Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950

Sephardi Lives: An Introduction

Let our wise men rise up, let each one search in his own place or town of residence for the memories of his brothers and neighbors. Let them call to the hidden manuscripts: come out!

Yosef-Da'at/El Progreso, March 13, 1888

History is not only the chronological narration of remarkable events . . . [but] much more: it is the study of life, the search for truth, the analytical description of traditions and customs according to the manner in which they present themselves before the eyes of the observer, and according to the manner in which they are painted in the imagination of the historian.

Morris Isaac Cohen, 1911

All that we have done so far is but a drop in the ocean.

Letter from Esther Michael (née Salem) in Salonica to her brother Jacques Salem in Manchester, August 23–28, 1917

In 1749, Jews in Salonica attempt to evade a communal tax meant to support the Jewish community of Jerusalem; in 1778 a merchant in Livorno writes a Ladino-language guide to modern living; in 1840 eyewitnesses report on the siege of the Jewish quarter of Rhodes in the wake of a blood libel; a rabbi of Sarajevo, writing three decades later, lauds the virtues of the printing press; in 1895 a teacher petitions the Ottoman government to open a school for girls in Istanbul; in the midst of the First World War a young woman sends a letter to her brother in Manchester, offering an eyewitness account of the horrific fire that had just destroyed Salonica; a scholar in the fledgling Turkish Republic, writing in 1927, defends the Arabic alphabet against attempts to introduce the Latin script; a Greek survivor of Auschwitz gives an interview in a displaced persons camp; in 1948 a man writes of his journey to the Belgian Congo.

What do these sources, penned in different languages, centuries, continents, genres, states, and social contexts, have in common? The simplest answer is that they were all produced by Jews who traced their roots back to medieval Iberia (modern-day Spain and Portugal). These Jews have come to be known as Sephardim because of a linkage Jewish authors in the Middle Ages made between the Iberian Peninsula and a biblical land referred to in Obadiah 1:20 as Sepharad. Although Sephardi communities have historically existed in locales around the globe, the individuals, families, social groups, and institutions treated in this book formed part of the largest Judeo-Spanish cultural sphere to exist outside the Iberian Peninsula—one that reconstituted itself in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean after the late fifteenth century.

And yet, the answer to the question of what unifies the documents described above, and the many others that fill this book, is infinitely more complicated than any terse demographic accounting can convey. The people who populate the pages of this book did not always identify themselves foremost as Sephardim, or even as Jews. Sometimes they organized themselves according to city, regional, national, imperial, religious, class, professional, and gender affiliations. In the face of this cacophony, this Introduction proposes a series of answers to the question of what unified the diverse experiences of modern Sephardim and what justifies the book you hold before you.

This sourcebook documents the history of the Judeo-Spanish heartland of Southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Levant as it existed in dynamic engagement with its diasporic centers on five continents over roughly two hundred and fifty years. We have chosen to begin the volume at the turn of the eighteenth century, a period of cultural stabilization for Ottoman Jewry. Our endpoint is the years immediately following the destruction of the Judeo-Spanish heartland of Southeastern Europe during the Second World War, after which the global geography of Sephardi communities assumed radically new form. Assembled here are roughly 150 sources gathered from archives and libraries all over the world, both in their English original and translated from Bulgarian, Croatian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Ladino, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Ottoman and modern Turkish, and Yiddish.

The pages that follow offer a broad historical introduction to the modern Judeo-Spanish heartland and of the Sephardi culture it produced in dialogue with a variety of Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies in the Balkans and the Levant, with non-Jewish cultures, global Jewry, and Sephardi émigré centers.

THE OTTOMAN JUDEO-SPANISH WORLD AND ITS DIASPORA, 1700–1950

The modern Sephardi communities examined in this book were constituted after 1492, when the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were forced to choose between conversion to Christianity and exile. In the years that followed, a relatively small number of Iberian Jewish converts made their way across the Atlantic and settled in Portuguese and Spanish America, where the watchful eye of the Inquisition made impossible the public expression of Judaism. A portion of those who desired to maintain their Judaism, or return to it, settled in Amsterdam and Dutch colonial holdings in the New World, where they were free to practice their religion. Some fled to southern France and lived as secret Jews until they were finally given free rein to acknowledge their Judaism. Others migrated to North Africa to join existing communities of Arabic- and Berber-speaking Jews long settled in the region. The largest numbers of Iberian Jewish exiles, however, found their way across the Mediterranean (some by way of Italy), to the Ottoman Empire, where they were permitted to settle and practice their Judaism openly. This community is the principal subject of the present volume.

