Middle Eastern and North African Jews and the Birth of Modern Fashion: A Hidden History
May 12 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
In this talk, historians Devi Mays and Julia Phillips Cohen discuss the unknown role that Jews from the eastern and southern Mediterranean played in the shaping of modern couture. Following two fashion houses run by an interconnected network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in fin-de-siècle Paris, the talk reveals the participation of these firms in a global web of makers, suppliers, and designers stretching from Algiers and Constantinople to Cairo, Tabriz and Kyoto.
Julia Phillips Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her publications include the books Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), co-authored and edited with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, as well as articles in the American Historical Review, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Modern History, Jewish Social Studies and Jewish Quarterly Review. She is currently at work, together with Devi Mays, on a book exploring a forgotten network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe.
Devi Mays is an Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History at the University of Michigan. Her book, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020) won the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize from the American Historical Association, the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture, the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia and Oceania from the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Alixa Naff Migration Studies Prize from the Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. Her articles have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, Mashriq & Mahjar, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Modern History and AJS Perspectives. She is currently working with Julia Phillips Cohen on a book exploring a forgotten network of North African and Middle Eastern Jews in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 • 306 Royce Hall • 2 PM
Middle Eastern and North African Jews and the Birth of Modern Fashion: A Hidden History
Julia P. Cohen (Vanderbilt) & Devi Mays (University of Michigan)
Moderator: Aomar Boum (UCLA)
Al Finci Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies