Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Extraterritorial Dreams: Sephardi Jews, Citizenship, and the Calamitous Twentieth Century 02: Citizens of a Fictional Nation: Ottoman-born Jews in France and Britain during the First World War”
Wednesday, 10 September 2014, 16:30 CDT
Chazen Museum
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building
Room L140
800 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
University of Wisconsin-Madison History Department
Lecture Series Overview: The governments of Spain and Portugal have recently announced their intention to grant citizenship to any Jew who can demonstrate descent from a family expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century. Sephardic families in the United States, Turkey, and Israel (and beyond) have embraced the propositions, seeing Portuguese and Spanish citizenship as a shortcut to EU citizenship—a useful commodity regardless of whether the paper-holder intends to dwell on Iberian soil. Seemingly unbeknown to the actors involved, all are echoing a drama enacted over the course of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when countless Ottoman Jews struggled to transfigure an early modern legal status—the protégé, or protected Ottoman subject of a European power—into something approximate to citizenship. In this series of talks, Professor Stein traces the history of Ottoman Jewish protégés from western Anatolia, the Ottoman Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and Iraq, considering how, amidst the dismemberment of the empire in which they were born, individual Sephardi women and men sought creative legal footholds in a nationalizing Europe. These talks also explore how the states of Europe configured extraterritorial Sephardic subjects variously: as strategic allies of neo-colonial ambition, commercial cash cows, residues of a faded imperial order, as symbols, menaces, and poseurs. Reaching athwart the Ottoman Empire, into western and central Europe and through south Asia, east Asia, and North Africa, this year’s George L. Mosse Lectures will ask how individual Jews negotiated the consolidation of citizenship laws in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century, and how their own, various legal choices influenced their fate over time, even during the determinative period of the Second World War.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Professor of History, and Maurice Amado Chair of Sephardic Studies at UCLA will give the George L. Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on September 9th, 10th and 11th 2014 at 4:30 p.m. in Room L140 Elvehjem Building (Chazen Museum of Art) located on the UW-Madison campus. The bi-annual Mosse Lectures are collaboration between the Departments of History at UW-Madison and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and alternate between the two universities. The lectures are funded through a generous bequest by Geoge L. Mosse to establish a program of collaboration and exchange between the two schools were he taught for many in both department’s of history. Other distinguished scholars who have given the Mosse Lectures include Christopher Browning, Ruth Harris, Jan Assmann, Martin Jay, Mary Gluck, and Michael Marrus. Mosse Lecturers are given the opportunity to publish manuscripts based on the lectures in the Mosse Series in European Cultural and Intellectual History, University of Wisconsin Press.
