In a region ruined by wars and violence, what was life like for Jews in Edirne between 1908 and 1934? What did a border mean as they continued to interact with surrounding Sephardic Jewish communities while their city changed hands, the empire fell, and a new republic was born? What did “survival” mean at the time for them, and how can one explain why today Edirne does not have any Jewish residents but a magnificent renovated synagogue, once the third largest in Europe?

Jacob Daniels in The Jews of Edirne traces the battles of the community and the choices they had to make starting with the Young Turk revolution up to the first decades of the Turkish Republic. He offers a different unfolding of the familiar “empire to nation state narrative” through a peculiar non-violent undoing of a Jewish community by the 1940s. Broadening his focus thread by thread from a single borderland community to the Jews of Thrace roughly over five decades, he reveals that the Jewish experience of the region from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century ranged from voluntary migration to lives cut short at Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The book opens by introducing the community through their commercial links and mobility in the region, which also shaped their understanding of and relationship with the border. Chapter 2, focusing on the Young Turk revolution and Bulgarian independence reveals the changes in lines dividing ethno-religious communities together with uncertain political borders. Chapter 3 covers the extent of the catastrophe of the Balkan Wars and sheds light on the intricacies of the performance of “Jewish loyalty” while being close witnesses to ongoing violence during their new life in the borderland. Chapter 4 focuses on the Greek annexation of Edirne, the Greek withdrawal, and the choices Jews had to make during this time of disorientation. Chapter 5 explores their experience as residents of a Turkish border town and citizens of a young republic. This chapter centers on Thrace Events, a weeklong attack on Jews, a turning point not only for the Jews of Edirne but the whole Jewish population of the country. Daniels closes the book by reflecting on the Second World War and Edirne’s transition into a juncture for the stateless and the expelled.

While building on and further developing the dominant framework of modernization, which has guided Ottoman Jewish historiography for decades, Daniels adopts “borderland” as the core of his methodological framework while also adopting more recent approaches in the field such as concentrating on Jewish mobility and transregional interactions. Sources ranging from official documents to Jewish institutional registers, diplomatic correspondence to local and international press allow him to argue that in decades marked by political chaos, Jews of Edirne interpreted borders differently when compared to their neighbors. They remained active in broader Sephardi networks while keeping their (Ottoman) Sephardi identity. This up to a degree deliberate stand was enabled by the “multifunctionality” of the border in the late imperial period that embraced multiple interpretations of its residents (180). However, their “active yet cautious style” was no longer an option with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and its rigid borders (7). Although Jews were never direct targets of mass violence throughout the period, their fall to the fringes of both the territorial limits as well as the national ideal in the new country led to a void that was once filled up by the vibrant Jewish community.

In this “tricky matrix,” Daniels sets out to trace Jewish agency through the many identities the Jews of Edirne possessed and lost, and the choices they made knowingly or unknowingly. The period is not only told through major events and well-known communal figures but also through the stories of hidden names, such as the educator Rosa Mitrani and editor Josef Barishac (3). Similarly, along with wars and revolutions, cases such as the local Jews’ conflict with the police over the demolition of a building where Moise Behar’s cabaret was located reveal the disappearing line dividing the local and the international in this period.

Offering an alternative to the “empire to nation state” narrative by revealing how the winding of a path unmaking of imperial realities and the making of nation states was for the Jewish residents of the region, The Jews of Edirne joins Jewish Studies, Ottoman Studies, and Borderland Studies literatures with a previously untold story. Without simplifying the complexities of the period, Daniels’ clear and intriguing style invites readers interested in modern nationalisms and histories of violence. It particularly encourages possible comparative academic works through borders and borderlands, the scope of research defined by broad borders ranging from central to eastern Europe.