These Iberian Jewish exiles became the most demographically significant Jewish immigrant community in the Ottoman Empire. Other sizable Jewish populations had lived in the region for many centuries. Together these Jewish communities became subjects of an empire that reached, at its height, from the Bosphorus to the Danube in Europe, across the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, and into the Arabic-speaking Middle East as far as the western borders of modern-day Iran. Over the next four hundred and fifty years the Sephardim would prove to be an integral element in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies, particularly in those cities in which they were most densely concentrated, such as Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Sarajevo, Sofia, and Jerusalem (see Map 1).

Like most Ottoman subjects and Jews the world over, Sephardi families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were typically poor and, later, working-class. Many worked as small-time peddlers or shopkeepers. Others engaged in specialized crafts and occupations, such as Salonica’s famous male porters (hamals) or the women who rolled cigarettes in their homes or in factories. The voices of the Jewish lower and working classes resound frequently in this book. One example is a petition drawn up in 1847 by impoverished Jews in Izmir who complained that the elites of their community were burdening them disproportionately with taxes and abusing them much more than the ancient Egyptians had abused the Hebrews during their enslavement. Another is a letter penned by a mid-nineteenth-century widow in Jerusalem requesting financial support. At times, poverty became a catalyst for politicization. This book also features the Ladino manifesto of a socialist federation of Salonica that was run and supported largely by Sephardi Jews: its authors used this platform to demand proper working conditions and an eight-hour workday.

Map 1   The Ottoman Mediterranean, ca. 1683

In addition to poverty, questions surrounding religious observance regularly emerged in Ottoman Jewish life. One voice readers will discover in this volume is that of a Salonican rabbi who in 1755 answered a query as to whether the Dönme—descendants of those Jews who followed the self-proclaimed messiah Shabbetay Sevi into Islam after he converted in 1666—could be considered Jews. A second responsum (singular of responsa, or rabbinic answers to religious queries), penned in 1763, discusses the phenomenon of Jewish men who broke with the prohibition against cutting their peot, or sidelocks. Although some tested the boundaries of Judaism, until well into the twentieth century most Ottoman Sephardim were practicing Jews who as a matter of course hewed to religious institutions that structured their everyday lives. Even those who openly disregarded Jewish law or came to identify themselves as freethinkers or atheists continued to be associated with the religious community into which they had been born. In this sense, Ottoman Sephardim were products of their local environment, where religious traditions and communal boundaries remained powerful even after the empire’s collapse in the wake of the First World War. Similar patterns prevailed among other Ottoman Jewish communities as well as among Ottoman Muslims and Christians across the empire.

The denominations that emerged among European and American Jews did not take root in the Sephardi world. The Jewish Reform movement, however, did capture the attention of Sephardi authors. One such response appears in this volume in the form of a mid-nineteenth century text issued by the chief rabbi of Izmir condemning the attempts of Jews in Paris and London to alter their liturgy. During the same period Isaac Akrish, a rabbi of Istanbul, denounced innovations closer to home; when reform-minded Jewish elites opened a new-style Jewish school in 1856, Akrish warned of the grave dangers that the teaching of foreign languages and knowledge of the nations of the world posed to traditional Jewish life. Other religious thinkers responded differently to the challenges of their age by seeking to demonstrate how their religion was compatible with modernity. In 1870 Judah Papo (d. 1873), a Sephardi rabbi in Jerusalem, praised the printing press for its ability to spread knowledge about Judaism and to give voice to rabbinical scholars like himself.

Identification with a religious body remained a given well into the twentieth century, but there were many other ways according to which Ottoman subjects identified and grouped themselves. Sephardi women and men also lived in constant dialogue with imperial and, later, national authorities, their non-Jewish neighbors, Jews of other backgrounds, and other individuals and communities across the globe. This dialogue took many forms. Jews and non-Jews shopped in the same markets, cooked similar foods, engaged in neighborly relations, made music together, experienced the same natural and man-made disasters, and appeared before the same courts. One document included in this book records the petition of a Jew who brought a case against his Muslim business partner to the Islamic law court of mid-nineteenth-century Izmir. In later periods Jews attended the same schools, adopted the same fashions, read the same newspapers and books, co-authored scholarship, participated in joint political projects, and socialized in clubs and dance halls with neighbors of other faiths.

