Special relativity & the (speaking) Jewish body

In Dorothy Seidman Bilik's Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction, this quote from George Steiner's Language and Silence:

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are his homeland.

(Wow, if that doesn't sound like some kind of neurotic nirvana... Where are you from? Well, let me start six thousand years back... Where do you live now? Right here in the six thousand years of myself!)

But seriously, folks. It made me wonder. What are the possibilities of Jews being a people of time and not of place? Yiddish, for example. A language of time (a time before?) but not place---or, more accurately, place but not nation. Where is Yiddish spoken? Where the Jews who speak Yiddish are. A language of specific bodies in history.

Special relativity: There can be no time without place, without a reference point in space. What if the body is the only reference point? Of course there is no history without the body.