Chapter 4 of Sara Stein's Extraterritorial Dreams contains a remarkable opening sentence:

And rivets the reader. One normally finds such arresting writing at the beginning of novels, not studies of Ottoman or Jewish history. It is to Stein's great credit that she has recovered remarkable characters buried in history, and brought them to life in such artful prose. Disputes over Hardoon's inheritance raise questions that are central to the book: after World War I what law could be applied to a Jewish resident of Shanghai, who was once an Ottoman subject, a “British protected person” born in Baghdad? What was the legal status of extraterritorial Jews in colonial settings?

Stein uses the examples of the legal status of Ottoman Jews residing in Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia to examine the meaning of citizenship in the modern world. Other scholars interested in the topic could write a dry, legal history. But Stein, who has already offered readers two lively narratives, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), among her other works, presents instead an absorbing read, another of her well-written gems of historical detective work illustrating large questions connecting several fields. Based on English, French, Hebrew, Ladino, Portuguese, and Spanish-language sources collected in twenty-one foreign ministry, consular, police, and Jewish philanthropy archives in seven countries, as well as the contemporary Jewish press, family archives, and memoirs, the short monograph offers the vibrant voices and agency of ordinary men and women, “legal misfits,” seeking the protection upon which their lives could depend, and the consular officials—many of whom were also Ottoman Sephardi Jews and foreign protégés—who often had no clear rules to follow in determining their status.

Rather than view the history of the capitulatory regime as a chapter in diplomatic history, or through the teleological prism pitting Ottoman and then Turkish economic progress and political independence against European imperialism, Stein offers an original perspective, examining the end of the era in order to ask what happened to the protected Ottoman subjects, their children, and grandchildren, when they lost European protection. What happened to those who found themselves abroad, after the Ottoman Empire fell? What happened to them when they became refugees? What happened to the protégés during World War I? For former Ottoman protégés in Nazi Europe, Turkey's granting or refusing of citizenship became a matter of life and death.

Four succinct, exciting chapters illustrate the argument that “protection was a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved” (p. 7). The narrative explores the status of Salonican Jews granted protégé status by Portugal as the city fell to Greece in 1912; British and French protégés in Ottoman Syria and Palestine during World War I; protégés in Britain and France in the same period; and finally, Baghdadi Jews with British protection in Bombay, Calcutta, and Shanghai in the 1930s. In all these cases we see the perpetuation of an early modern legal category after the Ottoman Empire had fallen, and then its revocation, usually leading to dire results for the former holders. But in the case of Hardoon, the British court (in China!) confirmed postmortem naturalization of a man who was “the son of a father born in Baghdad and naturalized in India, himself Ottoman-born, a British protected person (a status extended in violation of British law), a sixty-year extraterritorial resident of a treaty port city, and not even a one-time traveler to Britain” (p. 117). Like the wax that was worked into Hardoon's funeral effigy, protégé status was “eminently malleable, capable of being reconstituted and remolded, assuming ever new faces and hybrid cultural forms, shifting its shape without ever altogether melting away” until the era ended (p. 117), as we read in the conclusion, after World War II in Egypt.

The conclusion mainly touches upon how former Ottoman protégés experienced World War II and postwar nationalism in Middle Eastern states. It is unfortunate that these important subjects were not each given the chapter-length attention they deserve. Some Salonican Jews who held Italian papers in Nazi-occupied Europe were “repatriated” to Italy only to be murdered in 1943. These included members of old Ottoman Jewish families who had gathered at a Salonican Jewish-owned hotel north of Milan, the Hotel Meina. A painting from Andrea Ventura's haunting “The Hôtel Meina” series graces the cover of the book. It depicts anxious men and women looking out a hotel window at a lake. They are confined to their room, watching other guests being taken to the lake one by one, shot, and thrown in the water with a stone around their necks by the SS (p. 123).

Stein's book aims to complicate our understanding of modern European citizenship by offering insight into a type of political belonging beyond citizenship and nationality; to contribute to Jewish history by considering protégé status as being part of a spectrum of citizenship that was not merely something someone possessed or lacked, inserting human agency into the historical narrative; and using the example of the Jewish protégé to show how Ottoman history shaped the history of European citizenship. On all three aims it succeeds, weaving together Ottoman, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and European History through intimate accounts of the travails of fascinating marginal figures.

Where Stein's work is global in coverage, Devin Naar's is local, focusing on some of the same issues in Jewish Salonica, namely Jews’ post-imperial legal status in interwar nation-states, focusing on Jews in one city. Naar tracked down French, Greek, Hebrew, and Judeo-Spanish sources dispersed in archives in six countries to focus on how Jews in Salonica combined multiple threads of identity—especially Jewish and Hellenic—during the transition from Ottoman to Greek sovereignty, from the Balkan Wars to World War II.

