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In the 20th century, people across the world were experiencing a fundamental shift. For the first time, and at a rapid rate, society was changing and becoming something else: modern.

“This period that I’m interested in, the people living in it had the sense that they were going through enormous change — a sense that ‘now’ is different than before,’” said Dina Danon, an associate professor of both Judaic studies and history. “I’m interested in history from below: how people experienced these changes on the ground, in the quotidian sense.”

Today, we look back to those sources to see how culture shifted in this tumultuous period, though most scholars of Jewish history have focused on western life. For scholars such as Danon, this story becomes much more interesting in the places that have been overlooked.

Her research focuses on Jewish people living outside of the West, specifically the Sephardi communities who lived in the Islamic world. It centers interfaith communities — Jews who lived alongside Muslims for centuries — their modern diaspora and their Judeo-Spanish language, called Ladino.

Using archival material, Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise our ideas about Jewish modernity.

“It’s important to tell a more comprehensive story of Jewish history, to have a more global perspective on different Jewish communities and diasporas,” Danon said. “Their stories have a lot to teach us about conceptual categories that are hard for us to concretize — tolerance, coexistence — and I think that the experience of these Jews helps us reckon with the meaning of those terms on the contemporary scene.”

Her first book, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History shows how the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir, home to a Sephardi Jewish community for more than 400 years, reveals an interesting disparity: for most Jewish people across Europe, their religious and cultural distinctiveness was seen as somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet in Ottoman Izmir, Danon argues that this distinctiveness didn’t cause conflict. Instead, Izmir’s Jews found themselves grappling with conflicts rooted in other aspects of their identity, most notably their poverty and social class.

“Jews coming from the Ottoman Empire were from a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic empire. There was no presumption that being Jewish was a problem to be solved in the modern age. In Ottoman Izmir, there wasn’t a ’Jewish question’; there was no homogenizing impulse in the Empire,” she said. “In other words, it was completely okay to be Jewish; it wasn’t something people had to hide or feel anxiety about. Their ‘Jewishness’ wasn’t the problem in the modern age; against the backdrop of a heavily bourgeois eastern Mediterranean port city, it was their social class and poverty that caused conflict.”

People often presume that Jews and Muslims had an antagonistic relationship historically — a presumption that often comes from the perspective of contemporary geopolitics. But Danon’s sources from Izmir show relative stability; while there was still religious hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire, it wasn’t the main source of conflict from the perspective of its Jewish community.

To advance her research agenda in social history, Danon has begun work on her second book as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; it explores the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage and divorce in the modern Ottoman Sephardi world.

She first became interested in this topic while reviewing archival documents from Izmir’s Jewish community, where she found many registers containing matchmaking negotiations and dowry inventories. After exploring the Ladino press from across the Empire on the matter, Danon saw that the institution of marriage was being heavily scrutinized by Sephardi Jews in the late Ottoman period. Were arranged marriages still “modern”? Should dowries still be required? At what age should people marry? These questions, among many others, intersect with how people understood changing gender roles in the Middle East during this time.

“I’m thinking about how people experience modern change as husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons — as part of families,” she said. “How are socioeconomic boundaries constructed and reinforced through a changing marriage market? I was trying to draw attention to social changes in the first book; I’m trying to develop that further and prioritize the family as a crucial venue of change.”

Through her work, Danon is also engaged in the preservation of Ladino, which most of her sources use. Along with Bryan Kirschen in the Department of Romance Languages, she co-directed the “Ladino Lab,” an initiative supported by a Public Humanities Grant of Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). The lab offered students and faculty training in reading Ladino texts. They did so in part via a language apprenticeship program, pairing students with native speakers internationally to learn.

Although the grant is no longer funded, the programming they established in the lab has since been implemented through a dual-course Source Project offering. Learning Ladino is made more complicated by the fact that in addition to its printed Rashi form, it has a unique cursive form called soletreo, distinct from the standard Hebrew cursive. Interacting fully with the world of Ladino texts and materials requires students to learn both language forms. In the first semester, students learned to do so; in the second, they began research projects using the language.

In the future, she hopes to continue this effort on campus in new and exciting ways; it is only through the preservation of the language that research like hers can be completed, and inclusive research is the only kind that most accurately portrays the past.

“Binghamton students had this amazing opportunity to be involved firsthand in preserving and learning this endangered language,” said Danon, who added that she can’t help but be impressed by Binghamton’s dedicated students, as well as its long-standing tradition of excellence in Ottoman studies. “It is amazing to have a pedagogical platform to advance these interests. There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing a student share your enthusiasm — to have that lightbulb moment, where deciphering the text starts to click.”