Ottoman Sephardim were similarly intertwined with Jews of other backgrounds, including Romaniots (Greek-speaking Jews who lived in portions of the western Ottoman Empire), Mizrahim (Arabic-speaking Jews in the Middle Eastern regions of the empire), Karaites (followers of the Bible who rejected rabbinical Judaism), and Ashkenazi Jews (Jews who traced their roots to medieval Ashkenaz, aka the German Rhineland), many of whom entered the empire from Central and Eastern Europe during the modern period. Even among Sephardim, significant differences in status and class existed, such as those between Ottoman Sephardim and the Livornese—a group that included Sephardi Jews who had settled in Livorno, Italy, following the Iberian expulsion of 1492 and subsequently established extensive global trading networks. The Livornese retained their Italian identity even after they had been settled in Ottoman lands for many decades. Their continued identification with Europe distinguished them from other Ottoman Jews and earned them the moniker of francos, efrenji, and ifrangi, terms meaning Europeans in Ladino, Ottoman Turkish, and Arabic respectively.

Modern Sephardim also took part in global developments. A great number resided in port cities that served as a meeting place for people of various nationalities. Many also traveled abroad, had foreign commercial contacts, and encountered travelers and officials hailing from diverse parts of the world. They read foreign publications and participated in political movements both local and international. They corresponded with friends and family who had emigrated, purchased imported goods, and kept up with the latest fashions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Ottoman Jews also caught the attention of global Jewish philanthropic organizations whose leaders perceived their Eastern coreligionists to be in need of cultural regeneration and economic uplift.

For all these points of contact, Ottoman Sephardim also maintained their own traditions—religious, culinary, familial, and ephemeral. Perhaps the best marker of this can be found in the realm of language. During more than four centuries following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, Sephardi Jews spoke and wrote in Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish and Judezmo), an Ibero-Romance language grammatically similar to fifteenth-century Castilian but encompassing loan words from other Romance languages as well as from Hebrew, Aramaic, and various languages Sephardim encountered in their new homes, principally Greek, Turkish, and South Slavic languages. Until the early twentieth century Ladino was printed in a semi-cursive Hebrew typeface known as the Rashi script and penned in a Sephardi style of handwriting known as soletreo. Well into the twentieth century the majority of Sephardi Jews in Ottoman lands claimed Ladino as their mother tongue.

The advent of the printing press changed the fabric of their everyday lives, connecting and politicizing modern Sephardi communities. Sephardi Jews soon cultivated a rich Ladino print culture, publishing scores of periodicals and translating world literature into the language. They also used Ladino to organize politically and to create theatrical productions. As was true in the Yiddish-speaking world, sources printed in Ladino reflected a range of regional, local, and class-based variations that distinguished Sephardim from one another even as they united them.

While Jews were always a minority in the Judeo-Spanish heartland of Southeastern Europe and the Levant, there were times at which Sephardi culture—and Ladino in particular—held great sway (see Map 2). In the early twentieth century one was more likely to hear Ladino spoken on the streets of Salonica (one of the few urban communities ever to boast a majority Jewish population) than any other language; many non-Jews even learned Ladino at school or for business. There were also cities such as Salonica, Izmir, Edirne, and Istanbul in which Jewish journalists and authors contributed to local publications in French and Ottoman Turkish. By the nineteenth century both languages helped foster communication among elites from different ethno-religious communities in the empire.

Map 2   Sephardi centers in southeastern Europe, ca. 1908

Other changes were introduced by the state. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman authorities introduced a series of reforms known collectively as the Tanzimat (Reorganization). Among the legal changes Ottoman statesmen announced during this period was the declaration of the civic equality of Ottoman non-Muslims, a move that broke with earlier arrangements based on the state’s recognition of Christians and Jews as protected peoples—dhimmis in Arabic or zimmis in Turkish—in exchange for their recognition of the superiority of their Islamic rulers. As part of this reform, the religious establishments of the non-Muslim communities lost much of their former sway as they were forced to compete with a lay elite that increasingly took charge of communal affairs and made alliances with the state. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Jewish educational norms, which traditionally emphasized religious learning for boys but offered no formal education for girls, were challenged both from within and without.

Many of the most radical transformations in Ottoman Jewish education followed the introduction of Jewish schools run by a Franco-Jewish philanthropy, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, established in Paris in 1860. Alliance schools offered instruction in French according to a largely secular curriculum. In such institutions generations of Jewish girls and boys received a French-inspired education. Many Alliance graduates, including some whose words are included in this volume, went on to become prominent teachers, public intellectuals, and journalists in their communities.

During the same period the Ottoman state opened new imperial schools to non-Muslims, many of whom gained entry to positions in the Tanzimat bureaucracy as a result of their training. Although the number of Jews who passed through these state schools paled in comparison with those who attended traditional Jewish schools (meldars and talmude torah) or, later, those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, those Jews who could boast an imperial education profoundly shaped the development of Jewish communal life in the late Ottoman era. Such individuals came to be regarded as paragons of Jewish integration who could serve as intermediaries between Jewish communities and the government.

