SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Field

Jewish, Europe, Middle East, Sephardi/Mizrahi Studies, Cultural and Comparative History.

Research Interests

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for 2010, Sarah Abrevaya Stein received her A.B. from Brown University in 1993 and her doctorate from Stanford University in 1999. Her scholarship has ranged across the Yiddish and Ladino speaking diasporas and the European, Russian, American, Ottoman and wider Mediterranean settings, but is always engaged with the reasons for and manifestations of Jewish cultural diversity in the modern period. Stein has authored two books, including Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008), which explores how Jews fostered and nurtured the modern trade in plumes across a global commodity chain and throughout the far-flung territories where ostriches were reared and plucked, and their feathers were sorted, exported, imported, auctioned, wholesaled, and finally manufactured for sale. An article drawn from this study, “Falling into Feathers: Jews and the Trans-Atlantic Ostrich Feather Trade,” is the 2008 winner of the Chester Penn Higby Prize, granted by the American Historical Association every two years for the best article published by the Journal of Modern History. Her first book, Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press, hardback 2004, paperback 2006) won the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003 and was a finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award in 2004.

Stein is now working on three book projects. The first of these, Mediterranean Fever: Classifying Jews in a Century of Decolonization, will consider how Mediterranean Jews asserted themselves and were imagined and categorized by international and national law, the social sciences, and medical research and in myriad decolonizing contexts of the twentieth century. Mediterranean Fever will explore the salacious testamentary trial of a Baghdadi Jewish real estate magnate who died in Shanghai in the 1930s; the discovery, by two Tunisian Jewish doctors working in France and North Africa, of a genetic disease (Familial Mediterranean Fever) disproportionately affecting Jews of Mediterranean origin; a series of polygamy cases that weighed how indelible was the “Oriental” nature of immigrant Jews in Israel, India, and Britain; and the legal negotiations and ethnographic research that accompanied the “repatriation” of a Saharan Jewish community to France in the course of the Algerian War.

A second project is the production of a documentary reader co-researched, co-edited, and co-authored with Julia Phillips Cohen (Vanderbilt University) entitled The Sephardic Studies Reader: 1730-1950 (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). The absence of a single documentary reader on the Sephardic diaspora is a cause of significant frustration to scholars who are—as is the field of Jewish Studies more generally—increasingly dedicated to emphasizing the diverse historical experiences of modern Jewries. The Sephardic Studies Reader will fill this lacunae by presenting a selection of vivid and original documents penned in Ladino, Turkish, Bulgarian, Rumanian, German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and English, written over the course of over two centuries, by or about Sephardic Jews in the heartland of modern Judeo-Spanish culture: the Balkans, Palestine, and Turkey under Ottoman and post-Ottoman rule.

A third book in progress, co-edited with Aron Rodrigue and including a text translated by Isaac Jerusalmi, is tentatively entitled An Ottoman Dissenter: Saadi Halevy and Jewish Salonica in the 19th Century (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). This work will present an annotated translation of the first known autobiography in Ladino, authored by Saadi Besalel Halevy. Halevy, a prominent publisher, journalist, and singer, and an impassioned proponent of the Jewish Haskalah (Englightenment), launched an extended campaign—in his autobiography as well as in La Epoka, the popular Ladino journal he founded—against Salonica’s rabbis, whom he decried for their fanatical ways. His memoir is not, however, devoted to vitriol alone. In unpretentious and unselfconscious language, Halevy offers vivid descriptions of his native home, of the Ottoman musical world, of family practices, and his quotidian life.

Selected Publications

Books
In progress Mediterranean Fever: Classifying Jews in a Century of Decolonization.

