Extraterritorial Dreams

European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century

Sarah Abrevaya Stein

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226368368
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

Chapter 1

Seductive Subjects

The passports were magnificent in comparison with those one could obtain from other consulates in Salonica. The presses on which they were printed had been obtained, with some difficulty, by Portugal’s consul in Salonica, Solomon/Salomão Arditti, himself a Jewish native of the city, in the summer of 1913. Arditti was anticipating a surge in need, for Portugal’s Foreign Minister—at Arditti’s urging—had only just approved the granting of provisional protection to Jews in Salonica. The Foreign Minister’s directive, issued in the course of the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and during a time when the political future of the city itself was indeterminate, was in Arditti’s view sure to result in a flood of paper seekers. Whether by accident or by the consul’s design, the new presses were equipped to do more than generate a great deal of handsome paperwork quickly. They were also capable of printing passports whose impressive aesthetic qualities visually overrode the theoretically “provisional” nature of the papers themselves.1 Some of the Salonican Jews who obtained Portuguese protection from Arditti’s hands found that elegant provisional papers proved astonishingly durable. Carried outside of Salonica to cities elsewhere in Europe or any number of émigré settings, Arditti’s grand passports were accepted as proof of citizenship itself. With ink, paper, and a state-of-the-art printing press, Arditti was providing Portugal’s new protégés with the tools to contravene Portuguese law.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Salonica was among the most important ports of the Ottoman Empire and one of very few cities in the world in which Jews constituted a plurality of the population.2 Salonica’s Jewish community (like the Jewish population in surrounding regions) was overwhelmingly Sephardi—consisting primarily of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) speaking Jews descended from Iberian exiles who settled in the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century. Over five centuries, Sephardi Jews became an integral element of Ottoman society, particularly in cities where the community was most densely concentrated: Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Sarajevo, Sofia, and especially Salonica, where Jews formed the backbone of the mercantile and industrial workforce. The city had an almost fabled place in the Jewish world, in which it came to be known as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.”3

The loss of Salonica to Greece in the course of the Balkan Wars heralded the end of an era for the city’s Jews, as for Ottoman Jewry as a whole. In the course of the conflict, Salonica’s Jews witnessed a rash of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish violence and anticipated (rightly, as it turns out) a decline in their city’s economic vitality. The war also sparked great fear within the Jewish community that a further rise in anti-Semitism would accompany Hellenic rule.4 In response to what many perceived as an increasingly traumatic situation, Salonican Jews pursued security along a number of divergent paths. Many found themselves seduced by novel political affiliations taking shape in their city, evincing sympathy for socialism, Zionism, or the notion that if Salonica was not to be Ottoman, it should be the international capital of a politically neutral buffer state.5 Others chose to emigrate: between 1911 and 1912 alone, the number of Salonican Jews passing through Ellis Island doubled.6 With the annexation of the economically vital Salonican hinterland by Macedonia (in 1912) and the growing vibrancy of Christian-owned firms, local Jewish merchants scrambled to respond dexterously to a shifting commercial terrain.7 Finally, several thousand Salonican Jewish women, men, and families rushed to acquire protégé status, hopeful that the resulting papers would provide a measure of political security in a world turned upside down.8

Salonican Jews’ pursuit of protection was enabled by a highly particular set of circumstances generated by the Balkan Wars. During the uncertain months between the Greek occupation of Ottoman Salonica in October 1912 and the formal designation of the city as Greek (with the Treaty of Bucharest, in August 1913), Portugal, Spain, and Austro-Hungary set out to entice the single largest Jewish mercantile population in Southeastern Europe, the Sephardi community of Salonica, as protégés. These polities had their own complex reasons for pursuing Salonican Jewish subjects: what they shared was the realization that in this moment of political uncertainty it was possible to recast a faded legal category to their advantage. Within Salonica, the official Jewish Community was continuing to register certificates of identity to members of the community that could be used as proof of identity both domestically and internationally.9 Simultaneously, during the few months in which Salonica’s political future was indeterminate, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Austro-Hungarian consulates in Salonica—in the face of British and French restraint—began registering the city’s Jews (as well as lesser numbers of Jews in Istanbul, Edirne, and Izmir) as protégés. Roughly 2,500 Salonican Jewish women, men, and children took advantage of the opportunity—roughly 5 percent of the urban Jewish population.10

