Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Historica 25, I (2021): 201-223; https://doi.org/10.29302/auash.2021.25.1.10. RECONSTITUTION OF AN ABSENCE: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ALBA IULIA IN THE CONTEXT OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT DANIEL DUMITRAN AND TUDOR BORȘAN  Introduction Interest in the history and heritage of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe in recent decades 1 has not passed Romania by, although the institutional dimension of the interest, reflected in the degree of success of study programmes or established publications, seems to have been on a downward trend lately. On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, in the conditions of a continuing demographic decline, the heritage side tends to come to the forefront, being often a component of urban development strategies, sometimes driven by the initiatives of non-governmental organisations or restoration programmes carried out with the support of the heritage department within the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania. However, the consideration of Jews in the discourse on heritage or memory retrieval does not invariably arouse favourable opinions, even in intellectual circles, while among the wider population the degree of amnesia, indifference or ignorance is very high. It is not the intention of this study to establish a relationship between the realities of the present and the reluctance towards Jews reflected in the legislation of the modern Romanian state, or between the relevance of current attempts to capitalise on heritage in areas where Jewish communities were more open during the Emancipation period towards modernisation and integration, compared to areas where these communities have largely retained the status of marginal groups. What we intend is to propose a research method that responds to the major difficulty posed by such an investigation: that of the need to reconstruct an absence. 2  Daniel Dumitran, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of History, Archaeology and Museology, 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania; e-mail: daniel.dumitran@uab.ro. Tudor Borșan, PhD, Associate Professor Engineer, Department of Cadastre, Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering, 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia, Romania; e-mail: tborsan@uab.ro. 1 Marta Duch-Dyngosz, “Jewish Heritage and Cultural Revival in Poland,” in Naomi Seidman, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), online version accessed on 15.11.2021, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo- 9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0213.xml. For a more ample debate on the issue, see Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley - Los Angeles - London: University of California Press, 2002), 1-23. 2 The issue was addressed by the international conference Urban Jewish Heritage: Presence and Absence, organised in Krakow in 2018 by the University of Birmingham – Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage and by the Foundation for Jewish Heritage, during which a first version of the present text was presented.