The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders

Next month, Stanford University Press will publish The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders. Written by Jacob Daniels, Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, this is the first scholarly monograph in English to follow Edirne’s Sephardi community from the final years of the Ottoman Empire through the first decade of the Turkish Republic. While historians have revealed much about Jewish life in Istanbul, Izmir, and Thessaloniki, Daniels goes beyond these port cities to the inland region of Edirne, which is now in northwest Turkey. Bordering Istanbul on one side and Bulgaria on the other, home to a majority-Muslim population but also one of the empire’s largest communities of Orthodox Christians, Edirne Province in the late-Ottoman period was a place of contradictions. Unraveling them is the first step in telling the story of the local Jewish community.

In that spirit, Daniels starts by setting the scene and exploring the things that structured everyday life for Edirne Jews in the first decade of the twentieth century: communal institutions and boundaries, the new Balkan railway, and socioeconomic networks that spanned the countries of Southeast Europe. His second chapter shifts to a pair of political events that drastically changed the lives of Edirne denizens in late 1908: The Young Turk Revolution and Bulgaria’s declaration of independence (from the Ottoman Empire). Next, Daniels dedicates two chapters to the period 1912 to 1922, which was marked by wars, foreign occupations, and horrific ethnic cleansing campaigns. Remarkably, local Jews were about the only group not targeted by mass violence at this time. Ironically, it was precisely by emphasizing their Sephardi-Jewish identity that community members navigated a period in which Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian leaders all sought to homogenize Edirne’s population along the lines of their rigid nationalist visions.

Today, Sephardi Jews might associate Edirne with the only case of anti-Jewish mob violence in the history of modern Turkey. For one week in the summer of 1934, Muslims throughout the region of Eastern Thrace (also known as Turkish Thrace) attacked their Jewish neighbors and looted their stores and homes. Though no Jews were killed, the so-called “Thrace Events” (Trakya Olayları) horrified community members and spurred a Jewish exodus from the region. For centuries, Edirne had been home to one of the largest Ladino-speaking communities in the world. While this group of people had managed, by and large, to survive the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War I (1914-1918), and the Greco-Turkish War (1920-1922), the “peacetime” that followed would spell the end of the community. Most Edirne Jews moved to Istanbul in the months and years after 1934. But today, Edirnelis also live in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Paris, Tel Aviv, and beyond.

As the subtitle suggests, this book attributes a central role to the state border—something that repeatedly moved and grew stronger in the period 1908 to 1934. Ultimately, what ended the local Jewish community was not antisemitism, per se, but an intolerance of borderland minorities that many European states demonstrated during the interwar period (and had roots in earlier decades). With insights like this, Daniels sheds light on an overlooked Sephardi community, the broader Jewish encounter with modern nation-states, and the very nature of state borders. Written in an accessible style, this book should prove equally valuable to readers exploring their heritage and scholars interested in modern Jewish History.

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