Tombstones, Stonemasons, and Mental Maps

Abstract This article proposes a methodology for understanding the business networks and mental maps of Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe from the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. The methodology is based on scrupulous documentation of Jewish tombstones, especially the signatures of stonemasons. Through analysis of the signatures found in the Jewish cemeteries of Croatia, geographical networks become apparent, and we can reconstruct the mental maps of Croatian Jews, both in the Austro-Hungarian period and in interwar Yugoslavia. The Jewish cemeteries in some other central European cities serve as comparative material for our discussion.