UCLA

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.