About

Devin E. Naar is an Associate Professor and the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington. He serves as the Chair of the Sephardic Studies Program and holds a joint appointment with the Jackson School of International Studies. His research focuses on Sephardic history and culture, contributing to the understanding of Sephardic communities and their historical significance.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Ancient history
• Archaeology
• Art
• Genealogy

Selected publications

• From Salonika to America and Back

  Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 2026-04-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Undergraduate Winner: 1st Place, 2005. 18th Annual Carl Neureuther Student Book Collection Competition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Remembering the longest journey to Auschwitz – the deportation of Rhodes’ Jews decimated a small but vibrant community with centuries of Mediterranean history

  2024-08-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Debates about Columbus’ Spanish Jewish ancestry are not new − the claim was once a bid for social acceptance

  2024-10-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Special Issue on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the Americas

  American Jewish history · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction:Special Issue on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the Americas Devin E. Naar (bio) The nascent field of Sephardic studies began to take shape in the 1930s. One of its pioneering figures, Albert Adatto, later reflected on his unconventional process as a scholar: I do not consider myself a scholar in the normal sense. I am making a highly enjoyable volunteer reconnaissance among the documents that have been written about our people in the English language to determine how much is relatively true, how much is based on firsthand source material, and how much is bamyas [lies; literally "okra"] or bavajadas [nonsense]. The gr and project of mine is being carried out with the Sephardic spirit of kef [enjoyment] and reposo [calm].1 While he completed his MA on the history of Sephardic Jews in Seattle at the University of Washington in 1939, Adatto did not continue with doctoral studies or become a professional scholar. Instead, he, like his sister Emma Adatto, who completed her MA on Sephardic folktales at the University of Washington in 1935, continued to follow the development of scholarship and popular writing about Sephardic Jews over the subsequent decades.2 With his characteristic infusion of Ladino terms into his written English, Albert Adatto addressed a letter to David Sitton, a Sephardic leader in Jerusalem, in which he described his efforts to track as calmly and with as much good humor as possible what he perceived as the frequent misrepresentation of Sephardic histories and cultures in the United States and beyond.3 This special issue of American Jewish History, dedicated to Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the Americas, offers insight into both how much [End Page 509] the field has changed—in part, through its professionalization—and in some ways remained static over the past half century and more, both in dialogue with and as a reflection of broader trends in American Jewish and general culture and politics.4 During that time, Sephardic studies, a multidisciplinary and transnational field, has become a recognized area of interest within the broader field of Jewish studies, although the parameters of Sephardic studies—and the very meaning of "Sephardic"—remain contested. SEPHARDIC STUDIES AND JEWISH STUDIES The study of one constituency of Sephardic Jews—medieval "golden age" Spanish Jewry—has been at the center of the field of Jewish studies since its foundation with the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century.5 Harry Wolfson, who was the first chair of Jewish studies at an American university, established at Harvard in 1925, focused on the medieval Spanish-Jewish philosopher Hasdai Crescas, a rationalist like Maimonides, and on the use of reason in Spinoza's philosophy.6 Decades later, in 1966, when the scholar of Jewish literature Arnold Band famously noted "the spread of Jewish studies as an accepted academic discipline in the American liberal arts colleges and universities since the Second World War," medieval Spanish Jewry as well as figures like Spinoza remained part of the curriculum.7 But the emergent discipline of Jewish studies largely excluded the study of other kinds of Sephardic Jews, especially those who resided in Muslim-majority societies in recent centuries—perhaps necessarily so, in order to become mainstream. Finally, the five-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 led to a flurry of publications in 1992.8 In 1998, historians Aron Rodrigue and Aviva Ben-Ur initiated the formation of the [End Page 510] Sephardi/Mizrahi Caucus, which was modeled on the Women's Caucus and is now a recognized division of the Association for Jewish Studies; this marked another turning point. The growing number of scholars, books, and university courses dealing with the histories, cultures, and languages of Sephardim and Mizrahim mark a sea change—although not without obstacles along the way.9 The increased interest in so-called non-Ashkenazi or non-European Jews may be conceptualized as part of a broader trend of inserting into the historical narrative and curriculum those individuals and communities who have historically been on the margins: women, workers, racialized populations, LGBTQI+ communities, and others marked as "Other." This special issue on Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews may therefore be considered in dialogue...

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 5 “Spaniards We Were, Spaniards We Are, and Spaniards We Will Be” Salonica’s Sephardic Jews and the Instrumentalization of the Spanish Past, 1898–1944

  Berghahn Books · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Ancient history

  Chapter 5 “Spaniards We Were, Spaniards We Are, and Spaniards We Will Be” Salonica’s Sephardic Jews and the Instrumentalization of the Spanish Past, 1898–1944 was published in Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants on page 107.

