Jacob Daniels receives Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award

Congratulations to Dr. Jacob Daniels (Phd History, 2022; Reinhard Family Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-2023) on receiving the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. Daniels is Assistant Professor of Instruction and Assistant Director of the Shusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders

Moving borders to the center of the story, The Jews of Edirne follows one of the world’s largest Sephardi communities through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, annexation by multiple nation-states, and the fraught experience of living in the northwest corner of modern Turkey.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne Province—among the most religiously diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, the city had become a Turkish border town, and the province had lost much of its non-Muslim population. With this book, Jacob Daniels explores how one of the world’s largest Sephardi communities dealt with the encroachment of modern borders.

Using Ladino, French, English, and Turkish sources, Daniels offers a new take on the ways in which ethno-religious minorities experienced the transition “from empire to nation-state.” Rather than tracing a linear path, Edirne Jews zigzagged between the Ottoman Empire and three nation-states—without moving a mile. And by maintaining interstate Sephardi networks, they resisted pressure to treat the shifting border as a limit to their zone of belonging. Ultimately, proximity to the border would undo Edirne’s Jewish community, but the way this ending came about—local Jews were rarely killed or deported—challenges common assumptions about state borders and Jewish history. By studying Jewish encounters with the nation-state alongside the emergence of modern borders, Daniels sheds light on both phenomena. 

While previous histories of Ottoman-Jewish communities focused on cosmopolitan port cities, this book brings Sephardi history into an inland region where Jews interacted with fellow Ottoman citizens far more than with merchants from Western Europe. And it was this central zone that, ironically, became the northwest borderland of Turkey. This is the first book to study a Sephardi community that grappled with new borders—not just conceptually, but in a very concrete way—as it navigated the transition from empire to nation-state(s). Informed by untapped sources, The Jews of Edirne is a work of refreshingly new material and research, from start to finish.

The book will be published in June, 2025.