Constructions of Jewish Modernity and Marginality in Izmir, 1860-1907

Abstract

Izmir, an Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean port city, underwent significant changes during the wide-ranging Ottoman reform movement, Tanzimat (1839-1876). By the end of the nineteenth century, the emerging picture was a rapid cultural, social, and technological transformation of the local government and the local Jewish community accompanied by a heightened awareness of marginals’ visibility and mobility. In the body of a Jewish marginal, Ottoman officials, Jewish religious and secular leaders saw not only the threat of social disorder but the potential of imperial and communal disintegration. While conceptualization of marginality was embedded in the social, moral, and political concerns, it was inextricably tied to the articulation of European modernity as a regulatory category. Therefore, any discussion of Ottoman and Sephardi Jewish modernization efforts of the nineteenth century is bound to include marginal groups as a reminder of efforts to define new corporeal norms and ideals along the rhetorics of modernization and civilization. Rich historiography has explored the broader debates surrounding Jewish communities of the late Ottoman Empire, yet their marginal members have been almost entirely ignored. This dissertation investigates the complexities of being poor, diseased, criminal, foreign, or religious convert as markers of Sephardic Jewish selfhood in the overlapping realm of the urban public space, community, and family; focuses on ideas and practices surrounding Sephardic Jewish modernity. By doing so, it maps a new methodological terrain by placing the marginal’s body at the center. Drawing extensively on previously untapped Ottoman and Ladino archival material, it offers a new read on the increasing awareness of marginality to distinguish “normal” from “abnormal,” “appropriate” from “inappropriate.” In this dissertation, first, I argue that the emergence and dissemination of codes of marginality with corporeal manifestations appeared and evolved in relation to contemporary imperial and communal anxieties of the period that also reverberated across the geographic map. Second, contrary to the existing scholarship, which has depicted the margins and marginals as isolated spaces and beings on the verge of modernity, I argue that the Jewish marginals of Izmir resided at the heart of the urban center and were tightly embedded in the modern dynamics of their time. Scrutinizing the familiar and focusing on the underbelly of Jewish urban life, this dissertation challenges prevailing paradigms in Jewish Studies and Ottoman Studies. It also reveals that neither the Sephardi culture nor Ottoman Sephardi modernity was monolithic nor tangential to the larger Jewish world.