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

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.





A 2015-2016 Guggenheim Fellow, Sarah Abrevaya Stein is Professor of History and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA. Her scholarship includes Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Sephardi Lives: a documentary history, 1700-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2014), and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008). Stein’s most recent book is Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). With the support of a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, she is now working on Family Papers: a Sephardi Journey Through the Twentieth Century.



Christine Philliou, associate professor of History at UC Berkeley, specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) examines the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Her current work turns to the political, personal and intellectual/artistic itinerary of the Turkish writer Refik Halit Karay (1888-1965). Her interests and other publications have had to do with comparative empires across Eurasia, various levels of transitions from an “Ottoman” to a “post-Ottoman” world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political and cultural interfaces in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Balkans in the early modern and modern eras.


Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration works on international migration: its social, political, and economic consequences; the policies and politics emerging in response to its advent; the links between immigrants and the countries and people they have left behind; the trajectories of newcomers and their descendants after migration. He is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters and eight books, most recently, A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Homeland Connections (edited with Nancy Green; University of Illinois Press, 2016) and The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands (Harvard University Press, 2015).

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Duration: 56:57