Constant transformations and dramatic ruptures marked the two and a half centuries represented in this volume. Because fires were endemic to the dense cities of the Ottoman Balkans where wooden architecture predominated, various Ottoman Jewish sources provide a window into lives constantly threatened by such disasters. Among these sources is a Ladino editorial of 1846 portraying the damage wrought by a major conflagration in 1841 in Izmir. Another describes the devastating effect the 1917 fire in Salonica had on Jewish lives and infrastructure. Earthquakes too were a constant threat. The first source featured in this book offers the ruminations of a rabbi of Izmir about a calamitous earthquake that hit his city in the late seventeenth century.

Wars also led to border adjustments and the birth of new countries across Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The theme of Violence, War, and Regional Transformation thus lends this book one of its organizing motifs. Nationally inflected revolts in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the establishment in 1830 of an autonomous state called Serbia and in 1832 in the independence of another new state, the Kingdom of Greece. The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878 (also known as the Russo-Turkish War) precipitated further Ottoman territorial losses and led to the creation of an autonomous Bulgaria under Russian protection. The war also prompted the exodus of thousands of Jews, who joined hundreds of thousands of Muslims in their retreat into the shrinking borders of the empire. While most of these Jewish refugees returned to their erstwhile homes after hostilities ceased, others chose to settle permanently in the Ottoman cities in which they had taken refuge. Some three decades later, the Italo-Ottoman War of 1911–1912 (also known as the Italo-Turkish War) and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 again ended in Ottoman defeats and resulted in the empire’s loss of Libya as well as nearly all of its remaining territories in Southeastern Europe.

These conflicts represented a turning point for the Sephardi Jews in a number of respects. The Italo-Ottoman War marked the first time that Ottoman Christians and Jews fought as conscripts for the imperial army, under a universal conscription law introduced just two years earlier. It also prompted the flight of many long-time Italian Jewish residents. The Balkan Wars, which shifted Ottoman officials’ attention away from North Africa and back to the empire’s European territories, saw Jews fighting on all sides. Those from Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria were among the descendants of Jewish families that had remained in these new nation-states, many of whom went to great lengths to integrate and prove their allegiance to their new homelands. These wars also precipitated the flight of many Ottoman subjects to countries far from the conflicts, including destinations in Western Europe and the Americas.

Despite the many ruptures Sephardim experienced in the modern era, it was the transfer of the historic Jewish center of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek hands in 1912 that marked the single most dramatic development for Sephardi Jewry during this period, both symbolically and practically. Up to this point the vast majority of Sephardim remained under Ottoman rule, a situation that had facilitated travel and communication among different communities. Within a period of only a few years, increasingly torn by political violence and displacement, the erstwhile Judeo-Spanish heartland was divided between enemy camps. The Ottoman Empire’s entrance into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers accelerated this process and precipitated the loss of the remaining Ottoman territories in the Middle East.

The massacres and population transfers that resulted from a decade of incessant war—including the extermination of as many as a million Armenians in eastern Anatolia and the population exchange orchestrated in 1923 between Greece and the new Republic of Turkey—further homogenized the national polities that emerged after the Ottoman collapse. These events are described by eyewitnesses in the pages that follow. Indeed, due to high rates of literacy and the availability of new technologies, the interwar period witnessed an intense flurry of publications by Sephardi Jews in the empire, its successor states, and émigré centers. Jews were now being directed into state schools, where they were educated in national languages; historic Jewish neighborhoods were displaced in the interest of state-sponsored urban planning; and religious authorities lost much of what remained of their former secular functions. As elsewhere, local nationalist sentiment was accompanied by a rise in antisemitism. Both trends pressured Jews to assimilate into national cultures that showed little tolerance for linguistic, religious, or cultural differences.

All of these dramatic transformations drove Jews and non-Jews alike to novel forms of political expression and activism, the subject of another chapter. Ottomanism (imperial state patriotism), socialism, Zionism, anti-Zionism, Sephardism, feminism, and nationalism of various forms (including Serbian, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish and other national affiliations) animated Jewish men and women in the Judeo-Spanish cultural zone, prompting endless debate and cultural output. No formula could predict an individual’s political predilections, and for some, political allegiances changed fluidly with time and in step with world events.

Among those who became politicized in the era of imperial reorganization, secularization, nationalism, and increasingly frequent contact with ideas from abroad were Sephardi intellectuals and scholars. Indeed, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Sephardim began producing scholarly work on the history and traditions of their communities, impelled as much by their commitment to science as by the sense that the world of Judeo-Spanish culture they knew so intimately was poised to disappear. Wars and disasters accelerated their enterprise. These pioneers of Sephardi studies, to whom we devote another chapter of this volume, drew from many sources as well as their personal knowledge of the societies they described.

