Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora

Abstract

Devi Mays's book explores the generation of Sephardi Jewish migrants who left the Mediterranean regions belonging to the Ottoman Empire (before and after its fall) and were thrown into a world newly invested in formal paperwork to categorize and identify individuals and their origins. She focuses on the ways that “states attempt to categorize, make stable, and fix populations” but argues that “the individuals and groups this book examines often thrived in motion, in blurring categories that were not as rigid as consular and border officials liked to believe, or at least to portray in their interactions with higher-ups” (p. 2). Through an array of sources from archives in the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe, Mays traces the trajectories of her subjects as they navigated borders and immigration officials, making and remaking their lives and identities.Mays has written a transnational history, focusing on those from the Ladino-language sphere of the Ottoman Empire, who usually ended up in Mexico at some point. Even as she follows many men who make their homes in or pass through Mexico, readers never fully understand why Mexico is the focus of much of her inquiry or the contours of Sephardi life there. The stories of individuals can often tell us important information about the choices that people faced as well as the unseen struggles of those who were not elite. Yet by not tethering those individuals to the communities in which they found themselves and by choosing to focus more broadly on the larger state, the lives of the individuals remain blurry in many ways. Clearly, tracing the lives of individual migrants moving between states in a period of upheaval is a difficult task—yet a broader discussion of the societies in which these migrants found themselves would have added a great deal. State responses, passport stamps, and individual trajectories can tell us only so much.Mays's book moves from very specific examples of individual movement between regions and states to large-scale issues like the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath or the new directions of the Mexican government following the revolution. What is often missing is the space in-between. With her work focused mostly at the micro or macro level, we get little sense of the societies and larger cultural networks in which the individuals existed—such as families, communities, and cities.Mays returns throughout the book to the issue of “hypermobility”—migrants who spend short stays in different countries (sometimes just a matter of months) before moving on. The concept is useful, and her examples show the economic and personal reasons for why many Sephardi men seemed to be constantly moving. Yet the vast majority of her examples were men, and there was no discussion of the (potentially) gendered nature of this hypermobility. The lack of gender analysis overall in the work was frustrating. Women appear in the book, but almost always as the wife or daughter of a more important subject, and their role in migration overall is never clear. Were women also allowed to be hypermobile, or was it a privilege accorded to only men? This would have been useful to know.The book is at its strongest when discussing the large-scale changes that affected the lives of its subjects. Mays's treatment of the Ottoman Empire's fall and the ensuing uncertainty of those living in the region is excellent. The rise of passport and visa controls was another area in which the book makes a strong contribution. By following subjects who started migrating before the era of standardized passports through World War I and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Mays shows the array of strategies that individuals employed to get where they wanted. Few other histories of migration delve so deeply into the papers required for transit, and because of the hypermobility of many of her subjects, the study is fascinating. She demonstrates how the rise of documentation allowed creative ways for subjects to reinvent their identities and origins as they passed through different locations.Mays's work adds a great deal to our knowledge of the mechanics of how Sephardi Jews migrated from the Mediterranean to the Americas, and her focus on hypermobility will align in a variety of ways with much scholarship on a variety of immigrant groups throughout history. The book will be of great interest to scholars working on transnational migration networks as well as those researching Sephardi Jews and the role of ethnic minorities in Mexico.