Sarah Abrevaya Stein | University of California, Los Angeles (original) (raw)

Papers by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Comparative Studies in Society and History , 2022

Harold Amateau could fit lots of things into a box neatly and efficiently. According to his daugh... more Harold Amateau could fit lots of things into a box neatly and efficiently. According to his daughter, everyone in the family turned to him when they needed help packing. 1 Amateau cultivated this talent as the owner of Caribbean Botanical Garden, a narrow, densely packed botánica, or religious goods store, that he opened in East Harlem at 80 East 115th Street in the 1930s. The tiny shop was stuffed with merchandise: medicinal herbs, candles, amulets, crucifixes, oils, incense, divination cards, statues of saints, and more (see image 1). The size and meticulous organization of Caribbean Botanical Garden suited its owner, who was blind; it was also a prudent investment for an immigrant of modest means. But Amateau's store was also stuffed with historical meaning. The botánica existed at the intersection of Eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic traditions and histories, and at the productive juncture of myriad religious, commercial, cultural, and healing practices. Botánicas tend to be understood as local manifestations of an intricate, transatlantic Black, Caribbean, and Latinx religious, spiritual, and healing worlds. 2 Their shelves hold the herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual Acknowledgments: A draft of this paper was shared at a 2019 workshop on the botanica organized by Robin Derby, Patrick Polk, and Katherine Smith at UCLA. I am thankful to the organizers and to fellow participants for their engagement. Thanks also to Carolyn Long Morrow for her generosity in sharing recordings, transcripts, and insights from her own research; Jason Mizrahi and Steve Amateau, co-owners of Original Products Botanica, for kindly opening their store, documents, and memories; Marty Meyer for inviting me to Indio Products and sharing his insights on Jews' involvement in the spiritual wares industry, accrued over six decades in the business; Micaela Amateau Amato, for welcoming me into her home, memories, and family archive; and Robin Derby, Carolyn Long, Tony Michels, Devin Naar, Lynn Thomas, Max Greenberg, and the editors of and anonymous reviewers for Comparative Studies in Society and History for their insightful, generous comments on drafts.

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022

This ethnobotanical, historical study explores modern Sephardic Jews' abiding affection for ruta ... more This ethnobotanical, historical study explores modern Sephardic Jews' abiding affection for ruta graveolens , rue, or ruda (as it is known in Ladino). Folkloric writing on ruda has emphasized the immutability of Mediterranean Jewish folkways, but ruda has a history that reveals how a plant can further a particular diaspora—not the Jewish diaspora from biblical Israel, nor the Sephardic diaspora from medieval Iberia, but the Jewish diaspora from the modern Ottoman Balkans. Ruda offers a fresh perspective on the caterwaul of change engulfing modern Sephardim, refocusing attention from politics to the intimate, tactile, and gendered.

Comparative Studies of Society and History, 2022

This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s ... more This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.

Archives Juives, 2016

In the climax of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) a variety of international parties,... more In the climax of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) a variety of international parties, including officials in France, Algeria, and Israel, fought to gain control over documentation of and about a small Jewish community in the Algerian Sahara. This essay considers why decolonization radically changed the fate of the papers of a community long fetishized as marginal by social scientists, policy makers, and the demographic bulk of North African Jewry. To do so, it looks back to a history of colonial law that segmented southern Algerian Jewry off from Jews of the north; and explores the fierce archival battle, a component of the Algerian war of independence, over who would control the documents of Algeria’s past. Finally, this article reaches into the present day, probing how documents of the North African and Middle Eastern past continue to be used to serve various, conflicting nationalist agendas. All told, this research teaches that when it comes to studying Algerian Jewish history, the historian inevitably bumps up against an active and highly politicized, multi-party contest over the sources of the Jewish past—one laced through with the complex history of Jews’ relationship to the colonial and postcolonial order, and, indeed, power itself.

