This volume is an excellent basic resource for scholars and textbook for students, it offers a new look at the history of Izmir and will not only be an exciting eye-opener for scholars but will also surprise those familiar with the field. The contributors of this solid and well-researched reader- historians, linguists, Hebraists, Romance scholars, journalists - explore the rich, complex, and contradictory history of Jewish Izmir, and seek to capture and interpret the diversity of the Jewish experience in its breadth and diversity from a multidisciplinary perspective. With an eye toward urban studies, the reader brings together language and literature, archaeology and art, architecture and cemeteries, printing and journalism, music and theater, Jewish institutions, Jewish-owned business and shops, history, and family history. – Michael Studemund-Halevy University of Hamburg.