In Dr. Stein’s profusion of work, she has engaged with a vast array of subjects related to Jewish life and culture with a Mediterranean focus. She has authored and edited several award-winning books and published an extensive collection of scholarly articles. Most crucially, however, she has expanded our understanding of Jewish history by persistently illuminating unappreciated lives and the worlds within them that would otherwise be disregarded and forgotten.
On Monday, September 15th, about 120 members of the McGill community streamed into the Thomson House Ballroom for this year’s Annual Levites Lecture, hosted by McGill’s Jewish Studies department. Attendees were all eager to listen to Dr. Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s presentation, “Amateur Films and Sephardi Joy: A Global Spin.”
Her presentation delved into the interwoven lives of the Nahmias and Aresty families—Sephardi Jews spread across continents; the former family in the Balkans and the latter in the United States. While examining the dialectic of diaspora as it manifested in the shared reality of these families, the presentation unveiled a seldom seen Jewish existence in the Balkans. At the center of these 20th-century stories was Rachel Nahmias, with whom Dr. Stein developed a personal relationship during her research, and will soon celebrate her 109th birthday. She was also the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
While investigating photographs, maps, and snippets of film reels before the ballroom brimming with attendees, the passion of Dr. Stein’s meticulous approach to historical inquiry was on full display. The layers of analysis she provided cannot be fully recounted in this article, but a grounding insight is that the consistent theme throughout the presentation was constant change. Physical changes in location, cultural transformations of places, modification of names and hiding of identities, and pertinently, advancements in technology were all captured through the lives of these Sephardi families.
Dr. Stein contextualized Jewish life with a macro analysis of the socio-political changes surrounding the Nahmias family in their town of Bitola, in what is now North Macedonia—a place that for Nahmias, was Eastern European, but in her father’s upbringing, was thoroughly Mediterranean. The region changed hands many times over the decades before and after the Nahmias family inhabited their home on a bustling commercial street near the town center, referred to by locals as the “Jew House”.
From this bigger picture, Dr. Stein then analyzed minute details through images, ranging from formal family portrait photographs, to an Aresty family film from a 1936 reunion, to a professional mountain-spa-resort photographer, and later, the sedulous documentation of Jews in Nazi registry—each form conveying new feelings and reflecting a different perception of Jewish life. She identified the path of the sun and noted seasonal changes based on whether children held lilacs, indicating spring, or apples, indicating autumn. Also of significance were the various garments associated with changing weather that further reflected progressing economic status as their family’s wealth grew from the textile industry.
Aside from the retrievable information about dates, ages, status, and interactions, Dr. Stein delved into the personal relationships and attitudes of her Sephardi subjects by skillfully interpreting the happenings behind and around the camera. In a brief post-presentation conversation with Nu, Dr. Stein explained her approach: “I’m interested in the life of the photograph, and the data it captures.” While describing her multi-faceted research Dr. Stein expressed, “I feel as though I’m doing a little bit of a balancing act,” drawing both information and, more abstractly, personal meaning and stories from the images.
Dr. Stein reflected on her motivation throughout her career: “I have been driven to gather neglected voices… [voices of] Sephardim generally, but also girls, children…” In her reflection, Dr. Stein emphasised the importance of “attending to the diversity of Jewish experiences, rather than ‘the’ Jewish experience.”
The Aresty family film, which captured moments from the lives of their Sephardic family in the Balkans was, in effect, the first and last time this particular mode of Jewish existence would be documented. Dr. Stein not only brought to light Sephardi lives that are often drowned out by the Ashkenazi-centric narrative so prevalent in Jewish history; she honoured them by revitalizing their stories and broadening our understanding of the multiplicity of Jewish existences.
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