  PublisherDOI

• The (Mis)representation of Sephardic Jews in American Jewish Historiography

  American Jewish history · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The (Mis)representation of Sephardic Jews in American Jewish Historiography Devin E. Naar (bio) Nearly seventy years ago, in 1954, a landmark American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) conference commemorated the tricentennial of Jewish presence in North America. In his opening address, "The Writing of American Jewish History," Salo Wittmayer Baron, who was the first professor of Jewish history at a US university (Columbia) and was then serving as AJHS's president, advanced a new vision for the field. Scholars, argued Baron, must move beyond apologetics and filiopietism to professionalize American Jewish history. To achieve this goal, Baron urged "thorough investigation" of sources in the main American Jewish languages among which he included not only Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, but also Spanish—a language of those colonial-era Jews whose arrival in 1654 the conference celebrated—and Ladino, the language of the majority of the Jews from the Ottoman Empire who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century. Only through engagement with primary sources, he argued, would "wiping out the memory of entire segments of American Jews" be averted.1 By invoking both Spanish and Ladino, Baron alluded to a seeming paradox at the center of the field of Jewish history, including American Jewish history. Certain groups identified today as "Sephardic Jews"—medieval Spanish Jews as well as Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their descendants who migrated to Western Europe and the Americas in the early modern period (Western Sephardim)—have resided at the center of Jewish studies. In contrast, others often identified today as "Sephardic Jews"—Jews from the Ottoman Empire who spoke Ladino (Eastern [End Page 519] Sephardim), as well as other Jews from Muslim societies and other non-Ashkenazi Jews sometimes classified as Sephardim—have resided at the margins.2 Sarah Abrevaya Stein refers to this dynamic as one that pits the "Sephardic mystique" against the "Sephardic mistake," the latter imagining Jewish life since the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim societies as "monolithic, static, tangential to the larger Jewish world, and of little interest to the scholar of Jewish history."3 A vast literature has developed around the allure and mystique of the first group of Sephardim that traces back to the founding of Jewish studies as an organized discipline during the nineteenth century in German-speaking lands.4 To prove their worthiness, to combat antisemitism and claims that Jews were not European but merely the continent's internal "Oriental," and to justify Jews' claims for civil and political rights, practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums elevated the Jews of medieval Spain—figures like Maimonides—and the Western Sephardic diaspora—figures like Spinoza—as models whom German Jews ought to emulate for their legendary abilities to blend their Jewishness and participation in general society.5 That mystique transferred to the North American setting; the story of American Jewish history begins with Western Sephardim, whether those Spanish and Portuguese Jews who, as conversos, accompanied Columbus on his voyages to the Americas in 1492, or those who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654—the group that Baron and his colleagues celebrated in 1954. American Jewish leaders believed that the longstanding roots of Jews in the United States justified their belonging in the present. Wissenschaft scholars did not completely reject the accusations made against them by antisemites but internalized and projected denigrating tropes onto those Jews further to the east (and the south), to their own internal Others, in a process described by Aziza Khazzoom as the "great [End Page 520] chain of orientalism."6 Wissenschaft scholars viewed those descendants of Iberian Jews expelled in 1492 who settled in the Islamic world to be a liability for a narrative that sought to justify Jews' Europeanness, and so largely cast them out of the story. The great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz emphasized the "decline" of Ottoman Jews that drew on Orientalist imagery of the era. The descendants of "Spanish Jews" became "Turkish Jews" and later "Asiatic Jews" in the Ottoman Empire, stripped of the noble title "Sephardim," for they "did not produce a single great genius who originated ideas to stimulate future ages, nor mark out a new thought for men of average intelligence...

  PublisherDOI

• “Impostors”:

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2021-04-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6 “Impostors”: Levantine Jews and the Limits of Jewish New York

  Academic Studies Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Genealogy
  • Archaeology
  PublisherDOI

• INTRODUCTION. IS SALONICA JEWISH?

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jewish Salonica

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 33 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Ancient history
  • History

  Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Giorgos Antoniou

  Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

  4 shared

• John M. Efron

  1 shared

• Carolin Kosuch

  University of Göttingen

  1 shared

• Gonstanze Jaiser

  1 shared

• Anne-Christin Saß

  1 shared

• Paul Mendes‐Flohr

  1 shared

• Toby Green

  The King's College

  1 shared

• Giddon Ticotsky

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research…
• 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studi…