Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora by Devi Mays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora by Devi Mays Aviad Moreno Devi Mays. Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 360 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000398 In Forging Ties, Forging Passports, Devi Mays recounts the mesmerizing story of Ottoman Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the Americas—especially Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known as the Age of Migration, this epoch saw the emergence of new means of long-distance transport and communication that dramatically shaped the forging of interpersonal ties and ethnic and national identities across regions. Mays's work is more than part of an ongoing effort to reframe the generally geographically restricted historiographies of MENA Jewry by highlighting overlooked transregional interconnectivity. One of the author's most significant innovations is the way she addresses much broader questions about the complex relationship between the Age of Migration and the Age of Nationalism, and, more particularly, between the "hypermobile" individuals of that period and new state regulations characterized by the proliferation of passports and visas, especially after World War I. Drawing on a wide array of archival research conducted in nineteen archives across seven countries, Mays explores how certain Sephardic migrants were privileged enough to be able to maneuver among the different understandings of their religious, national, ethnic, racial, and class categorizations across different legal regimes. [End Page 496] The book is divided into six chronological chapters. Chapter 1 begins by arguing that at the turn of the century, Sephardic migrants in Mexico "resisted" rigid classification such as Ottoman expatriates or equivocal Mexicans, often "fabricating" their origins. By shifting between these and other national identities, mobile individuals could also forge transnational Sephardic commercial networks, and maintain a global Sephardic diasporic consciousness. By professing a multiplicity of liminal identities beyond the more traditional national and ethnic ones, as the narrative continues in the second chapter, Sephardic immigrants bypassed new American restrictions on enemy nationals' entrance and commercial transactions during World War I, and evaded other forms of wartime volatility in the 1910s in the Ottoman world, Mexico, and beyond. From the late nineteenth century to this period, "global citizenship" also conferred prestige and allowed management of stigmas of the Orient in the New World. Along these lines, chapter 3 explores how after World War I, particularly in the 1920s, Sephardic migrants and those who remained in the homeland made sense of the postwar instability and the Mexican Revolution to forge new trajectories and places for transnational connection with fellow Sephardic groups rather than simply becoming citizens of new nation-states. The fourth chapter assumes a world divided by new borders and related parochial national concepts, such as Turkish policies designed to encourage religious and ethnic minorities to migrate in order to homogenize the newly formed Turkish Republic, and the United States' imposition of immigration quotas in view of integration policies. Against this backdrop, Mexico was particularly receptive to Sephardic Jewish migrants, perceiving them, due to their Iberian origins, as "equally Spanish and Jewish" (134)—a context that Sephardic migrants learned to utilize. By drawing on the complex case of Ladino-speaking immigrants to the Americas, Mays's fascinating narrative challenges common perceptions of Jewish migrations as solely European, and of MENA migrations as motivated solely by the allure of the "developed North." Mays focuses on less-understood cultural links among the Ladino-speaking minorities in the Ottoman world, which were more inclined to integrate into the Hispanophone worlds than were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, Arabic-speaking Jews, and other Ottoman groups into corresponding spheres. A telling example is the story of a woman from Salonica who, stepping on Cuban soil for the first time in her life and hearing Spanish, wondered if the locals were in fact "all Jewish" (3). Dealing with the post–World War I illegalization of migration and transport of goods, chapter 5 examines how Sephardic migrants adapted by creating transnational patronage, familial, and commercial networks that traversed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to circumvent the bans and fabricate their "official" origins. The final chapter traces the evolution of these networks despite state control of mobility into World War II...