Extraterritorial Dreams

"In this text, Stein recounts the history of Sephardic and southeastern European Jews' experience of WWI, especially as it concerns the dizzying shifts in legal status so many experienced as the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire retracted, new states were created in its wake, and as Ottoman-born Jews living abroad found themselves "extra-territorial" subjects--citizens of no polity at a time when national identity and, even more, citizen papers, were of ever greater import to the modern world"--