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This book tells the story of the Muslim community in modern Bulgaria during a period of imperial dissolution, conflicting national and imperial enterprises, and the emergence of new national and ethnic identities. Following the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-1878 that paved the way for Bulgarian independence, a movement for cultural reform and political mobilization gained momentum within Bulgaria’s sizable Muslim population. From the establishment of the Bulgarian state in 1878 until the 1908 Young Turk revolution, this reform movement emerged as part of a struggle to redefine Muslim collective identity without severing ties to the Ottomans, during a period when Muslims were losing faith in the Sultan, while also fearing Young Turk secularism. This book draws on both Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies, and approaches the question of Balkan Muslims’ engagement with modernity through a transnational lens, demonstrating how Bulgarian Muslims debated similar questions as Muslims elsewhere around the world. This book situates the Bulgarian story within a global narrative of Muslim political and cultural reform movements, analyzes how Muslims understood and conceptualized “Europe,” and reveals the centrality of the Bulgarian Muslims to the Young Turk Revolution. Milena Methodieva makes a compelling case for how the experience of a Muslim minority provides new insight into the nature of nationalism, citizenship, and state formation.

The Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the "spectacle of nature" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the "sentiment of divinity." These "passions of the soul," traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade.

Structured around the stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Asssidon), The Sultan’s Communists examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly independent Morocco. It also explores how Communism facilitated the participation of Moroccan Jews in Morocco’s national liberation struggle with roots in the mass upheavals of the interwar and WWII periods. Alma Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and ’60s, and how Communist Jews survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy. These stories unfold in a country that, upon independence from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, Israel) during the Cold War all while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. Heckman’s manuscript contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East, filling in the gaps on the Jewish history of 20th-century Morocco as no other previous book has done.

The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.

Why did some of the most brilliant—but often forgotten—Jewish émigré writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French as a second language, even as they faced a double exclusion as foreigners and as Jews under Vichy? Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France before the Second World War (including Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, Irène Némirovsky, and Elsa Triolet) switched from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, even when their Frenchness was being violently denied by the state. In this manuscript, Julia Elsky argues that these Jewish émigré writers harnessed the potential multilingualism of French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities before and during the Occupation. When the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied them their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws, Jewish émigré authors from Eastern Europe began to re-examine, and in some cases, reassert their role in the French nation by exploring the possibilities of writing with a “Jewish voice” in the French language. In depicting key aspects of the war experience—the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the Resistance in France and in London—their work contests the boundaries between foreignness and belonging.