In progress, with Aron Rodrigue, An Ottoman Dissenter: Saadi Halevy and Jewish Salonica in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

In progress, with Julia Phillips Cohen, The Sephardic Studies Reader: 1730-1950 (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

2008 Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press). 52nd Annual New England Book Show Winner, Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Selected reviews of Plumes: The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, The Atlantic, The New Yorker (online edition), The Jewish Daily Forward, The Sunday Telegraph (London), The Guardian (Manchester), Literary Review (London), Sh’ma/JBooks, American Historical Review .

2004 Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires , Indiana University Press. Winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003; Koret Jewish Book Award Finalist, 2004. Paperback published 2006.

Peer Reviewed Articles
2010 “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Creation of the Jewish Colonial,” The American Historical Review (December).

2010 With Julia Phillips Cohen, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History.” Jewish Quarterly Review 100:3 (Summer).

2008 “American Deaf Jewish culture in historical and trans-national context,” American Jewish History 94/3, (September).

2008 “Sephardic Identities on the Margins of Europe: a response,” Jewish Social Studies 15/1 (Fall).

2007 “‘Falling into Feathers’: Jews and the trans-Atlantic ostrich feather trade,” The Journal of Modern History 79/4 (Winter): 772-812. Winner of the Higby Prize by the Modern European section of the American Historical Association, for best article in The Journal of Modern History, 2006-2008.

2007 “Mediterranean Jewries and Global Commerce in the modern period: on the trail of the Jewish feather trade,” Jewish Social Studies 13.2 (Winter): 1-39.

2006 “Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96.4 (Fall), 498-509.

2005 “Advertisements in Ottoman Ladino Journals,” Pe’amim, Studies in the Cultural
Heritage of Oriental Jewry 105-106 (Autumn 2005-Winter 2006), 57-82.

2005 “Modern Jews and the Imperial Imagination,” AJS Perspectives (Fall, 2005), 14-16.

2002 “Introduction: Ladino in Print,” Jewish History (Fall) 6/3, 225-233.

2002 “Faces of Revolution: Yiddish cartoons of the 1905 Revolution.” Slavic Review, American Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies 61/4 (Winter), 732-761.

2000 “Creating a Taste for the News: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish Periodicals of the Ottoman Empire.” Jewish Histor y, 14/1, 9-28.

1997 “Illustrating Chicago’s Jewish Left: Todros Geller and the L. M. Shteyn Farlag,” Jewish Social Studies 3/1, 74-110.

Book Chapters and other publications
In progress “Jews and Empire,” Cambridge History of Judaism, c. 1815-c.2000, Vol. VIII, Tony Michels and Mitchell B. Hart, eds, Cambridge University Press.

Forthcoming “Jews, Plumes, and Global Commerce in the Modern Period,” Jewish History Encounters Economy, Gideon Reuveni, editor. Berghahn books.

2009 “Shameful news: Language politics and the first Judeo-Spanish daily of the Ottoman Empire,” D. M. Bunis, Y. Bentolila & E. Hazan, editors, Languages and Literatures of Sephardi and Oriental Jews, Magnes Press, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

2007 “Divining the Secular in the Russian Yiddish popular press,” Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, editors, Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Indiana University Press, 253-275.

2004 “Bastard Tongues: Jewish Languages and Cultures in the Russian and Ottoman Empires,” Michael Geyer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Religion und Nation/Nation und Religion. Wallstein Verlag, 525-540.

2004 “The Permeable Boundaries of Ottoman Jewry.” Joel Migdal, editor, Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices. Cambridge University Press, 49-70.

2002 “Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries since 1492.” Martin Goodman et al., editor, The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Oxford University Press, 327-362.

Editing
2002 Guest Editor, “Ladino in Print,” Jewish History (Fall) 6/3.

Awards

Sarah Stein's research has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Research, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and the Maurice Amado Foundation, among other sources. Her scholarship has been awarded the Higby Prize by the Modern European section of the American Historical Association for Best Article in The Journal of Modern History (2008, for "Falling into Feathers") and the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for the Best First Book in Jewish Studies (2003, for Making Jews Modern). She is winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (2010, for Plumes).