SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Field

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

Research Interests

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 a book tentatively entitled Mediterranean Fever: Classifying Jews in a Century of Decolonization that considers 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 explores 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 evacuation of a Saharan Jewish community to France in the course of the Algerian War.

Selected Publications

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

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

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

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
Under review “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Creation of the Jewish Colonial.”

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.

Reviews
2010 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, AJS Review.

2008 Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry, Slavic Review.

2006 Matthias Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture, La Lettre Sépharade 27, October.

2006 Bea Lewkowicz, The Jewish Community of Salonika and Michael Molho, Traditions and Customs of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, The Jewish Daily Forward, 25 August.

2005 Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society. Journal of Social History, Winter.

2005 Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, The House of Jacob. Journal of Modern History 77/4.

2005 Carole Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts, Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 18.

2004 Avigdor Levy, editor, Jews, Turks, Ottomans, A Shared History, Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century. Slavic Review. American Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, 63/1, Spring.

2003 Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Roots of Sectarianism. Shofar 22/1, Fall.

2002 Daniel J. Elazar, editor, Still Moving: Recent Jewish Migration in Comparative Perspective. The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 7/5, October.

2001 Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World, A 900 Year-Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok. Shofar, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 19/4, Summer.

2000 Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self Image in the West. American Jewish History 88/3.

2000 Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Istanbul, Izmir. New Perspectives on Turkey, Fall.

1998 Sander Gilman, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence. Jewish Social Studies 4/2.

1997 Daniel Goffman, editor, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, History and Culture in the Modern Era. Diaspora, A Journal of Transnational Studies 6/1.