Sarah Abrevaya Stein

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. In The Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century

The Family Papers

European Citizenship, Ottoman Jews, and the Calamitous Twentieth Century

Extraterritorial Dreams

Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria

Aomar Boum

Between metropole and French North Africa : Vichy's anti-Semitic legislation and colonialism's racial hierarchies / Daniel J. Schroeter -- The persecution of the Jews in Libya between 1938 and 1945 : an Italian affair? / Jens Hoppe -- The implementation of anti-Jewish laws in French West Africa : a reflection of Vichy anti-Semitic obsession / Ruth Ginio -- "Other places of confinement" : Bedeau internment camp for Algerian Jewish soldiers / Susan Slyomovics -- Blessing of the bled : rural Moroccan Jewry during World War II / Aomar Boum and Mohammed Hatimi -- À la recherche de Vichy : the Commissariat général aux questions juives and the implementation of the Statut des juifs in Tunisia / Daniel Lee -- Eyewitness Djelfa : daily life in a Saharan Vichy labor camp / Aomar Boum -- The ethics and aesthetics of restraint : Judeo-Tunisian narratives of occupation / Lia Brozgal -- Fissures and fusions : Moroccan Jewish communists and World War II / Alma Heckman -- Re-centering the Holocaust (again) / Omer Bartov -- Paradigms and differences / Susan Rubin Suleiman -- Sephardim and Holocaust historiography / Susan Gilson Miller -- Stages in Jewish historiography and collective memory / Haim Saadoun -- A memory that is not one / Michael Rothberg -- Holocaust and North Africa / Todd Presner

The Holocaust and North Africa

From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from New York's Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, this text explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture.

Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce

Plumes

Aron Rodrigue

This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the finely wrought fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars. Sa'adi was a prominent journalist and publisher, one of the most significant creators of modern Sephardic print culture. He was also a rebel who accused the Jewish leadership of Salonica of being corrupt, abusive, and fanatical; that leadership, in turn, excommunicated him from the Jewish community. The experience of excommunication pervades Sa'adi's memoir, which documents a world that its author was himself actively involved in changing.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

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