Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGreece: Biography of a Modern Nation. By Roderick Beaton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xxvi+462. $35.00 (cloth); $10.00 to $21.00 (e-book).K. E. FlemingK. E. FlemingNew York University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 3September 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715313 Views: 43Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

these men and women as an Ariadne thread to disentangle cross-border movements. The volume not only sheds light on fighters’mobility, but also on how their cosmopolitan militancy wrought their identity and how these cosmopolitan partisans ‘reinvented’ themselves in changing circumstances. Regrettably, however, the focus on individuals at times overshadows the role of manifestly important organizations and movements such as the Communist International (and, after 1943, of Moscow-oriented communist parties). Similarly, more could have been said about ideology as a driver of transnational resistance. Global militancy was often underpinned by an internationalist worldview that the book only mentions in passing. In any case, this volume is a landmark for the field. It is the outcome of an impressive research endeavour that, in the spirit of its object of study, is truly transnational, involving colleagues from a number of countries who have amassed a remarkable amount of empirical evidence. Scholars of anti-fascist resistance will now have to take stock of transnational connections in their work – they can no longer be disregarded or downplayed. This publication has convincingly expunged nationalism from resistance studies. Fighters across Frontiers also opens exciting new avenues for research. For instance, the volume raises questions about the obverse phenomenon of cross-border fascist militancy. Non-European (or non-Mediterranean) theatres in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East surely also displayed important yet understudied instances of transnational resistance. The significance of partisan networks for events in the turbulent years 1945– 1949 (such as the Greek Civil War), which are succinctly discussed in the final chapters, merits further consideration. The volume’s concluding remarks about anti-fascist memory and how it evolved in post-war decades also deserve further research. Undoubtedly, Fighters across Frontiers will become a pathfinder for exciting new research.

Over the past ten years, more than two hundred thousand Israeli Jews have taken European citizenship, obtaining passports from countries that just seventy years ago their ancestors had fled: Poland, Hungary, and Germany. In recognition of the huge losses suffered by Jews in the Holocaust, a host of European nations—motivated by varying degrees of cynicism, apology, and pragmatism—have moved to restore national citizenship to the descendants of displaced and murdered European Jews. And for their part, the Israeli Jews who have sought out these citizenships by waiting in endless lines and going through complex bureaucratic hoops also have an array of reasons, from the emotional to the pragmatic, for doing so. While the media have treated this development as something new, or as an ironic historical twist, it is, in fact, a familiar tableau, a new chapter in the long and complex story of Jewish (and European) nationality and citizenship from the Ottoman era. Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s excellent and insightful Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century presents the difficulties, ironies, and vexations of Jewish “nationality” in the twentieth century. In so doing, it traces historical threads that take us from the early modern period to the present day, from the Bronx to Baghdad, and to numerous places and moments in between.

A rabbi, political leader, diplomat, physician, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and biblical exegete, Moses ben Baruch Almosnino was one of the most important Jewish leaders in the post-expulsion period and was the central intellectual figure in sixteenth-century Jewish Salonica. Well versed in rabbinic literature, science, and philosophy, Almosnino was also a prolific writer. All around, he was an exemplary “chacham kolel” (lit., “general erudite,” or “well-rounded scholar”) and a great Jewish Renaissance man.

Turkey has long benefited from a historical narrative that has framed it as a haven and refuge for Jews during the Holocaust, a secular nation that remained neutral during World War II, and that today is home to over 20,000 Jews. This tale of benign shelter for Jews rests as well, of course, on the longer history of the Ottoman Empire from which the Turkish state emerged. As is well known, following the late-fifteenth-century wave of expulsions of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II “invited” them to resettle in Ottoman lands, giving rise to some of the Early Modern period's most vibrant Jewish centers: Selanik, Izmir, and Istanbul. This deeper “backstory” has contributed to a relative historiographic quiescence in the face of the notion that Turkey was heroic in its efforts to help Jews during the Holocaust. A notion which, as Corry Guttstadt puts it in her opening pages, “has turned … into an ossified, self-perpetuating myth which is frequently propagated in international publications” (p. 1).

This essay provides a concluding summary of the volume as a whole, showing how it breaks down into historical and theoretical/methodological components and considering the ways in which the volume pushes forward our understanding of Salonican Jewish history by revealing it to be at once a Jewish history, an Ottoman history, and an urban history. In addition to providing a brief summary of each of the contributions to the volume, it aims to synthesize their collective impact by situating the volume as whole within the varied historiographies that to date have considered the history of Salonica’s Jews.

Nationalismus, Türkisierungund das Ende derjüdischen Gemeinden in Thrakien 1918-1942. By Berna Pekesen. Südosteuropäische Arbeiten 145. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012. 334pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Tables. €44.80, hard bound. - Volume 73 Issue 3

Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Olga Borovaya. Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xi, 284 pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. 33.99, e-book - Volume 72 Issue 2

Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. By Tijana Krstic. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. xiii, 264 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 60.00, e-book. - Volume 71 Issue 3