Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Citizens of a Fictional Nation: Ottoman-born Jews in France during the First World War

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 226; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/pastj/gtu039

1477-464X

S. A. Stein,

African history and culture studies

Before he was a stowaway, Jack Azose was an Ottoman subject. Upon his arrival in France he was undocumented and a suspected spy until, with the assistance of Paris’ Prefecture of Police, he became ‘ … a foreigner of Jewish nationality from the Levant’ ( un étranger de nationalité Israélite du Levant ) in the eyes of the law. It was the time of the First World War. Jack was fifteen, claiming to be eighteen. 1 The legal nomenclature that was granted him had not existed prior to the First World War and would disappear soon after the war’s end. The fact of being Jewish was not yet a guarantor of citizenship to any national or international body, and the Levant was an amorphous geographic entity. And yet, in the course of the First World War and its immediate aftermath, thousands of Jews who were Ottoman by birth but extraterritorial by circumstance came to be codified in a new and inventive fashion in France and its colonies. Immediately after the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the First World War, the Third Republic determined that most of the 7,000 Ottoman subjects living in France, the majority of whom were Jewish and a significant minority of whom were Armenian Christian, would be deemed protégés spéciaux (special protégés). The formulation and application of this nomenclature was the result of careful orchestration by the Prefecture of Police, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior and (when it came to cases including Jews) two Franco-Jewish philanthropic organizations — the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Association Culturelle Orientale — which aided the administration in identifying and allocating papers to Ottoman-born Jews. The papers issued as a result allowed thousands of Jewish (as well as Armenian Christian and some Muslim) women, men and children living as extraterritorial Ottoman subjects in France to avoid surveillance, deportation or (with tens of thousands of Germans, Austrians and Ottomans) internment as enemy aliens; to travel within their country of residence and abroad; and to acquire the passports, residence permits and official papers that were ever more indispensable in the modern world. 2