Between 1860 and the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, over a million subjects, most of them Christians, immigrated to the Americas. The largest Jewish branch of this diaspora formed in the United States, numbering fifty to sixty thousand. This coedited collection rotates around a fractional subset of this group, the Sephardic community of Seattle, which hovered at around three thousand by the mid-1900s, constituting the country’s second largest Ottoman Jewish community in the U.S., after that of New York.Footnote ¹

The bulk of this volume deals with the Siatelinos (the Ladino term for people from Seattle), reflecting the partnership between the University of Washington and the local Sephardic community, initiated mainly through the academic entrepreneurship of Devin Naar, who joined the Department of History as assistant professor in 2011. Coeditors Kerem Tınaz and Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, both historians, launched the project that became this book not in Seattle, but at Koç University in Istanbul, where the two had planned a gallery exhibition sponsored by the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi, or ANAMED), along with an accompanying catalog. Both endeavors aimed to showcase the documents and objects—two thousand cataloged items and counting—gathered from among Seattle’s Ottoman Jewish descendants under the leadership of Naar, founder of the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program. When the idea for the exhibition took shape in 2015, the coeditors were junior fellows at ANAMED. Both earned their PhD degrees in 2018, the former at Oxford University, and the latter from the Interdisciplinary Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington.

Legal complications and concerns for the security of items to be transported a quarter-way across the world resulted in cancellation of the exhibit a few months before its launch. The coeditors then reimagined the abortive catalog as the present volume, which consists of nine chapters: six essays by scholars of history, language, and literature, an overview of the collection by its former research coordinator, and two reflective pieces by descendants of Ottoman Jews.

The book opens with Devin Naar’s historical assessment of Seattle’s Sephardic community, whose earliest members arrived as fishermen in the early 1900s. The essay, titled “Ottoman Imprints and Erasures among Seattle’s Sephardic Jews,” emphasizes victimhood measured primarily through immigration restrictions and residential covenants leveled against nonwhites and Jews, sometimes explicitly against “Turks of the Hebrew Race” (p. 62). Naar argues that Seattle’s Sephardim responded to these adversities, intensified by World War I, by disavowing identification with the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they highlighted the Spanish or Sephardic dimensions of their heritage, asserting themselves as descendants of Jews who had been expelled from the Spanish kingdoms in 1492 and who spoke Ladino, a language based on early modern Romance languages and fused with elements of Arabic, Aramaic, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Turkish. Naar observes that once Sephardim firmly secured a white social and legal status in the post–World War II period, they could “more readily reclaim” their Ottoman roots in the form of pride in the empire’s successor state, Turkey (p. 73). His main examples are the “Turkish restaurant” (p. 73) operated by Morris and Zelda Tacher in the 1940s, its walls embellished with Turkish flags and posters, and the community’s long-standing custom of referring to one of its two synagogues as “Turkish” (p. 74). But such examples remain anecdotal because, as Naar argues, these Jews had already “internalized” a Spanish identity (p. 75).

In the second chapter, Ty Alhadeff, former research coordinator of the Sephardic Studies Collection, summarizes the process of amassing over two thousand items, which entailed fundraising, partnering with the local community, advertising for donations in newsletters, digging through attics, basements, and bookshelves, and digitizing the retrieved documents and objects, a benefit for community members reluctant to part with their storied possessions.

In chapter 3, “From the Aegean to the Pacific: Ottoman Legacies in Seattle Sephardi Synagogues,” Maureen Jackson argues that Seattle Sephardim have consistently resisted attempts to subsume their liturgical traditions under the Western heritage of the historic “Spanish-Portuguese” synagogues (p. 105), whose founders pioneered the country’s Jewish community in 1654 and who migrated from the Iberian Peninsula without an Ottoman sojourn. Jackson references the reciprocal visits Ottoman Sephardic Jews and dervishes in Edirne made to one another’s places of worship, as captured in the testimony of Samuel Benaroya, a Seattle cantor who was interviewed by musicologist Edwin Seroussi in the 1990s. Benaroya and his father attended the Mevlevi lodge in their native city of Edirne every Friday evening for over a decade with the intention of incorporating the Sufi melodies they heard into their Hebrew prayers. Jackson characterizes the musical traditions of Ottoman Muslims and Jews as “co-developing” (p. 111), resisting a tenacious historiographical model that envisions Jews as external to broader society. Using music as her lens, Jackson offers a counterweight to Naar’s finding that Siatelinos steadily drifted away from their Ottoman identity.

Culling from personal libraries donated to the Sephardic Studies Center, Laurent Mignon in chapter 4 surveys several secular and religious publications in Ladino, exploring the most popular genres and themes represented in the books Ottoman Jewish immigrants brought with them to Seattle, such as novels (which stressed love and adventure), moral treatises, and historical fiction. This chapter, titled “Walking through a Library: Notes on the Ladino Novel and Some Other Books,” would have benefited from a broader discussion of Ladino literature, a categorical analysis of the donor libraries Mignon examined, and brief biographies of each benefactor. Additionally, scrutiny of marginal notations and ownership, dedicatory inscriptions, and booksellers’ stamps might shed light on readers’ responses, gift-giving practices, and supply chains.

Chapter 5, Özgür Özkan’s “Sephardic Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Army,” offers a revisionist analysis of non-Muslim conscription in late Ottoman militia forces, during the era of mandatory universal male induction instituted in 1909. Challenging the long-standing scholarly assumption that Jews departed the empire to escape military service, Özkan argues that non-Muslim participation in and attitudes about the Ottoman military were varied and underdocumented, and therefore inconclusive. The author observes that materials found in local collections, such as the diary of Seattle’s Leon Behar, who served as artillery officer in the Ottoman Army, can potentially “put dominant narratives into question and stimulate new debate about them” (p. 163).