American Historical Review, 2015

Amidst the denouement of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), a variety of international... more Amidst the denouement of the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), a variety of international parties, including officials in Israel, France, and Algeria, competed to micromanage, acquire, and steward documents pertaining to the small community of Jews in the Algerian Sahara. Reflecting back on the unique colonial history of southern Algeria, this paper reconstructs the ways in which French colonial classifications haunted the post-colonial era, continuing to affect Jews of southern Algerian origin long after the Algerian Sahara ceased to be home to Jews and Algeria became a sovereign nation; and argues that in the era of decolonization, the struggle to control papers pertaining to Saharan Jewish history abetted a spectrum of local, communal, and national projects. Moving outward, the article meditates on that which is unique—and that which is generalizable—about archives of the post-colonial era, suggesting that they are uniquely multi-sited, yet political, contentious centers of conversation. It concludes by exploring contemporary echoes of its case study apparent in the political intricacies that surround various extant and/or endangered North African and Middle Eastern Jewish archival collections.

Past & Present, 2015

This paper rethinks the First World War as a richly complex legal terrain, joining scholars of No... more This paper rethinks the First World War as a richly complex legal terrain, joining scholars of North Africa and South Asia in carrying a conversation about legal pluralism from the colonial to the continental setting. It explores the history of a novel form of legal protection created by the Third Republic in the course of the First World War and extended to some seven thousand Ottoman-born Jews living in France and its overseas possessions. In branding these men, women, and children specially protected “foreigners of Jewish nationality from the Levant,” the 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 allowed thousands of Jewish women, men, and children living as extraterritorial Ottoman subjects in France to avoid surveillance, deportation, or internment as enemy aliens, and to acquire the passports, residency permits, and official papers ever more indispensible to the modern world; what’s more, it allowed the Third Republic to sharpen its colonial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean, serving as a flexible tool of realpolitik. “Citizens of a Fictional Nation” explores how Ottoman-born Jews in France and officials in the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Interior, and Police Prefectures struggled to shoehorn legal categories born of the empire-state into the logic of a nation-state at war. Arguing that citizenship existed on a spectrum for many Jews born in the Ottoman Empire, it operates at the intersection of various fields, including Jewish, French, and Ottoman Histories, simultaneously contributing to the study of the Great War and the multifarious legal ambiguities unleashed by the major conflicts of the early twentieth century.

American Historical Review, 2011

Most of the Baghdadi Jews of Shanghai came to China by way of India, where, in the late nineteent... more Most of the Baghdadi Jews of Shanghai came to China by way of India, where, in the late nineteenth century, family patriarchs served in the employ of D. Sassoon and Company, a global operation owned by a Bombay-based Jewish family of Baghdadi origin that dealt in silk, cotton, and legal opium. In India, the first generation of émigrés received British Protected Person status easily, for it was in the financial interest of the British Colonial and Foreign Office to monitor and tax their estates; when these émigrés (and their children) migrated to and between commercial tributaries in South, Southeast, and East Asia, including Shanghai, they passed their protected status to wives, children, and grandchildren. This informal arrangement was allowed to function for some fifty years, until, in the inter-war period, international legal theorists and representatives of the British Foreign and Colonial Office began to question its legitimacy. The critique was not abstract: with the trauma of the First World War and the expansion of informal British imperialism in the Middle East, rising numbers of Middle Eastern Jews (in Iraq, especially) were seeking British naturalization or protection, and British officials were ill inclined to sanction a practice in South or East Asia that might appear to set a legal precedent in Palestine or Iraq.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2014

