Sarah
Abrevaya Stein (UCLA) has
published Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century with the University of Chicago Press. From
the publisher:
We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern history teaches otherwise. Reimagining citizenship as a legal spectrum along which individuals can travel, Extraterritorial Dreams explores the history of Ottoman Jews who sought, acquired, were denied or stripped of citizenship in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as the Ottoman Empire retracted and new states were born—in order to ask larger questions about the nature of citizenship itself.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein traces the experiences of Mediterranean Jewish women, men, and families who lived through a tumultuous series of wars, border changes, genocides, and mass migrations, all in the shadow of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendance of the modern passport regime. Moving across vast stretches of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, she tells the intimate stories of people struggling to find a legal place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. From a poor youth who reached France as a stowaway only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a spy to a wealthy Baghdadi-born man in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife, Stein tells stories that illuminate the intertwined nature of minority histories and global politics through the turbulence of the modern era.
Praise for the book:
“A scintillating study of the various
moments and places in which numerous empires met, overlapped, and competed, as
well as the individuals who moved between these empires, both physically and
through the papers they carried and lost, Extraterritorial Dreamsis
incredibly rich, evocative, and persuasive in its exposition of the broad and
diverse landscapes in which the author’s story unfolds.” –Julia Philips Cohen
“From the stunningly diverse histories
of Ottoman Jews who held (or lost) the protection of European powers during the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Stein weaves a powerful and compelling tale of
the shifting parameters of citizenship that evinces the human dramas not always
evident in passports and legal documents. She brilliantly charts the ways in
which ‘protection’ could be the stuff of both dreams and nightmares, offering
new freedoms as well as imposing new dangers. In this deeply moving history,
the human costs of being a legal misfit or anomaly are made visceral, along
with the messiness of modern citizenship itself. This story of the complex
range of citizenships held (and imagined) by Ottoman Jews prompts a larger
rethinking of histories of belonging and exclusion that is urgently relevant
to—and revelatory for—our contemporary world.” –Jordanna Bailkin
“From Salonika to Alexandria, from
London to Baghdad to Shanghai and many places in between, Stein takes her
readers on an unforgettable journey through the complex legal landscape
traversed in the twentieth century by ‘protected persons’ as war, unrest, and
changing imperial or national agendas transformed the legal and geopolitical
stakes of a centuries-old rights regime. Stein’s vivid storytelling and
incisive analysis leave no doubt that the study of ‘protection’ has much to
tell us about the power and limits of modern citizenship.” –Mary Dewhurst Lewis
