In Forging Ties, Forging Passports, Devi Mays recounts the mesmerizing story of Ottoman Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the Americas—especially Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known as the Age of Migration, this epoch saw the emergence of new means of long-distance transport and communication that dramatically shaped the forging of interpersonal ties and ethnic and national identities across regions.
Mays's work is more than part of an ongoing effort to reframe the generally geographically restricted historiographies of MENA Jewry by highlighting overlooked transregional interconnectivity. One of the author's most significant innovations is the way she addresses much broader questions about the complex relationship between the Age of Migration and the Age of Nationalism, and, more particularly, between the “hypermobile” individuals of that period and new state regulations characterized by the proliferation of passports and visas, especially after World War I. Drawing on a wide array of archival research conducted in nineteen archives across seven countries, Mays explores how certain Sephardic migrants were privileged enough to be able to maneuver among the different understandings of their religious, national, ethnic, racial, and class categorizations across different legal regimes.
The book is divided into six chronological chapters. Chapter 1 begins by arguing that at the turn of the century, Sephardic migrants in Mexico “resisted” rigid classification such as Ottoman expatriates or equivocal Mexicans, often “fabricating” their origins. By shifting between these and other national identities, mobile individuals could also forge transnational Sephardic commercial networks, and maintain a global Sephardic diasporic consciousness. By professing a multiplicity of liminal identities beyond the more traditional national and ethnic ones, as the narrative continues in the second chapter, Sephardic immigrants bypassed new American restrictions on enemy nationals’ entrance and commercial transactions during World War I, and evaded other forms of wartime volatility in the 1910s in the Ottoman world, Mexico, and beyond. From the late nineteenth century to this period, “global citizenship” also conferred prestige and allowed management of stigmas of the Orient in the New World. Along these lines, chapter 3 explores how after World War I, particularly in the 1920s, Sephardic migrants and those who remained in the homeland made sense of the postwar instability and the Mexican Revolution to forge new trajectories and places for transnational connection with fellow Sephardic groups rather than simply becoming citizens of new nation-states.
The fourth chapter assumes a world divided by new borders and related parochial national concepts, such as Turkish policies designed to encourage religious and ethnic minorities to migrate in order to homogenize the newly formed Turkish Republic, and the United States’ imposition of immigration quotas in view of integration policies. Against this backdrop, Mexico was particularly receptive to Sephardic Jewish migrants, perceiving them, due to their Iberian origins, as “equally Spanish and Jewish” (134)—a context that Sephardic migrants learned to utilize.
By drawing on the complex case of Ladino-speaking immigrants to the Americas, Mays's fascinating narrative challenges common perceptions of Jewish migrations as solely European, and of MENA migrations as motivated solely by the allure of the “developed North.” Mays focuses on less-understood cultural links among the Ladino-speaking minorities in the Ottoman world, which were more inclined to integrate into the Hispanophone worlds than were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, Arabic-speaking Jews, and other Ottoman groups into corresponding spheres. A telling example is the story of a woman from Salonica who, stepping on Cuban soil for the first time in her life and hearing Spanish, wondered if the locals were in fact “all Jewish” (3).
Dealing with the post–World War I illegalization of migration and transport of goods, chapter 5 examines how Sephardic migrants adapted by creating transnational patronage, familial, and commercial networks that traversed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to circumvent the bans and fabricate their “official” origins. The final chapter traces the evolution of these networks despite state control of mobility into World War II, at which time the networks began to break down just as they became most crucial. This story focuses on Mauricio Fresco, the son of Constantinople's most prominent Ladino-language newspaper editor, as he transformed himself from a Turkish Jewish migrant in Mexico to a prominent Mexican diplomat stationed in Shanghai in the 1930s and later in Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Nazi-occupied Paris. Fresco, in Mays's rendering, is one of those Sephardic individuals who “thrived in motion” (2).
One of Mays's assumptions is that both worlds, the “Old” and the “New,” experienced the “post-imperial” emergence of nation-states concurrently. Her conclusions, drawn from the focus on the Ottoman center, could be enhanced by reflecting on the simultaneous and somewhat similar Sephardic migration network originating in northern Morocco, another Mediterranean wellspring of Jewish migration to Latin America. This case reminds us that the emergence of nationalism across most parts of the Americas and Europe in fact overlapped with ongoing and newer colonial-imperial projects over parts of Africa, Asia, as well as the Caribbean Basin. These projects persisted well into the twentieth century, in a way that generated additional dynamics of global migration at the time. Between 1912 and 1956, northern Morocco became a hub of multicultural encounters between Jews and an unprecedented number of European settlers, predominantly Spaniards, in a way that not just hybridized the identities of local Jews, and influenced their fluency in European languages, but also facilitated their ongoing migration to (the former Spanish colonies in) the New World.
Additionally, the exploration of eastward movement of Jews from Southeast Asia and Asia Minor to Palestine would also benefit from cross-referencing with Mays's analysis, especially since restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement by the British Mandate are a well-known topic in Jewish history. It would be groundbreaking to find out that here, too, Sephardic Jews used diverse identities other than their Jewish ones to bypass restrictions on entering Palestine.
These additional topics for investigation should in no way diminish the significant contribution of Mays's innovative research. Forging Ties, Forging Passports is an important addition to research, bridging Jewish and Middle Eastern scholarship with the broader investigation of migration and diaspora, as the transnational turn still makes new inroads into MENA studies and Sephardic studies.