Journal of North African Studies, 2012

Algeria occupies a special case within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in ... more Algeria occupies a special case within the context of modern Jewish history, as the only site in the colonial world in which autochthonous Jews were granted citizenship by a colonial power; with the passage of the Crémieux Decree in 1870, some forty years after the French conquest of Algeria began, roughly thirty thousand Jews became citizens of France in one of the only acts of mass naturalization to occur under modern European imperial rule. It is usually but a footnote to histories of Algerian Jewry that the Crémieux Decree did not, in fact, extend to all Algerian Jews. At the time at which this law was passed, France had begun but not yet completed its bloody, fifty-year conquest of the Algerian Sahara, where several thousand Jews lived. Algeria’s Southern Territories (as they would come to be called in 1902) remained under direct military oversight for nearly eighty years of colonial rule, and Jewish residents of this administrative region, like the majority of Algerian Muslims, were categorized by the state as indigènes (indigenous subjects). This paper reconstructs how colonial conquest, law, and policy sought to delineate southern Algerian Jewry from northern Algerian Jewry. It argues that in the aftermath of the French conquest of the M’zab in 1882, the military sought to identify and legally isolate ‘southern Algerian Jewry’ (first from ‘northern Algerian Jewry’, and subsequently, from Algerian Muslims) for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews, per se; rather, in order to avoid jeopardizing a protectorate relationship it had built with the region’s Ibadite leadership in 1853, to protect French strategic interests, and to maintain a fragile status quo. Southern Algerian Jewish difference, neither inherent nor extra-historical, thus emerged as an exogenous creation of colonialism.

The Journal of North African Studies, 2012

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2010

This article presents synthetically the scholarly contributions of four generations of nineteenth... more This article presents synthetically the scholarly contributions of four generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sephardic intellectuals, pioneers of the field of Sephardic Studies, who were born in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Levant. These individuals participated in a world of Judeo-Spanish letters that stretched from Jerusalem to Vienna, Livorno to Cairo, Adrianople to Ruschuk, and Sofia to Sarajevo, but whose center of gravity lay somewhere between the Ottoman port cities of Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, cities with the largest and longest-running Ladino printing presses and the three largest Judeo-Spanish communities of the period. In the mid-nineteenth century, this unorganized collection of scholars began pursuing the study of Sephardic communities as they read the works of the German and East European Haskalah, translated Hebrew as well as western literatures and contributed to the flowering of the Ladino press. As the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire contracted, and as they witnessed a series of wars and disasters—most dramatically the near destruction of various Balkan Jewish communities during the Second World War—they began producing serious scholarship on the history and traditions of their own communities, compelled as much by their commitment to scientific studies as by their sense that the world of Judeo-Spanish culture they knew so intimately was poised to disappear. As the authors reconstruct this history, they argue that modern Sephardic intellectual history existed not in the form of a few isolated or marginalized thinkers, but in dynamic engagement with a wide landscape of Jewish and non-Jewish thought.

Journal of Modern History, 2007

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Jewish Social Studies, 2003

This paper writes Jews into the intertwined histories of colonial economics and modern consumptio... more This paper writes Jews into the intertwined histories of colonial economics and modern consumption. To do so, it explores the involvement of Mediterranean and North African Jews in the global trade of a single, highly-valued luxury good, the ostrich feather, whose exchange linked the economies of the Sahel, Sahara, and Central- and North- Africa with one another and the fashion worlds of Europe and the United States. Situating the global ostrich feather trade within a larger story of imperial competition over colonial commodities, this article argues that Mediterranean and North African Jewries played an important role in trans-national and trans-oceanic commerce in the modern period; contrary to received wisdom, their involvement in global networks was on occasion lessened rather than strengthened by the process of colonization.

American Jewish history, 2009

... The pair united in that wedding, Mary Bister and William Greenbaum, met at the non-Jewish Sch... more ... The pair united in that wedding, Mary Bister and William Greenbaum, met at the non-Jewish School for the Deaf and Dumb on Madison Avenue. Like Plapinger and Bernhardt, Bister andGreenbaum were married by a rabbi, according to traditional rites, and in a synagogue. ...

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2006

Books by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Stanford University Press, 2022

This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holoca... more This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved—Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble, yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes.

Translated from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French, Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up the history of wartime North Africa.

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leadi... more For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.

In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers.

With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

Stanford University Press

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction i... more Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's author, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia under the aegis of the Franco-Jewish organization the Alliance Israélite Universelle and quickly adopted—and was adopted by—the local community. Ninette is an unlikely protagonist: Compelled by poverty to work as a prostitute, she dreams of a better life and an education for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son in the local school and the story unfolds as she narrates her life to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's story should still prove surprising today suggests how much we stand to learn from history, and from the secrets of Sin Street. This volume offers the first English translation of Danon's best-known work. A selection of his letters and an editors' introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern ... more 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, winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Studies, 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.