Well before the devastation of the Second World War, mass emigration disrupted the Sephardi heartland. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, many Ottoman Jews began moving intra-regionally, from smaller cities to bigger ones and especially into cultural and economic centers such as Salonica and Istanbul. By the early years of the twentieth century, Jews began leaving the Ottoman lands for Egypt, Europe, and the United States. Some were prompted by the desire to avoid conscription. Others migrated in search of economic betterment. Later waves of emigration would expand these communities and create new ones in Palestine, Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico, among other places (see Map 3). Many of those who survived the Second World War, including many of the Turkish and most of the Bulgarian Jews, emigrated, either to large cities in the region or to the new state of Israel. Wherever they relocated, Sephardi émigrés remained in touch with their former homes, sending letters and money to those left behind, communicating with friends and family, collaborating on the publication of books and periodicals, and helping others to emigrate in their wake. These sustained connections to the Sephardi heartland, along with the pleasures and challenges Sephardim encountered in their new homes, are the subject of the penultimate chapter of the book.

Map 3   Sephardi émigré centers of the twentieth century

Although the cultural world of Sephardim had already begun to disintegrate even before the Second World War, the Holocaust sounded the death knell for the Judeo-Spanish heartland. While the Sephardi communities of Bulgaria and Turkey remained largely intact at the end of the war, the vast majority of Sephardim elsewhere in the region perished at the hands of the Nazis and their local accomplices. With them were destroyed homes, libraries, synagogues, neighborhoods, cemeteries, and an unimaginable quantity of objects and sources of popular culture. Even the memory of these communities was whitewashed, as gravestones from Salonica’s Jewish cemetery were used as building material to pave walkways, rebuild churches, and construct the walls of city plazas, while the bones of the dead remain covered over by Aristotle University. Elsewhere, too, the former vibrancy of Sephardi life—in Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, and other parts of Greece—has been forgotten, as the last generation of inhabitants who remember having Jewish neighbors passed. Even in scholarly realms the history of the Holocaust is written largely in the absence of its Sephardi dimension.

In addition to the Sephardi communities in Turkey and Bulgaria, émigrés outside Europe, as well as those Jews who hid, fought as partisans, or lived through camps, did survive the war. Our sourcebook extends until the mid-twentieth century in order to document the manner in which those who survived the war reconstituted their lives and communities. And yet, given the book’s focus on the Judeo-Spanish heartland, it is difficult to frame the postwar period as anything but a shadow of the rich, centuries-long Sephardi history that preceded it.

SEPHARDI LIVES

How does one define or identify a Sephardi life? The boundaries of Judeo-Spanish communities were always porous, and, as Sephardim were the demographic and cultural Jewish majority in Southeastern Europe and Western Anatolia, Sephardi communities absorbed others—Jews and non-Jews—over time. Many of the sources included in this documentary history illustrate that much of what appears Judeo-Spanish was constituted by individuals with diverse origins and thus cannot be understood according to the principle of descent. Though in certain respects the inheritance of medieval Iberia, Sephardi culture as it was shaped in Southeastern Europe, Anatolia, and the Levant in the early modern and modern eras was unquestionably a byproduct of various local developments and multiple influences.

This dynamic is evident for example in the history of the Gabbay family of nineteenth-century Istanbul. Born into the Jewish community of Baghdad during the second half of the eighteenth century, the patriarch of this family, Bağdatlı Yehezkel Gabbay (d. 1823), served both as the personal banker of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) and as a communal leader of Baghdad’s Jewish community before he ran afoul of the sultan and met a violent end. After his death his family remained in the imperial capital, and within just two generations his grandson Yehezkel Gabbay II (1825–1898) founded what would prove the first long-lived Ladino newspaper. A decade later, in 1871, his great-granddaughter Rosa Gabbay published a Ladino-language etiquette handbook for Jewish women, an excerpt of which is included in this volume. Members of this Arabophone Jewish family from one of the empire’s most important centers of Judeo-Arabic culture thus became, within a few decades, eminent figures in Sephardi communal life and pioneers of the Judeo-Spanish newspaper industry in the Ottoman capital.

Similar examples may be found among Sephardi Jews with family ties to Ashkenazi communities, such as the influential Salonican family of printers headed for much of the nineteenth century by Sa'adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi (1820–1903), whose name bears witness to his Ashkenazi origins. Sa'adi’s father’s family had come to the empire from Amsterdam in the early eighteenth century: his writings as well as those of his son Sam Lévy and great-granddaughter Esther Michael (née Salem) are included in the pages that follow. These figures may be said to have lived Sephardi lives, though their origins and names point to family trees with widespread roots. Despite this they became thoroughly integrated into the Sephardi milieus in which they lived, as did other families with surnames that suggest Ashkenazi origins, such as Polako (Polish), or Tedeschi and Aleman (German).

