Cosmopolitanism and Coexistence in Ottoman Jewish History: The Case of Shopkeeper Yeuda Macha.

This piece takes the life of Yeuda Macha, a Jewish shopkeeper in Izmir, as its starting point. Focusing on a late nineteenth-century source detailing the settling of his accounts after his death, the article reconstructs the links, contacts, and partnerships that punctuated his daily life both within and outside of the Jewish community. With its emphasis on the mundane, this source offers a point of entry into the rhythm of everyday life in the eastern Sephardi diaspora and the centrality of the esnaf, or urban shopkeepers and petty traders, who made up so much of the Sephardi labor force. It also offers crucial tools to evaluate and refine categories that are so often applied reflexively in the study of the modern Mediterranean and its Jewish communities, such as "cosmopolitanism" and "coexistence," and the opportunity to concretely probe the nature of both real and imagined boundaries between religio-ethnic groups in an Ottoman port like Izmir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]