Comparative Studies in Society and History , 2022

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022

Comparative Studies of Society and History, 2022

Archives Juives, 2016

American Historical Review, 2015

Past & Present, 2015

American Historical Review, 2011

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2014

Journal of North African Studies, 2012

The Journal of North African Studies, 2012

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2010

Journal of Modern History, 2007

Jewish Social Studies, 2003

American Jewish history, 2009

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2006

Stanford University Press, 2022

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019

With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

Stanford University Press

University of Chicago Press, 2016

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the ... more The history of Algerian Jews has thus far been viewed from the perspective of communities on the northern coast, who became, to some extent, beneficiaries of colonialism. But to the south, in the Sahara, Jews faced a harsher colonial treatment. In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria, Sarah Abrevaya Stein asks why the Jews of Algeria’s south were marginalized by French authorities, how they negotiated the sometimes brutal results, and what the reverberations have been in the postcolonial era.

Drawing on materials from thirty archives across six countries, Stein tells the story of colonial imposition on a desert community that had lived and traveled in the Sahara for centuries. She paints an intriguing historical picture—of an ancient community, trans-Saharan commerce, desert labor camps during World War II, anthropologist spies, battles over oil, and the struggle for Algerian sovereignty. Writing colonialism and decolonization into Jewish history and Jews into the French Saharan one, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria is a fascinating exploration not of Jewish exceptionalism but of colonial power and its religious and cultural differentiations, which have indelibly shaped the modern world.

Yale University Press, 2010

The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America pr... more The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America prompted a bustling global trade in ostrich feathers that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War. When feathers fell out of fashion with consumers, the result was an economic catastrophe for many, a worldwide feather bust. In this remarkable book, Sarah Stein draws on rich archival materials to bring to light the prominent and varied roles of Jews in the feather trade. She discovers that Jews fostered and nurtured the trade across the global commodity chain and throughout the far-flung territories where ostriches were reared and plucked, and their feathers were sorted, exported, imported, auctioned, wholesaled, and finally manufactured for sale.

From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from rival Sephardic families whose feathers were imported from the Sahara and traded across the Mediterranean, from New York’s Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, Stein explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture. This is a singular story of global commerce, colonial economic practices, and the rise and fall of a glamorous luxury item.

Stanford University Press, 2012

This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language mem... more This book presents for the first time the complete text of the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, transliterated from the original script, translated into English, and introduced and explicated by the editors. The memoirist, Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi (1820–1903), wrote about Ottoman Jews' daily life at a time when the finely wrought fabric of Ottoman society was just beginning to unravel. His vivid portrayal of life in Salonica, a major port in the Ottoman Levant with a majority Jewish population, thus provides a unique window into a way of life before it disappeared as a result of profound political and social changes and the World Wars. Sa'adi was a prominent journalist and publisher, one of the most significant creators of modern Sephardic print culture. He was also a rebel who accused the Jewish leadership of Salonica of being corrupt, abusive, and fanatical; that leadership, in turn, excommunicated him from the Jewish community. The experience of excommunication pervades Sa'adi's memoir, which documents a world that its author was himself actively involved in changing.

Indiana University Press, 2003

On the eve of the 20th century, Jews in the Russian and Ottoman empires were caught up in the maj... more On the eve of the 20th century, Jews in the Russian and Ottoman empires were caught up in the major cultural and social transformations that constituted modernity for Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewries. What did it mean to be Jewish and Russian, Jewish and Ottoman, Jewish and modern? To answer these questions, Sarah Abrevaya Stein explores the texts most widely consumed by Jewish readers: popular newspapers in Yiddish and Ladino. This skillful comparative study yields new perspectives on the role of print culture in imagining national and transnational communities and the diverse ways in which modernity was envisioned under the rule of empire.