Reading Race in the Ottoman Empire

The Ladino press provides a case study for thinking through race as archive and analytic in the Ottoman Empire. Doubly racialized both as Jews and as “Orientals,” reformist Sephardic reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century perceived themselves as trailing behind Europe, Ashkenazi Jews, and other Ottoman minorities. Journalists like David Fresco, who to sought to transform their communities to be fit for the modern world, provided racial depictions of Indigenous groups worldwide against whom readers could judge themselves to be further along the path of progress. While inscribing racial difference, through his commitment to monogenesis he defended racial progress and the ability of all races to progress as a single species. This tension reflects how reformers translated global racial ideas to fit their local circumstances as they sought to negotiate their own position in a violently uneven imperial world order. Rather than projecting presentist or Atlanticist concerns about race onto the Ottoman Empire, this reveals how historical actors translated racial ideas across the global, imperial, and communal levels. This was a process that neither antisemitism nor Orientalism—two dominant conceptual frames for thinking about difference-making in the region—can fully capture.