During the Balkan Wars, the creation of an autonomous Jewish city-state of Salonica—whose population was majority Jewish—appeared more likely than the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But Salonica's incorporation into Greece made such fantasies an impossibility. World War I, the Greco-Turkish War, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey led to Jews becoming a small minority in Salonica. Naar's study explores how during these tumultuous events Jews in Salonica “sought to shape their destiny and secure a place for themselves in the city” promoting a “city-based identity” for themselves that reflected the imperial past and nation-state present, while containing pre-war hopes of autonomy (pp. 5–6, 7).

Naar situates his book among “post-celebratory” scholarship that seeks to recover the Jewish history of Salonica by viewing history “through a Jewish prism,” using Jewish sources to give agency to Salonican Jews, without succumbing to either nostalgic or gloomy narratives. The author aims to uncouple the interwar years from World War II—avoiding a teleological account that inevitably ends with the destruction of Salonican Jewry in 1943—instead presenting the Jews as dynamic, historical actors, not merely the targets of chauvinists and racists. Naar presents his book as an effort “to restore the voices of Salonica's Jews and to tell their stories in their own words” (p. 17). To do so he utilizes Jewish sources from the era to effectively argue that each roadblock to Jewish life compelled Salonican Jews to political engagement promoting their own Jewishness, continued connection to the city, and liberal Hellenism—defined as pluralist, civic belonging, and complementary, rather than in competition, with Judaism. These themes are examined in five very detailed chapters.

Somewhat surprisingly, chapter 5 ends the book on a lachrymose note, narrating the doomed efforts of Salonican Jews to preserve their cemetery—the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe—from Greek urban expansion. As he notes, “the destruction of the Jewish necropolis” in December 1942 preceded “the liquidation of the Jewish metropolis” as deportations to Auschwitz began in March 1943 (p. 240). Today, the campus of Aristotle University sits atop the former cemetery. In 2014, the first memorial was dedicated there, attributing blame mainly to the Nazis. But as Naar proves, the initiative came not from the German occupiers, but from members of the Church, government officials, and university representatives. Emphasizing Jewish agency, Naar shows how Salonican Jewish campaigners sought to convince Greek authorities to preserve the cemetery on historical, archaeological, religious, and minority rights grounds, while also undertaking an intense campaign to document the inscriptions for the sake of Salonican Jewish pride, and as evidence of a shared Greek-Jewish past. But despite Jewish efforts, the cemetery was seen as standing in the way of the progress of Hellenic civilization, interpreted in an exclusionary way. As a result, the marble tombstones “were used to pave roads, line latrines, and extend the sea walls; to construct pathways, patios, and walls in private and public spaces throughout the city, in suburbs . . . and more than sixty kilometers away in beach towns . . . where they decorated playgrounds, bars, and restaurants in hotels; to build a swimming pool . . . to repair the St. Demetrius Church . . . and to fashion the courtyard of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the cafeteria of the Yacht Club of Thessaloniki,” and the campus of the university, including the medical school, “whose students appropriated Jewish tombstones for use as dissection tables and skulls, which they gave so-called Jewish nicknames, to place atop their office desks” (pp. 275–76).

Naar's book successfully changes the way we remember the interwar period for Salonican Jewry, from a period of decline to one of creativity in the face of severe obstacles, from imagining them as passive victims, to active agents who sought to perpetuate their role and presence in the ever-changing city as they attempted to find a space for themselves as “part of Greece without relinquishing their Jewishness,” as Hellenic Jews, a dual status preserved from the Ottoman era (p. 283).

In the interwar years Salonican Jews managed to obtain recognized status for the community, which expanded its reach and institutions; its schools educated its youth as Hellenic Jews fluent in Greek; chief rabbis served as strong representatives of their flock; the Jewish press flourished; Jewish intellectuals published histories which emphasized Jewish belonging to the city and contribution to its development, emphasizing the symbiosis of Hellenism and Judaism, Greeks and Jews since antiquity; and they managed to stave off expropriation of their cemetery for two decades. In short, the reader is persuaded that Salonican Jewry during this period was “a dynamic Jewish collective imbued with agency” (p. 292). The reader may well ask whether it matters, however, as Salonican Jewry was annihilated anyway. But like Stein, Naar offers the reader voices overlooked in current historiography, in his case, ironically, those of the elite members of what was once the center of the Jewish world.