Sarah Abrevaya Stein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226368191
- eISBN:
- 9780226368368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226368368.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
This chapter rethinks the First World War as a richly complex legal terrain, exploring the history of a novel form of protection created in France during the First World War and extended to seven ...
More
This chapter rethinks the First World War as a richly complex legal terrain, exploring the history of a novel form of protection created in France during the First World War and extended to seven thousand Ottoman-born Jewish émigrés. In branding these men, women, and children protected “foreigners of Jewish nationality from the Levant,” the French Foreign Ministry cannily borrowed a category born of the early modern empire state (the protégé), legally codified an amorphous, geo-cultural entity (the Levant), and strategically repackaged an element of Ottoman Foreign Policy (the Capitulations regime) to craft wartime policy at home. The policy (and a cognate policy in England) allowed émigré Ottoman Jews to avoid surveillance, deportation, or internment as enemy aliens, and to acquire the passports, residency permits, and papers ever more indispensible to the modern world; it also allowed France and England to sharpen their colonial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean. Arguing that citizenship existed on a spectrum for many Jews born in the Ottoman Empire, this chapter operates at the intersection of various fields, including Jewish, British, French, and Ottoman histories, and contributes to the study of the legal ambiguities unleashed by the Great War.Less
This chapter rethinks the First World War as a richly complex legal terrain, exploring the history of a novel form of protection created in France during the First World War and extended to seven thousand Ottoman-born Jewish émigrés. In branding these men, women, and children protected “foreigners of Jewish nationality from the Levant,” the French Foreign Ministry cannily borrowed a category born of the early modern empire state (the protégé), legally codified an amorphous, geo-cultural entity (the Levant), and strategically repackaged an element of Ottoman Foreign Policy (the Capitulations regime) to craft wartime policy at home. The policy (and a cognate policy in England) allowed émigré Ottoman Jews to avoid surveillance, deportation, or internment as enemy aliens, and to acquire the passports, residency permits, and papers ever more indispensible to the modern world; it also allowed France and England to sharpen their colonial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean. Arguing that citizenship existed on a spectrum for many Jews born in the Ottoman Empire, this chapter operates at the intersection of various fields, including Jewish, British, French, and Ottoman histories, and contributes to the study of the legal ambiguities unleashed by the Great War.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226368191
- eISBN:
- 9780226368368
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226368368.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, ...
More
Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, compete, and collide. It traces interactions between the states of Europe and Ottoman-born Jews who held, sought, or lost the legal protection of a European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the early modern capitulatory regime gave way to a modern passport regime and the Ottoman Empire to successor states. Some Ottoman Jewish protégés remained in their birthplace as extraterritorial subjects, partaking in a transition from empire to nation-state, protectorate, or mandate regime. Others carried their status as émigrés or passed their legal identity to descendants born outside the empire. All told, protection proved a matter of negotiation and experimentation and a measure of the diffuse and unruly nature of state power: and citizenship a spectrum for individuals to navigate rather than a possession to claim. Extraterritorial Dreams demonstrates that authorities athwart Europe harboured phantasmagorical ideas about the benefits Ottoman Jews offered (or the threat they posed to) the state, particularly at times of war and imperial expansion; that Jewish protégés’ histories resonated with those of non-Jewish protégés, would-be protégés, and colonial subjects; and that Jewish holders and seekers of protection employed creative means of manipulating state law to their advantage. Even as the capitulatory regime and Ottoman Empire were crumbling, protection proved a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved.Less
Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, compete, and collide. It traces interactions between the states of Europe and Ottoman-born Jews who held, sought, or lost the legal protection of a European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the early modern capitulatory regime gave way to a modern passport regime and the Ottoman Empire to successor states. Some Ottoman Jewish protégés remained in their birthplace as extraterritorial subjects, partaking in a transition from empire to nation-state, protectorate, or mandate regime. Others carried their status as émigrés or passed their legal identity to descendants born outside the empire. All told, protection proved a matter of negotiation and experimentation and a measure of the diffuse and unruly nature of state power: and citizenship a spectrum for individuals to navigate rather than a possession to claim. Extraterritorial Dreams demonstrates that authorities athwart Europe harboured phantasmagorical ideas about the benefits Ottoman Jews offered (or the threat they posed to) the state, particularly at times of war and imperial expansion; that Jewish protégés’ histories resonated with those of non-Jewish protégés, would-be protégés, and colonial subjects; and that Jewish holders and seekers of protection employed creative means of manipulating state law to their advantage. Even as the capitulatory regime and Ottoman Empire were crumbling, protection proved a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved.
