in
memoirs, a novel, and the Jews of Singapore Museum, rather than a vital Jewish quarter.
Copyright (c) 2025 The Journal of Transcultural Studies
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Copyright (c) 2025 The Journal of Transcultural Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