The family name of another individual featured in this volume points to the Romaniot, or Greek-Jewish, origins of certain Sephardi Jews. Jamila Kolonomos, whose recollections of her time as a Macedonian partisan during the Second World War are included in this book, hailed on her father’s side from a Judeo-Greek family from Ioannina in present-day Greece. As Romaniot Jews the Kolonomos family had likely resided in the area under Roman and later Byzantine rule long before the Ottoman conquest of the region. Yet in the early twentieth century, three brothers from the Kolonomos family settled in Monastir, present-day Bitola, Macedonia, a city that was home to an active Sephardi community. Over time they appear to have integrated into the local Sephardi milieu. As Kolonomos recalled later in life, her childhood was filled almost exclusively with Ladino. It was the language spoken in her home, the language her father used for his correspondence, the only language she knew as a child, and the one she chose to study systematically as an adult, after the last speakers of the Macedonian Ladino she grew up with had been all but destroyed during the Holocaust.

The magnetic draw of certain geographic and cultural centers also played a role in diversifying the Judeo-Spanish community. Around the turn of the eighteenth century a man by the name of Abraham made his way into the Sephardi community of Salonica. Abraham was a Jewish slave of unknown origins who had been sold by a man from Kilis, in the Aleppo vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (in present-day southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border), to another man by the name of Mürtaza Beşe ibn-i Hasan, from Crimea. Abraham arrived in Salonica after fleeing his owner and was granted his freedom there. Both because Sephardim dominated Jewish life in Salonica and because there were few options for an existence outside of a religious community in the Ottoman setting, if Abraham chose to settle in Salonica after his manumission, it is safe to assume that he too became Sephardi in time.

Conversion and other forms of purposeful boundary crossing also altered the fabric of the Sephardi heartland. An Ashkenazi man by the name of Moric Štajner married a Sephardi woman of Belgrade, his native city, in 1900. In the years that followed he attended Belgrade’s Sephardi synagogue and raised his children within that community before applying, more than two decades later, for official recognition as a member of Belgrade’s Sephardi congregation. After a year of extensive deliberations between local Ashkenazi and Sephardi representatives, Štajner’s wish was finally granted, and his registration into the Sephardi community complete. A parallel process unfolded twenty-five years later, when a man named Lazar Tinčević applied to the Jewish community of Salonica to convert to Judaism. After being assigned the name Abraham, he asked, instead, to be registered as Alberto—a name commonly adopted by Ladino-speaking men of the period—thus making explicit his intention to convert not only to Judaism but also to the Sephardi rite and culture of Judaism that had prevailed in his city for centuries.

The different trajectories pursued by Sephardi individuals during the modern era were similarly diverse. Few ended their lives in the same city or state in which they or their parents were born. One example is Graziella Benghiat, a graduate of an Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Izmir whose father moved to that city from the nearby town of Aydın. Benghiat, whose lecture on feminism is included in this volume, lived most of her early life in Izmir, where she ran a French-language journal in 1914. It was also in that city that she married Alexander Benghiat, a Sephardi journalist whose recollections of his education in a traditional Jewish school, or meldar, are also featured in this book. In the midst of the wars that plagued the region during the early twentieth century, the family dispersed: Alexander Benghiat died in Salonica, Graziella made her way to Paris with her son, while her brother-in-law spent time living in Cairo before settling in Buenos Aires. The Benghiats’ diverse connections and homes were hardly an exception in the Sephardi cultural world.

Abraham Galante, another author whose writings are included in this book, spent his life between his native Bodrum, on the southern Aegean coast; the island of Rhodes, where he attended school and later became a teacher; Izmir, where he was both a teacher and a journalist; Cairo, where he fled the regime of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and ran a Ladino newspaper for three years; London, where he attempted to gain support for his plan to settle Jews in the Sudan; and finally, Istanbul, where he lived out the final decades of his life under Ottoman and later Turkish rule. Although Galante chose to settle in Istanbul and became an ardent Turkish nationalist, his scholarly and family connections were global and linked him to the United States, Europe, Rhodesia, Palestine, and Israel, as attested by two letters included in this volume.

The story of Abraham Benaroya, a Bulgarian Sephardi labor leader and socialist whose life is documented below, is similarly dizzying. Born in Vidin in northwestern Bulgaria to a family of petty merchants, Benaroya later spent time studying at the Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade, teaching in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and leading a socialist federation in Salonica—whence he was exiled to Serbia by the Ottoman government and later to Naxos by the Greek state—before he was deported by the Germans during the Second World War. Surviving the war, he returned to Salonica until 1953, when he moved to Holon, Israel. There he ran a newspaper kiosk and spent the final years of his life in dire poverty, embittered and alone.

