About the Talk:
The Jewish community of Izmir is one of the most important historically in the Ottoman Empire. Formed in the early 17th century, the community grew in wealth and power as Izmir became a very strategic and economically important center of trade for the European powers. While never as large as Istanbul or Salonika, Izmir has left an indelible imprint and a large diaspora. In the late 1820s, the Ottoman Empire, under Sultan Mahmud II (1808-1839) following his dissolution of the Janissary Corps, embarked on its first modern census meant to assist with modernizing the Empire. This census, completed in the early 1830s only recorded males and was conducted only in the heartland of the Empire. Most of these censuses give us at least an age, the first name, a father's name, and relationship to the "head of household". Last year, while conducting work in the archives, our speaker Michael Waas discovered a rare surviving defter ("notebook") from that census for Izmir that contained a surprise: surnames.
In this lecture, Michael Waas will provide some background on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish community in Izmir, and what this surviving remnant of the census reveals about Jewish history and genealogy. This research was conducted together with Dr. Dov Cohen of Bar Ilan University and advised and assisted by Dr. Abraham Marcus, emeritus professor of The University of Texas, who without his expertise, we would only be scratching the surface. This project is the first of many projects that Waas will be helping bring to JewishGen's Sephardic Research Division.
About the Speaker:
Michael Waas is a professional genealogist and historian, specializing in Sephardic Jewry, with his firm, Hollander-Waas Jewish Heritage Services. He received his Bachelor's Degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Historical Archaeology from New College of Florida and his Master’s Degree from the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa and the subject of his MA thesis was “Istorya i oy: A comparative study on the Development of Jewish Heritage of the former Ottoman Empire.” He received the Gaon Prize for Outstanding M.A. Thesis research for the academic year 2017-2018 of the Moshe David Gaon Center for Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) Culture as well as the Prize for Research into the Heritage of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewry, awarded by the Ben Zvi Institute and the Israeli Ministry of Education, for the year 2017-2018. He has lectured globally on Jewish genealogy and Sephardic history, in Portugal, Israel, the UK, in the US, and virtually for several organizations. Waas is the co-administrator of AvotaynuDNA's ongoing Genetic Census of the Jewish People as well as Associate Director of the Sephardic Researcher Division of JewishGen. Currently, Waas is the Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society, where he is surveying their archive and collection for Jewish-related materials.