I'm curious as to what other alternative arrangements and cultural methods of accommodation with a modern world and non-Jewish home nations will develop. In particular, it must be said from what I've seen that things are pretty heavily focused on specifically Israel/the Levant and is now expanding to Europe, so I'm wondering what other potential models whether original or modified might evolve around other Middle Eastern, North African, and Ethiopian Jews, to say nothing of the ones already afield in the United States and other New World colonies.
For the U.S. reform hasnt started but given the Tauro synagogue in Providence is nominally sephardic Id go following the Maharitz. but youre right we've fallen for the Levantine trap in Jewish historiography.
At this point in the story, the Jewish population of the US and British North America is in low four figures - this is before the Second Migration, let alone the Third [1] - and the number of Jews elsewhere in the Americas was negligible unless you count romantic and most likely inaccurate legends about converso families. The American Jews are important in that they're pioneering a model of Jewish life based on individual liberty and loose community organization, but even there, the UK (and ITTL, Acre) are more significant examples of that model. The Americas might be part of this story down the line, but they aren't yet.
Ethiopia too - Eldad ha-Dani aside [2], the Ethiopian Jews and the Euro-MENA mainstream aren't going to rediscover each other until somewhat later in the 19th century.
MENA is of course a more glaring omission. We're going to see more of it fairly soon - for instance, Iraq will enter the chat when the Sassoons make their first appearance at the end of the 1799-1815 arc, and the Iraqi and Persian Jews will continue to figure in the 1840 arc. OTOH, this timeline has turned into a story about an alternate Jewish modernity (I'm probably cheating a bit in describing some of the emerging arrangements in Russia and the Wadi Ara as "modern," but YKWIM), and the Jews of the Maghreb, Yemen and even Anatolia/Balkans at this time are premodern in their internal structure and their relationship with wider society. Some of them will progress toward one or more of the models of modernity that are appearing here and others will
migrate toward those models (as some already have), but I'm not sure how deep in the weeds I'll be getting with those homelands.
(Also, the last time I tried to build an entire alternate world, it took me four years, and while I'm enjoying this project, I don't plan on spending nearly that long on it. So the scope of future arcs will be necessarily limited.)
[1] A long time ago, I did "Spinoza migrates to Constantinople after being excommunicated and, among many other things, indirectly touches off an early Second Migration," which you can find
here if you don't mind some inaccuracy about how Ottoman politics and religious administration worked at the time. But this isn't that story.
[2] That there were Jews in Ethiopia was something that Jews elsewhere "knew" for centuries before they actually
knew. It's amazingly, beautifully ironic that the charlatan Eldad ha-Dani turned out to be right after all.