Those who ended their days in their native cities often did so only circuitously. Such was the experience of Joseph Nehama, a historian and Alliance Israélite Universelle schoolteacher from Ottoman, and later Greek, Salonica. After the Nazi occupation of his city, Nehama evacuated to Italian-occupied Athens. Fleeing that city after its occupation by German troops, Nehama attempted to make his way to Spain but was caught and deported to the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1944. It was only after his liberation the following year that Nehama made his way back to the city of his birth, now forever changed and with few traces of its once vibrant Jewish community.

Others crossed oceans never to return. This was true of Emma Adatto Schlesinger, whose family came to Seattle from Istanbul in the early twentieth century. Far from the city and empire in which she was born, Adatto lived, together with her family members and other Sephardi émigrés in Seattle, in a transplanted Ottoman Judeo-Spanish world, which she later preserved in her writings. These included one of the first master’s theses written for an American university on a Sephardi theme. Her brother, Albert Adatto, soon followed in her footsteps, producing in 1939 a thesis on the history of Seattle’s Sephardi community, selections of which are included in this volume. It is in homage to the Adattos’ commitment to Sephardi Studies, as well as in recognition of their families’ diasporic past, that we choose to feature a 1910 photograph of Emma and Albert as young children, taken in their adopted city of Seattle, on the cover of this book. Emma’s later recollections of growing up in the Sephardi community of the Pacific Northwest are also featured in this volume.

As these examples suggest, Judeo-Spanish culture in the Ottoman heartland was far from homogenous, insular, or static. Above all, the boundaries of Sephardi communities were elastic: their human geography reflected the effervescence of the multicultural society in which they took shape. The permeability of Sephardi communal and cultural boundaries proved even greater in the various émigré centers in which Sephardim settled over the course of the twentieth century, especially after the Judeo-Spanish heartland all but ceased to exist.

A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

Sephardi Lives is the first wide-ranging documentary history of the modern Judeo-Spanish world. It features the voices of women and men of various classes, cities, regions, religious and political affiliations, and eras. This book contains personal correspondences and court briefs, rabbinic responsa and political manifestos; articles from the Ladino press and works of scholarship; excerpts of memoirs, diaries, and oral histories; parliamentary records and documents of state; eyewitness accounts of war, massacres, and everyday violence; etiquette manuals; as well as intimate glimpses of childhood, friendship, marriage, and political comings of age.

The sea of material from which we have drawn is vast and, for the most part, unplumbed. Because they are so often neglected, documents that illustrate day-to-day Jewish lives receive special attention. These sources record the experiences of Jewish women and children. They explore relations between family members and religious questions. They document individual responses to war and natural disasters, emigration, and meditate on the interactions between Sephardim, other Jews, and non-Jews. While the book cannot cover every dimension of Sephardi life everywhere, it paints as rich a landscape as possible, given available resources.

Sephardi Lives is divided into six chapters designed to reflect spheres of life that shaped the quotidian experiences of Sephardi women, men, and children along with those of their neighbors. We acknowledge that this organizational structure is something of a conceit: the world of scholarship was never distinct from everyday life (or vice versa), while both realms coursed with the dramas of violence, war, and regional transformation, the shaping of political movements and ideologies, diasporic and émigré circles, and, in time, the trauma of the Second World War. Readers should consider these section headings as guides rather than strictures and are encouraged to utilize the index to pursue particular themes or the lives of particular authors across chapters.

Readers may not find certain categories they expect in this book. Despite a commitment to foregrounding sources about gender and by and about women, we have chosen to integrate such sources into the various chapters rather than to create separate chapters structured around Gender or Women’s Lives. The delineation of material on antisemitism, another category readers might expect, was a strategy we rejected as ill-fitting the geographic context. Anti-Jewish sentiment in Southeastern Europe and the Ottoman Levant did not develop into a clearly articulated political position until the final half-century covered by this volume. Nonetheless, examples of both anti-Jewish violence and ideological expressions of resentment against Jews can be found in different chapters of the book, particularly Violence, War, and Regional Transformation, and The Second World War, but also in The Emergence of Sephardi Scholarship. We have similarly refrained from developing a separate chapter covering Jewish/non-Jewish relations, although this theme also pulses through the book, which includes the voices not only of Jews but of Christians and Muslims as well.

