Extraterritorial Dreams ― European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century

In Extraterritorial Dreams distinguished historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein recounts the history of Sephardic and southeastern European Jews’ experience of WWI, especially as it concerns the dizzying shifts in legal status so many experienced as the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire retracted, new states were created in its wake, and as Ottoman-born Jews living abroad found themselves “extra-territorial” subjects—citizens of no polity at a time when national identity and, even more, citizenship papers, were of ever greater import to the modern world. Based upon original research conducted in dozens of archives in Great Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, Israel, Tunisia, Algeria, and the United States, this book tells the history of the First World War through the intimate stories of Sephardic Jews struggling to find a place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. Among these stories is that of a young Ottoman Jewish man who reached wartime France as a stowaway on an ocean liner, only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a suspected spy; of Sephardic Jews in Manchester who—in order to avoid internment in enemy alien camps—pleaded with the British Foreign Office to be treated like Armenian Christians and “accidental Turks”; of the legal complexities spawned by the death of a fantastically wealthy Baghdadi-born Jew in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife. For Stein the Great War was an essentially legal battle that pitted Ottomanness against myriad other novel legal identities. It also strives to situate the history of the First World War in a longer arc reaching from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. It was only during this second global conflict of the twentieth century that individuals experienced the definitive impact of their First World War legal status—for some, legal identities obtained during the Balkan Wars and First World War resulted in salvation during the Second World War; for others, it proved an unlikely conduit to Auschwitz.

is professor of history and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of many books, includingSaharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, also published by the University of Chicago Press.