The sixth essay, “Artifacts and Their Aftermath” by Benjamin C. Fortna, finds an awkward place in this volume. Fortna focuses on Eşref Sencer Kuşçubaşı (1883–1964), an Ottoman insurgent and special officer of Circassian ancestry, whose trunk of personal documents and objects the author gained access to from Kuşçubaşı’s descendants. Fortna makes a passing reference to other Ottoman collections, but his essay has nothing to do with either Jews or Seattle. A divisive and shadowy figure, Kuşçubaşı is remembered in Turkey alternatively as a hero and a traitor. The trunk’s most interesting ego document discusses atrocities committed by a fellow Ottoman soldier of Circassian descent against the non-Muslim population of Western Thrace. Fortna might have better formulated his chapter by considering Kuşçubaşı within the framework of nonconforming minorities serving in the Ottoman military.

The seventh chapter “Narrating Sephardic Histories: A Reflection” combines a primary source by Sam Negri (b. 1941) with commentary by Ottoman historian and podcaster Chris Gratien. Negri provides a sketch of growing up in a lower-class, white neighborhood of Brooklyn as the son of Ottoman Jewish immigrants, whose lives were upended when Sam’s father Leon Negri was murdered by a youth at a bus stop in 1967. Negri recalls how the mafia and press pressured the family to politicize the crime as a way to “resist the demographic change taking place in America’s cities and the integration that came with it” (p. 190). Although Negri is himself a journalist, his contribution only briefly alludes to the reportage of the murder, without citations. Neither Negri nor Gratien individualize the teen gunman, depriving him of agency and failing to apply to him Gratien’s conclusion that the men, women, and children historians study are “real people with family, friends, and descendants” (p. 199). This self-conscious elision of the killer’s biography reflects a general tendency of the volume, perhaps a characteristic of communally driven chronicles, to treat outsiders as props upholding a larger narrative of immigrant hardships and perseverance. Daily interactions and co-creation of culture and norms with the broader society seldom capture the spotlight in such chronicles.

The penultimate chapter, by Kerem Tınaz, focuses on the endeavors and legacy of Avraham Galanti (a.k.a. Galante, 1873–1961), a Turkish Sephardic scholar and historian whose archives are housed in the National Library of Israel. This essay uncovers the economic, linguistic, and political obstacles that prevented Galanti from publishing and preserving much of his work. The volume closes with a personal reflection by his great-grandniece, Hannah S. Pressman (“Galante’s Daughter: Crafting an Archival Family Memoir”), whose involvement with the Sephardic studies program helped her forge a path of discovery about the distaff side of her family, including the slaughter of several of its Rhodian members in the Holocaust.

It is the essay by Tınaz that most clearly conveys the power of communally driven archives like the Sephardic Studies Collection of the University of Washington. Tınaz reflects that a “single object or document with no apparent historical significance kept in a personal library, when placed together with similar objects in a collection, might become an indispensable element in piecing together the communal past” (p. 213). The partnership forged between the university and its local Ottoman descendant community, he notes, fosters “a new cultural and historical consciousness” (p. 213), and the loss of such documents leads to the “extinction of many stories” (p. 213) and “harms historians’ perspective on the past” (p. 220).

Although the nine essays in this volume fail to form a cohesive whole, a somewhat unified tone does emerge. The overall picture is of a community that endured racism and social exclusion from various mainstream societies, but persevered; interacted with outsiders, but only anecdotally; existed apart from broader society but rarely participated in its creation; carries a legacy of diasporic journeys and immigration, but not one worthy of comparison with other immigrants groups—of whom we hear virtually nothing in this volume.

At the same time, this volume spotlights a tremendous achievement: the amassing of a collection of private and communally held documents and objects that reflect what the coeditors term Seattle’s Ottoman Jewish “afterlife” (p. 19). Central to this endeavor were the bidirectional bridges Naar built between the university’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the local Sephardic community. The result is a community-driven archive that, as the coeditors note, assembles “objects and documents that would otherwise be scattered, and sometimes lost” (p. 22). In the metacognitive introduction that opens the book, they reflect on this archive as “a new type of collection” (p. 29), one that gathers, sorts, organizes, and digitizes “a constant flow of objects produced and donated by the very community whose history” the end users hope to write (p. 25). The building of this repository boasts many spinoff achievements: renewed academic interest in the American branch of the Ottoman Jewish diaspora, including the Ladino language in its many spoken and written forms, and Sephardic studies courses and programming that have engaged University of Washington students at all levels, from undergraduate to postdoctoral researchers, and a wide range of disciplines, from history and comparative literature to computer science and engineering. This volume is a tribute to a public university’s extremely successful humanities project. The online availability of its digitized collection democratizes archival research and lives up to one of the core missions of the public university.

In his aforementioned chapter, Ty Alhadeff reflects on the disparagement prominent scholars over the ages have expressed for the literary output and intellectual capacity of Ottoman Jews. Already in the late nineteenth-century, Heinrich Graetz had concluded that not a single community leader “rose above the level of any everyday person.” Ottoman rabbinical scholars walked only on “well-trodden paths,” eschewing originality.Footnote ² In The Jews of Islam (1984), Bernard Lewis concluded that the writings of Ottoman Jews after the sixteenth century, whether in Hebrew or Ladino, were of “limited appeal” (p. 86).Footnote ³ Ilan Stavans, in The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005), maintained that Ladino was “never used for intellectual discussion” (p. 86) and its speakers failed to produce authors of international renown.Footnote ⁴ Sephardic Trajectories is an implicit critique of the “advanced civilization” approach to the Ottoman Jewish past. It seeks not the “preeminence” of a population group, but rather new knowledge embedded within previously unknown primary source materials and their aggregate, the kind of collection that lends itself to scholarly innovation.