Representation of transcultural memory in "His Hundred Years" and "Farewell to Salonica"

Sephardic Jews are a community of Jews who initially settled in the Iberian Peninsula through forced migration but later sought refuge in the Ottoman Republic in the early 15th century to escape the Catholic Christian persecution in Spain. After the 1492 Alhambra Decree, tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain. During the reign of Sultan Bayezid II, thousands of Sephardic Jews were accepted and settled in Ottoman territories. Following their invitation to the Ottoman Empire, the Sephardim were particularly settled in areas like Salonica, Izmir, Istanbul, and the Thrace region. Together with other Jewish groups living in the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic Jews enjoyed a tolerant, affluent, and productive life in the Islamic world for centuries. However, the political, social, and economic changes brought about by the Balkan Wars and World War I accelerated the migration of Sephardic Jews to Western countries, especially America. My thesis aims to explain the migration of Sephardic Jews to America in the early 20th century from the perspective of transcultural memory studies, focusing on the characters in Shalach Manot's "His Hundred Years" and Leon Sciaky's "Farewell to Salonica," as well as the memories of Sephardic Jews who lived in the Ottoman Empire for approximately five centuries. It explores the multicultural environment Sephardic Jews experienced. Transcultural memory studies shed light on the dynamic, evolving, and interconnected nature of the memory. It emphasizes the fluidity of memory, illustrating how memories interact across diverse cultural landscapes, contributing to the formation of societal narratives and identities without being confined to a single cultural or national border. In recent years, there has been increasing academic interest in memory studies due to growing attention to interculturalism, identity, and ethnic-religious studies. This study aims to elucidate the relationship between the multicultural structure of Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire and their migration to the United States in the early 20th century through the lens of transcultural memory studies.