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Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, compete, and collide. It traces interactions between the states of Europe and Ottoman-born Jews who held, sought, or lost the legal protection of a European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the early modern capitulatory regime gave way to a modern passport regime and the Ottoman Empire to successor states. Some Ottoman Jewish protégés remained in their birthplace as extraterritorial subjects, partaking in a transition from empire to nation-state, protectorate, or mandate regime. Others carried their status as émigrés or passed their legal identity to descendants born outside the empire. All told, protection proved a matter of negotiation and experimentation and a measure of the diffuse and unruly nature of state power: and citizenship a spectrum for individuals to navigate rather than a possession to claim. Extraterritorial Dreams demonstrates that authorities athwart Europe harboured phantasmagorical ideas about the benefits Ottoman Jews offered (or the threat they posed to) the state, particularly at times of war and imperial expansion; that Jewish protégés’ histories resonated with those of non-Jewish protégés, would-be protégés, and colonial subjects; and that Jewish holders and seekers of protection employed creative means of manipulating state law to their advantage. Even as the capitulatory regime and Ottoman Empire were crumbling, protection proved a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved.

This book discusses the life and work of the best-known Israeli scholar, the Kabbalah historian of German Jewish descent, Gershom Scholem (1897 – 1982). It offers a new perspective on this seminal figure and on major historical events and ideological struggles that took place during the first part of the 20th century in Europe and the Middle East. The book also makes a certain claim about how new knowledge is created. Scholem, it is here argued, is known beyond the narrow confines of his academic because, beyond being a capable philologist, he was a story-teller of unique talent. The two stories that make up Scholem’s fame are the story he told of himself and the story of Jewish history, told through the lens of his historiography of the Kabbalah. The objective of this book is therefore to critically retell these two stories thus that each story would shed light on the other. Pitting Scholem’s biography over and against his historiography, the book is able to approach questions about nationalism, spiritual revival, and colonialism in the 20th century. The discussion thus reflects the geo-political transformations that took place in Germany and in Palestine during this period. It gives a new perspective on Scholem’s life and his historiographical undertaking. And finally it shows that new knowledge is often the result, not of discovery but of re-reading and invention. Scholem, it is here argued, recreated Jewish mysticism in light of the political, social and spiritual questions of his time.

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals of the fin-de-siècle made their way into and through metropolitan places of cultural production and exchange, and Paris in particular, they engaged with a culture obsessed with decadence in its widest manifestations, literary, philosophical, medical, and political. The results helped define Jewish cultural life of the era, and well beyond. From Caesare Lombroso or Max Nordau through Sigmund Freud; from Marcel Proust to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Italo Svevo through Saul Bellow; from S. An-Sky through A. B. Yehoshua, from Claude Cahun through Patrick Modiano, the tropes, concerns, and obsessions of decadence were powerfully expressed, contested, and reworked by Jews, transformed but essential to their cultural production. Entrepreneurs and idealists directly and indirectly nurtured or guided this aestheticist avant-garde into an embodiment of the modern – individuals like Murray Marks and Oscar Wilde; groups of Jewish intellectuals, such as those associated with La revue blanche, and Jewish patrons and art dealers who sustained the multiform and various movements that defined Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. This book is an exploration of how Jews drew the topoi of aestheticism and decadence into their imaginative constructions and created something genuinely new and definitive of modernity.