Dina Danon's new book is an excellent work of social history that significantly enhances our understanding of Ottoman Jewish history in the late imperial period. It does so in a multi-layered way, such that it ultimately consists of more than its title suggests—that is, a history of the Jews of Izmir (though it is that, as well). What one might expect from a book with such a title, and given longstanding historiographic approaches to the Ottoman empire, is a history of a community apart, one that shows a distinct group delineated most sharply by its religious “difference” and status as a “minority community.” Instead, thanks to Danon's deft handling of the tools of social history, and her attentiveness to an array of studies of the Ottoman empire in this period, what emerges is a portrait of social stratification in late Ottoman Izmir writ large.

Since at least the time of Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis’ co-edited Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York, 1982), which came out close to forty years ago, scholars have been at work dismantling the notion that Ottoman imperial social categories were rigidly or primarily derived from religious (“national”) memberships. The historiography of the past decades has made clear that for the vast bulk of Ottoman history, there was nothing systematic about the so-called “millet system,” long a “founding myth” of the Ottoman empire. But myth as it may be, the influence of this framing has remained pervasive, most clearly in the enduring claim that religious categorizations trumped others as the defining feature par excellence of the lived lives of Ottoman minorities. “Minorities” have been so designated from a largely religious perspective. But through this new history of the Jews of Izmir, Danon shows us, via a careful reading of Ladino, Hebrew, and other sources, the remarkable extent to which it in fact was not religion, but rather economic and class affiliation that were most salient in defining one's networks and sense of “place” within the late imperial landscape. Here Danon very much follows the lead of such scholars as Daniel Goffman, who have forcefully demonstrated that cross-communal links (among Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Muslims, English, French, and others, inter alia) based on shared social, economic, and other interests were a vital engine in the late Ottoman period—and that these links and their importance have long been occluded by a disproportionate focus on the millet paradigm.

Thus, at the heart of Danon's analysis is an examination of the impact of growing bourgeois wealth and class stratification on Izmir's Jews in the late 1800's—and, along with it, the sharply contrasting emergence of the Jewish poor, in multiple forms. As she shows, anxiety arose around the need to distinguish between the “truly poor” and those who were simply indolent, on the dole, or outright scamming would-be supporters. These “new taxonomies of poverty” (65), as Danon terms them, came to infiltrate almost all institutions of Jewish communal life, as different organizations—schools, associations, clubs, social guilds—staked their missions on different approaches to ameliorating poverty, or, in some instances, to trying to snuff it out altogether. It was poverty and its manifestations within the Jewish community that caused identitarian concern for Izmir's Jews—not their “Jewishness” as a monolith. Consequently, philanthropy and aid of various sorts became both an ameliorative necessity—and a marker of social standing.

As is the case with any good work of scholarship, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir does not only lay out theses and evidence, but also opens up questions worthy of future examination. One of the most noteworthy of Danon's observations in this context is her fascinating though yet-to-be-interrogated claim that “the beginnings of modern Jewish philanthropy can be traced to the port cities of the early modern western Sephardi diaspora” (62). While not a central component of the book's argument, this proposition is one that opens up a potentially productive line of argument for future study—and that further illuminates the importance of discourses around poverty to her interpretive approach. Such gestures in future directions also serve as evidence that Danon's scholarship not only fruitfully builds on work that has come before, but that it will in turn be a critical stepping stone for the work of others.