This paper examines changing discourses about gender relations amongst Karaite Jews in Cairo in the 1940s and 50s. Articles from the Arabic-language Karaite newspaper al-Kalim show that the Karaite community were troubled about marriage during this period, a concern which I argue reflects the Karaites’ increasing discomfort over their place within the changing nation, yet simultaneously their profound cultural integration within Egyptian society. As Kholoussy (2010) has shown, discourses about marriage, divorce and bachelorhood were a prime forum in which Egyptians expressed anxieties over the wellbeing of the nation amidst the upheavals of the first three decades of the twentieth century. In the pages of al-Kalim, debates about marriage centred primarily around the dowry (dota) system. Male and female writers alike bemoaned dowry inflation, in some cases claiming that it threatened the community’s very existence, whilst proponents and opponents of reform marshalled economic and social arguments to make their cases. Karaite Jews used these conversations to establish or contest new modes of interaction between the genders, debate changing ideals of wifehood and masculinity, and set out their vision for the future of their community—much as other Egyptian commentators had done in preceding decades. Yet in the Karaite case, I argue, this reflected anxieties specific to their community. If the preceding period had witnessed political and economic uncertainty for all Egyptians, as well as intense upheavals in relations between Jews and non-Jews, the Karaites occupied an especially precarious position. Enjoying limited economic privilege and access to foreign citizenship relative to Rabbanite Jews, they were more vulnerable to the social and bureaucratic hostility that all Jews faced during this period, and were becoming increasingly uncertain of their place within the changing nation. Nevertheless, the vocabulary Karaites used to articulate these anxieties, which they shared with other, non-Jewish, Egyptians, reveals that they consumed and adapted nation-wide discourses regarding cultural and social change. This study of discourses surrounding marriage and gender not only contributes empirically to our historical knowledge of Jewish social life in Egypt, but offers a useful corrective to top-down frameworks which begin by questioning the national, political and cultural affiliations of Middle Eastern Jews rather than allowing the sources to speak for themselves.

On 27 January 1969, the Ba’th Party in Iraq executed twelve alleged spies—nine of whom were Jews—and suspended their bodies from gallows in Baghdad and Basra following a televised show trial in which prosecutors presented fabricated evidence of their collusion with Israel to destabilize Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis gathered to celebrate what the state touted as the end of Zionist intervention in Iraq’s affairs. In fact, the fewer than ten thousand Jews remaining in Iraq at the time were isolated from world Jewry and from Iraqi national politics. Why, then, did the Ba’th Party, which faced many threats to its power in this period, devote so much public attention and state resources to the arrest, trial and execution of a fictitious spy ring supposedly led by Jews? Existing scholarship on Iraq mentions this incident only briefly as an example of the new Ba’th Party government’s brutality without investigating the role that anti-Israeli posturing played in the incident. This paper places the experiences of Iraqi Jews within the context of Iraqi social and political responses to the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967, arguing that the Ba’th Party’s public targeting of Jews as spies manipulated anti-Israeli sentiments to justify new forms of state violence against Iraqi citizens and newly divisive notions of citizenship. This paper provides new insights into the development of Iraqi political culture during the first five years after its 1968 coup—a period for which documentary evidence remains scarce. Jewish school and administrative documents seized by the Ba’th state and taken from their security headquarters in 2003 illuminate exchanges between Jewish leaders and state bureaucrats, providing a rare glimpse into state policies toward one of Iraq’s ethno-religious communities. In addition, more than thirty interviews I have conducted with Iraqi Jews provide detailed testimony of their subjective experiences of Ba’th policy and the ways it affected their place in Iraqi society. I analyze these sources alongside rhetoric in Iraqi media and speeches to examine the ways in which the new Iraqi government manipulated anti-Israeli sentiments and anti-Semitic notions of conspiracy, justifying violent security policies against Jews that could then be turned on other sectors of Iraqi society to cow potential opposition and reinforce suspicion of ethno-sectarian groups which the party deemed potentially disloyal.

Levantinia? Non-Muslim Communities in Times of War and Occupation The Great War hit non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire particularly harshly. Nonetheless, Armenian, Greek-Orthodox, Jewish and Levantine communities of Istanbul had experienced the war and the following occupation of their city by British, French and Italian forces quite differently than those communities who lived elsewhere in the empire. During the war censorship cut their communications with the world, the Ottoman state heavily intervened in their autonomous governments, curfews limited their movement and in some cases, they were subjected to genocide. They experience the Allied occupation differently as well. Istanbul at that time seemed to offer the possibility of a revival for their communities. The end of the war and the occupation also allowed Istanbul to become an information hub to not only count the dead but also to find the bodies. Moreover, massive losses that cut through community lines brought diverse communities together. This paper argues that Istanbul under Allied occupation allowed communities to imagine new and better futures for themselves. This paper examines the impact of the war on non-Muslim communities of Istanbul, looked down upon by the rulers and the occupiers alike, and the ways in which these communities reacted to the changes brought by the war and occupation. This paper goes beyond the Muslim and non-Muslim dichotomy and takes a closer look at the diversity in the city’s inhabitants. From multi-communal charity balls during the war to public festivals during the occupation, this paper uses documents ranging from the Ottoman, Republican and Military Archives in Turkey, the Central State Archives in Italy, the National and Military Archives in France, the National Archives and the British Library in the UK, and the National Archives in Washington DC, along with newspapers and scholarly journals of the era, to study multiple ways different communities interacted with each other in an unprecedented atmosphere of social and political flux.

The welcoming of Sephardic Jews (expelled from Spain and Portugal) by Ottoman authorities during the Inquisition along with Turkish authorities’ various actions throughout history to protect European Jews have been promoted since the beginning of the 1990s in the West and in Turkey as proof of five centuries of harmonious relations and tolerance between the Ottoman (and afterwards Turkish) state and its Jewish minority- in contrast to European states. Contrary to other Turkish ethno-religious minorities, the lack of public and legal complaints both in national and international arenas from Turkish Jewish citizens against Turkish state's discrimination seems to confirm this idea. While this discourse has strengthened relations and highlighted a common interest between the Turkish state and Turkish Jewish elites, it has omitted traumatic events endured by the Turkish Jewish community as well as everyday acts and discourses of antisemitism in Turkey. It does not explain either several past massive waves of immigration of Turkish Jews to new homelands and, significantly, the recent massive applications (circa half) of Turkey’s 20,000 Jews for Portuguese and Spanish nationality, following the 2015 decree laws passed by those countries granting nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews. In order to make sense of these events we need to both challenge the theoretical frontiers of area studies within which Turkish Jews have until now been studied and overcome its political instrumentalisation. Using an original combination of Gramscian “hegemony” to better contextualize discourses within power relations, Hirschman’s "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" theory and Tilly’s research on the ambivalence of state protection of citizens, we argue that this search for a second nationality reflects a potential “exit strategy”. In other words an apolitical and non-confrontational strategy to enable escape from growing Turkish authoritarianism without challenging Turkish state's hegemonic discourse of minority tolerance while ensuring the safety of the remaining Turkish Jewish community. Contrary to Hirschman’s theory, for whom “loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice”, we aim at proving that it is paradoxically Turkish Jews’ double loyalty towards the Turkish state and the Turkish Jewish community that pushes them towards (potential) “exit” and prevents them from opting for “voice”. This article draws from 20 semi-structured interviews and two participant-observations in Portugal and in Turkey, official statistics and legal documents, Turkish and European reports on hate speech in Turkey, a press review of the only Turkish Jewish newspaper Salom, and an analysis of three websites dedicated to Turkish Jews.