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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora by Devi Mays Hannah S. Pressman (bio) Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora. By Devi Mays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xi + 341 pp. In her new book Forging Ties, Forging Passports, Devi Mays portrays a group of "hypermobile individuals" who skillfully performed new national affiliations or ethnic identities as circumstances required (12). Drawing on archival materials from seven countries, Mays deftly interweaves the stories of Jews whose "shared Sephardiness"—combined with ethnolinguistic flexibility—provided a global safety net in an era of increasingly stringent restrictions on movement between countries (94). The result is a compelling presentation of early-to-mid twentieth-century migration whereby, despite fragmentation and upheaval on the level of empire and state, "transnational familial and economic connections propelled the creation and perpetuation of a Sephardi, and at times, a broader Jewish collective that transcended borders" (55–56). Mays bookends her study with the 1949 correspondence between Mauricio Fresco, a Sephardi diplomat living in Mexico, and Abraham Galante, an eminent Turkish Jewish historian and one-time member of Turkey's Grand National Assembly. The English translation of Fresco's French letter to Galante appears in Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein's Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 (2014). Both thematically and methodologically, Forging Ties is very much in dialogue with the emphasis in Sephardi Lives on the multiplicity of Sephardi experience during the modern era. Another obvious [End Page 90] touchstone text, with its emphasis on peregrinations and passports, is Stein's Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (2016). While chronicling state policies, surveillance, and rhetoric regarding Jewish migrants, Mays offers meticulous readings of individual stories in order to disrupt the top-down narratives and fixed categories through which scholars typically construct migration histories. In so doing, Mays mimics the subversive techniques employed by her own research subjects, who "played with the ways that their religious, national, ethnic, racial, gender, and class taxonomies were read across different legal and national regimes" (12). Mays is especially effective at rendering the interwar Mexican context for this phenomenon. Through exegeses of archival documents, she makes clear the individual human costs of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the Turkification process of the 1920s. The forging of a monolithic national identity in the new Turkish Republic necessitated drastic shifts in the societal tolerance of minorities that had generally prevailed during the Ottoman Empire. Conversely, after the Mexican Revolution, new immigrants were welcomed to help boost the economy in Mexico. Alternately labeled turcos, Spanish-Syrians, djidios orientales, or judíos españoles, former Ottoman Jews made inroads into Mexican society by deploying just the right amount of cultural and linguistic affiliation—with France, in the case of Sephardi shopkeepers appealing to customers' sense of elite continentalism, or with Spain, in the case of nearly all the Sephardi migrants hoping to assimilate quickly. In this regard Mays cites a fascinating 1922 article in La Luz, a Ladino periodical out of New York, in which a certain Albert Avigdor explained "Porke los Sefaradim Deven Pensar en Meksiko" ("Why the Sephardim Should Consider Mexico"). Addressing his primarily American Sephardi audience, Avigdor contended that Spanish fluency, easily attained by Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, could facilitate faster upward mobility than was available to Sephardim who were marginalized by Ashkenazi Jews and struggling to succeed in the United States. Besides their "shared Iberian heritage," Avigdor also suggested that socially, Mexicans and Levantine Jews shared a "more pleasant, more hospitable" approach to life and a slower pace compared to Americans (160–61). Of course, the dark backdrop that went unmentioned in Avigdor's upbeat essay was the imposition of federal immigration quotas that greatly restricted Jewish immigration to the United States in the early 1920s. Undeterred, some Sephardi migrants found loopholes and attempted to enter America via Cuba or the Mexican border, often passing as Cubans. Apparently concerned that this illegal activity would reflect poorly on the already-established American Jewish community, B'nai B'rith offered resources [End Page 91] such as loans and Spanish classes to help convince Sephardi migrants to stay put in...