Scholars have long considered how Ottoman Jews have been racialized as ethnographic subjects, but they have barely begun to examine their subjectivities and works as ethnographers themselves. Nor have they incorporated Jews’ contributions to the Ottoman project of ethnography within Ottoman and Middle East Studies. This research explores how Ottoman Sephardic travelers and teachers, rabbis and writers produced, circulated, and marshaled ethnographic and racial knowledge in service of different visions of reform. By reading ethnographic texts, it uncovers how Ottoman Sephardic Jews—who themselves could be doubly racialized as both Jews and as those deemed “Orientals”—adopted and adapted racializing discourses and how they represented themselves and Others. Drawing on Ladino, Hebrew, French, and Ottoman Turkish texts—including travelogues and memoirs, rabbinic responsa and photography, literature and the popular press—it attends to the racialized, gendered, and classed politics of cultural representation that emerge in Ottoman Sephardic ethnography.

This study begins by reading anthropological notions of race and evolution that appeared in the Ottoman Sephardic press to understand what race meant to Ottoman Sephardic Jews (chapter 1). Sephardic writers translated these ideas about race, civilization, and progress into practices of racialization, enacted within the Ottoman provinces in relation to other imperial subjects, including other Jews (chapter 2). Travel accounts from Ottoman Palestine reveal how Sephardic travelers circulated newly imagined geographies of race in response to global capitalism. Yet Sephardic reformers also applied ethnographic and racial ideas within their own communities in the urban centers of the empire, which surfaces in autoethnographic works on superstition (chapter 3). Such racializing logics and discourses spread in part through the Franco-Jewish Alliance Isra�lite Universelle, which I reframe through the analytic of race (chapter 4). Finally, this study traces the afterlives of Ottoman Sephardic ethnography as it carried into the twentieth century and the global Sephardic diaspora after the collapse of the Ottoman empire (conclusion). This demonstrates how racial discourses were not just social constructs, but created political realities with material consequences for peoples’ lives long after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The dissertation considers how a wide range of actors—including physicians, scientists, hospitals, aid organizations, governments, and the public—understood the infectious eye disease trachoma and deemed eye health salient from political, economic, scientific and cultural perspectives in Palestine and Israel from the late nineteenth century through the 1970s. Even though the causative agent was not isolated until 1957, there was a strong consensus at the beginning of the twentieth century that poverty, unhygienic practices, and ignorance facilitated trachoma. This etiology allowed Jewish ophthalmologists to construct it as a disease that was receptive to biological, cultural, and social interventions. My dissertation explores the design and implementation of Jewish anti-trachoma efforts; how physicians produced biomedical discourses on trachoma that were entangled with cultural constructions of the Arab East; and the wide set of transnational developments and relationships that configure the story of ocular expertise in Israel.

Using a wide array of state and organizational archival papers, memoirs, and scientific publications, this study investigates what it meant for trachoma to be considered a “disease of the Orient” throughout three political regimes in Palestine and Israel, and the social, ethnic, and political tensions the presence of trachoma raised about who was modern. During Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, trachoma treatment instigated questions about the boundaries between Jews and Arabs, Middle Eastern Jews and European Jews, physicians and auxiliaries, biomedicine and folk remedies, and the health of the eye and the health of the nation. In the postwar period, when trachoma nosedived as an Israeli public health priority, trachoma instead illuminates how Jewish organizations and the State of Israel utilized their ocular expertise to make their mark on the Third World through technical solutions embodied as development aid, both to Jews in North Africa and non-Jews in sub-Saharan Africa. The history of trachoma not only highlights how important ophthalmology was in conceptualizing public health in the Middle East, but also creates new sites of global medical inquiry by linking Zionist social welfare practices, international Jewish philanthropy and postcolonial medical diplomacy.

This dissertation analyzes the fluid, contingent, and unstable social and cultural roles of Sephardi Jews in the twentieth century United States. Specifically, this study examines the individuals and communities of Los Angeles, California and the breadth and depth of their local, national, and global relationships. As purveyors of “Oriental” goods and entertainment, merchants in and residents of a racially fragmented metropolis, or cultural and political activists and leaders, these Jews - individually and collectively - drew on diverse strands from their palimpsestic identities to shape and manage their position in Los Angeles, the United States, and the world. Based on communal and organizational archives, personal correspondence, press, census records, oral histories, and more, a complex portrait emerges of the contested and fungible experiences of American Sephardi Jews.

From the outset of the French protectorate of Morocco in 1912 through independence in 1956, a variety of ideologies coalesced into pro-independence political movements. This dissertation explores Jewish involvement in the Moroccan Communist Party (PCM) between 1925-1975. Opening up this 1925-1975 moment recovers ways in which Jews and Muslims conceptualized Jews fitting into newly independent nation-states. Leftist groups, originating in Europe, flourished in Morocco beginning in the mid-1920s. By 1936 the socialist leaning Moroccan Union of Muslims and Jews had been founded, a sign of the growing importance of leftist organizations in the Moroccan political spectrum. When France fell to Germany in 1940, the French Communist Party (PCF) chose solidarity with France over its internationalist obligations, requiring the Maghribi Communist parties to fight for the common cause against Fascism and put independence ambitions on hold. Vichy rule brought anti-Semitic legislation to the majority of North African Jews, inspiring many in the immediate post-war generation to reject France’s vision of republican assimilation. The national liberation parties of the Maghrib, in practice, if not on paper, often espoused an Arab nationalist platform informed by Islam. Betrayed by French republicanism and unconvinced by Zionism, many Maghribi Jews expressed their patriotism through Communism. The 1950s through the early 1970s were the apex of Communist Jewish political participation in the Maghrib and the height of migration to Israel or France. Emanating from Moscow and refracted through the PCF to Morocco and beyond, this project not only looks at ideologies and populations in transit, but also their transformation in new national and international contexts.

This dissertation examines the cultural property-related activities conducted in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and under the Allied Occupation. It studies the actions and policies predominantly of the Ottoman, British, French, and Italian states and institutions and to a lesser extent the Russian and Greek ones from the beginning of the war in 1914 to the end of the Allied occupation in Istanbul in 1923. This work draws from a range of different archives and primary sources written in Ottoman Turkish, English, French, and Italian, such as government reports and communications between different governmental bodies, popular periodicals, archeological bulletins, memoirs, and books in order to present a new and inclusive way to look at the development of our relationship to cultural property and its uses, especially in times of armed conflict. This work also offers a map to the historical linkages between policies and practices regarding the cultural property. The central argument of this work is that the First World War created an international push towards the creation of protection and preservation measures for cultural property and that belligerents employed these measures as an additional marker of civilization and a tool of war and occupation.

This study investigates how cultural property-related activities, such as establishing museums and engaging in archeological excavations, was propelled by war, especially by the German destruction of cultural property in the first year of the war, and by the division (or the prospect of the division) of the Ottoman Empire. This work relates these topics to the different and sometimes clashing visions and plans regarding the nature of the Ottoman society, its past, and its future. I focus on the Ottoman Empire in its entirety, but I zoom out to look at wartime Greece and zoom in to Allied-occupied Istanbul to explore strategies of creation of public opinion via cultural property. I also study the reception of these cultural property-related activities and their impact on the making of international law.