This chapter untangles the intersecting desires and dynamics that fueled the competitive scramble for Salonican Jewish protégés during the course of the Balkan Wars. It explores how these wars provided the occasion for certain European states to reimagine the protégé status: and how individual Ottoman Jews sought to navigate the rapidly shifting political environment of Southeastern Europe to their advantage. In the pages that follow, I hone in on the evolution of Portugal’s unusual (and unusually tentative) legal relationship to Ottoman Jews—and those from Salonica, in particular—from the late-nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. I consider in what ways the extension of consular protection served Portugal and local consular representatives in the course of the Balkan Wars, and why Ottoman Jews came to appear less “seductive” to Portuguese officials in years to come. In this chapter we ask; What legal rights, and what limits, were placed upon those who inscribed themselves on the ledgers of foreign consulates? How did individual Jews and Jewish families come by their protection, and in what ways did this status serve—or work against—them over time? To address these questions, we visit the same history from various perspectives: that of Portuguese officials in Lisbon; Portuguese consuls in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; non-Jewish Greek observers and the Greek authorities; and, finally, individual Jewish seekers and holders of Portuguese papers—women and men who acquired Portuguese papers and subsequently sought to leverage this protection to their advantage over the course of the First World War, with the rise of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian and corporatist regime in Portugal, and during the frantic lead-up to the Second World War.

IMPERIAL AMBITIONS AND THE PATH TO PROTECTION

The relationship between the Portuguese state and Jews athwart the Sephardi diaspora did not begin with the Balkan Wars but had roots deep in the early modern period. For much of this era, in all the centers of the western Sephardi diaspora (that is, in the European centers of Sephardi culture that existed outside the Ottoman lands and northern Morocco), the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and of those forced to convert to Catholicism in Portugal in 1497 were known and referred to themselves as nação, members of “the Portuguese nation.” The nação, a community bound by commercial as much as ethnic ties, was granted a unique—and uniquely advantaged—collective legal status by various states of Europe. This nomenclature also served to provide “members of the nation” with a means of demarcating their community from that of other Jews and non-Jews.11 Crucially, “Portuguese” was, for the western Sephardim, an affirmative diasporic identification formed in the absence of a legal relationship to Portugal. Indeed, Portugal was annexed to Spain for nearly a century of the early modern period (from 1580 to 1640), and thus lacked the wherewithal to extend subject-hood of any form. With the Inquisition active until the eighteenth century, most of the early modern Jewish merchants who conducted commerce in Portuguese territories did so as Italian protected subjects.12

In the Ottoman context too, an indirect connection was drawn between the empire’s protégé Jews and Portugal. As early as the eighteenth century, Ottoman sources referred to the empire’s Frankos as portakal taifesinden [Portuguese], likely because they were assumed to descend from converso émigrés from Portugal who settled in the port of Livorno, whereupon they returned to Judaism.13 Still, it appears to have taken until the late nineteenth century for the label “Portuguese” to gain a measure of legal standing for Southeastern European Jews.

Some among the first Ottoman Jews to appear on Portugal’s citizenship rolls were registered in the North African commercial hub of Tunis in the late nineteenth century. The catalyst to these registrations lay in the realm of colonial geopolitics. According to the terms of the capitulations, France had granted protection to a great number of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Tunisia in the nineteenth century in hopes of strengthening French influence over the Regency. After Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, however, France withdrew its protection from these extraterritorial subjects, leaving them under the jurisdiction of Tunisia’s civil code.14 Under pressure from the French, Italy and Britain soon closed their consular courts in Tunis, agreeing to suspend the capitulations within the realm of French protectorate Tunisia. These developments provoked great consternation among Tunisian Jewish families who had come to take for granted the rights, security, and privileges that foreign protection afforded. And these families in turn sought legal alternatives: engaging, in Mary Dewhurst Lewis’ evocative term, in “jurisdiction jumping.”15

