In his ambi­tious new his­to­ry, The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Bor­ders, Jacob Daniels chal­lenges two pop­u­lar yet con­tra­dic­to­ry con­cep­tions of Jews liv­ing in the late Ottoman Empire and the ear­ly Turk­ish Repub­lic. In keep­ing with a trag­ic view of Jew­ish his­to­ry, the first notion posits that the empire’s bor­der­lands became a dead­ly place for its Jew­ish inhab­i­tants. In con­trast, the sec­ond mis­con­cep­tion high­lights the pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in the bor­der­land in com­par­i­son to its Chris­t­ian and Mus­lim neigh­bors. By focus­ing on the peri­od between 1908 and 1934, Daniels demon­strates the agency exhib­it­ed by the Sephardic com­mu­ni­ty as they nav­i­gat­ed a dif­fi­cult and volatile time.

Sephardic Jews emi­grat­ed to the Ottoman Empire after their expul­sion from Spain and Por­tu­gal in the ear­ly 1500s. In 1908, one of the old­est and largest Ladi­no-speak­ing Sephardic com­mu­ni­ties inhab­it­ed the Edirne province. Dur­ing the region’s ago­niz­ing shift from empire to nation-state, begin­ning in 1912, the Edirne province became caught in ten years of ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­putes between the Ottoman Empire, Bul­gar­ia, Greece, and Turkey. Hor­rif­ic vio­lence, forced pop­u­la­tion exchanges, and eth­nic cleans­ing of Chris­tians and Mus­lims accom­pa­nied these chang­ing bor­ders. While Jews were not the direct tar­gets of these attacks, they lived in a con­stant state of fear and uncer­tain­ty as they attempt­ed to sur­vive in a sit­u­a­tion where their posi­tion and iden­ti­ty were con­stant­ly shifting.

The Ottoman Empire orga­nized eth­nore­li­gious groups into mil­lets, which were autonomous, self-gov­ern­ing units. Since there were no bor­ders in the Balkan lands, eth­nore­li­gious mil­lets extend­ed across regions, and the rulers did not expect group mem­bers to iden­ti­fy with the cul­ture of their neigh­bors. They accept­ed cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences with­out see­ing them as a prob­lem or some­thing to cel­e­brate. As the par­a­digm began to shift toward the nation-state, cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences became a prob­lem solved through assim­i­la­tion or mar­gin­al­iza­tion. The Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty’s stature shift­ed from mil­let to minor­i­ty status.

Once the ini­tial dis­place­ments of Bul­gar­i­an and Greek Chris­tians and Mus­lims took place on the Edirne bor­der­lands, oth­er groups became tar­gets. In 1934, Turk­ish mobs engaged in a week-long attack on the Edirne Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. While no one was killed, the inci­dent caused a mas­sive exo­dus. Some Jews fled to Greece or Bul­gar­ia, but the major­i­ty went to Istan­bul. Today, the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion of Istan­bul is 12,000. No Jews remain in Edirne.