The pursuit of Portuguese papers proved a readily available option. Beginning in 1894, Portugal’s consulate in Tunis opened its citizenship rolls to four extended families of Portuguese origin—those of Borges, Ferreira, Mendez, and Silvera. These families, residents of Tripoli, Constantina, Sousse, Tunis, and Sfax, were among the Livornese mercantile families who had begun settling and/or creating commercial bases in the North African entrepôt in the sixteenth century.16 By the late nineteenth century, Livornese Jewish families (or Grana, as they were known locally) had established deep roots in the North African landscape, but they nonetheless continued to think of themselves as a discrete cultural and communal population. These sentiments were compounded by community member’s possession of foreign protection, which set Livornese Jews apart from the native-born Arabophone (so-called Twansa) Jewish community. These dynamics explain why, when French, British, and Italian protection was denied the Livornese Jews of Tunisia, they turned to the Portuguese consul in Tunis for succor. Between 1894 and 1923, the Portuguese consul in Tunis registered over one hundred thirty members of these families. (In 1923, when the Morinaud Law allowed for the naturalization as French citizens of wealthy, highly educated Tunisian Jews, it is likely that many of these same Jewish families transferred their allegiances back to France.)17

In extending papers to Livornese Jews in Tunisia in the late nineteenth century, Portugal was to a certain extent pursuing the selfsame goals that would be pursued by the consul in Salonica decades later: embracing as protégés a wealthy mercantile population while vying with other European powers to deepen its commercial and cultural toehold in the Mediterranean. But one crucial element differentiates these stories. In late-nineteenth century Tunis, a small number of Jewish families came to the Portuguese consulate seeking protection. In early twentieth-century Salonica, a zealot consulate seeking Jews actively recruited large numbers of would-be Portuguese citizens. During the Balkan Wars, the pursuit of Salonica’s Jews was the concerted (if short-lived) policy of a young constitutional monarchy seeking economic opportunity, international visibility, and a revitalization of Portugal’s imperial past.

The momentum came from Spain. Its heralded mastermind was Ángel Pulido Fernández, a physician, anthropologist, and Spanish senator who zealously advocated for Spain’s embrace of the Ladino-speaking diaspora. Senator Pulido’s campaign, launched with his 1905 study Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí, centered upon the idea that Spain ought to welcome into the nation’s fold Spanish Jews living in lands from Morocco to the Balkans, in part by offering these “Spaniards without a country” the opportunity to acquire citizenship. Pulido’s ambitions were as practical as patriotic. His Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí noted that the Ottoman Empire’s economy hinged upon the contributions of its Jews, and furthermore that 70 percent of the commerce between northern Morocco and Spain was in Jewish hands. On this evidence, he argued that Spain’s reintegration of its “hemorrhaged” Jews might prove a catalyst to the restoration of the commercial and cultural might lost by Spain when the country relinquished the remains of its overseas empire in 1898.18 In defense of this position, Pulido formulated a claim that would inform not only Spain’s policies towards Ottoman- and Moroccan-born Jews, but those of various other countries in years to come: that Sephardi Jews were a commercial tool for an aspirational nation, and the extension of citizenship the key to unlocking their fiscal utility.

Pulido’s gestures towards Sephardim sparked a range of reactions in the Judeo-Spanish heartland, as in Spain. In Southeastern Europe, Pulido was mocked by some Jewish observers and embraced by others, catalyzing a surge of academic interest in Castilian and medieval history, and animating a sense of Sephardi identification with Spain that was perhaps Pulido’s lasting achievement.19 In Spain, the senator’s efforts found favor among a liberal circle of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals—Spanish Judeophiles who attempted to pressure their government (as well as a number of foreign regimes) to protect Sephardi Jews displaced or legally marginalized by global events.20 Most importantly for the purposes of our story, Pulido’s efforts sparked a copycat reaction that reached Lisbon, Vienna, Athens, and beyond.

With this context in mind, we return to Salonica and the frame of the Balkan War. In November 1912, a month after Greek forces occupied the city, the Spanish consul in Salonica, parroting Pulido, extended protection to all Jews in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction: Extraterritoral Dreams
• 1 · Seductive Subjects
• 2 · Protégé Refugees
• 3 · Citizens of a Fictional Nation
• 4 · Protected Persons?
• Conclusion: Aftershocks
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index