Certain of the section headings we have chosen could command sourcebooks of their own. In particular we wish to draw attention to the fact that this book does not claim to offer comprehensive coverage of Sephardi life in émigré centers. In keeping with our focus on the Ottoman Judeo-Spanish world, this survey of the Sephardi diaspora seeks to emphasize the challenges and opportunities new émigrés encountered on new shores and the bonds that sutured the historic Sephardi heartland to various diasporic centers, indelibly imprinting both.

Wherever and whenever they lived in the Judeo-Spanish culture sphere or in diaspora, Sephardim were always highly integrated. For this reason documenting a discrete Sephardi history is impossible. We have not attempted it here. What is arguably more interesting, though also immeasurably harder, is to represent Sephardi culture as one that maintained distinct elements while remaining deeply connected to multiple other worlds.

This returns us to the question raised at the outset of this Introduction. What do the approximately 150 sources that appear in this book—written in over a dozen languages, spanning centuries, continents, genres, political and social contexts—have in common? We propose the following answers: the sources collected in this volume have in common their engagement with the diverse modern worlds of Sephardi Jews or those who identified and came into contact with their worlds. The documents that follow should be read as disparate glimpses into the past, moments that can be understood fully only with a complete recounting of the several contexts in which they unfurled. At the same time they can be read as chapters in a larger, Sephardi story that remains coherent despite its internal dissonance. The cacophony may be daunting, but it is what makes the study of the Sephardi past endlessly engaging. Acknowledging that (to borrow from one of our epigraphs) all that we have done so far is but a drop in the ocean, we are eager to introduce students, teachers, and scholars to lives that have been overlooked for too long.

JULIA PHILLIPS COHEN

SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

I. EVERYDAY LIFE

On the Street and in the Synagogue, from Court to Courtyard

1. A CALAMITOUS EARTHQUAKE HITS IZMIR {1688}

*

Although less common than fires, epidemics, or harsh weather, earthquakes regularly unleashed tremendous devastation in Ottoman lands. To many, the fate people experienced during natural disasters was a clear sign of God’s wrath or favor. Among those who held this view was Rabbi Elijah HaCohen (ca. 1659–1729), who lived through a massive earthquake that hit Izmir in 1688. His account told of the great—but unequal—suffering wrought by the earthquake, which killed thousands and left all of the mosques and churches of the city in ruins. Although some 400 Jews died and two synagogues were damaged, HaCohen believed that divine providence had spared the Jews. Writing many months after the earthquake, having witnessed six months of ongoing destruction (including fires, an epidemic, aftershocks, and lawlessness), HaCohen chose to write of the miracles he witnessed at the time of the quake, demonstrating his unshaken belief that God had shown mercy to his Jewish believers.

And I shall tell you of the miracles that occurred to the Jews during this earthquake. The first is that it happened on Shabbat, and they were at home, and not scattered about in the markets and the streets . . . as the devastation occurred mainly in the quarters of the non-Jews . . . and all the nations [i.e. non-Jews] attested to this miracle. And another is that it occurred during the midday meal while they were all at home and not outdoors visiting relatives and friends. Another is that it happened in the summer and not during the winter. Another is that the dead were [found and] buried. Another is that the fire did not reach the Jewish neighborhood, so they all managed to salvage things from their houses. Another is that God drove those who were destined to be saved from the houses that collapsed to other places where they were not harmed. And a great and unparalleled miracle happened to me, the author: the place where I found myself during the earthquake was a narrow place surrounded by four high walls that fell on top of me, and it became dark from the dust caused by the collapse. I did not now what to do. There was no spirit left in me and I was trembling and confused. I rose to my feet and said God is the King, God has ruled, God will rule forever . . . about ten times, as was customary on such occasions, and yet the tremors did not cease, so I recited Hear, O Israel . . . and other verses. And when [the earthquake] did not subside I almost died and was silent. As soon as the moment of anger ceased and the darkness cleared I found myself in a pit of stones consisting of the four walls [that had collapsed] . . . and I was not hurt at all. Blessed be He that does good to those who are undeserving! And you should also know that during this period a plague broke out in the city, and many died, non-Jews and Jews alike, more than the number of those who died during the earthquake. And as I write there are still people dying. . . .

Note

*Elijah ben Solomon Abraham HaCohen, Inyan ha-Ra'ash, in Ve-Lo 'Od Ela (Izmir, 1853), 167b–168b. Translated from Hebrew and introduced by Yaron Ben-Naeh.

2. A WILL FROM RASHID, EGYPT [1695]

*

Wills and testaments illuminate various aspects of past lives for which no other written trace may remain, offering insights into material culture, family relations and, above all, the values of those who drafted them. Here we find a will left by Abraham ben Natan, a wealthy Salonican Jewish merchant living in Rashid, a port city in Ottoman Egypt that attracted merchants from across the Mediterranean. Although the will allocated a limited portion of ben Natan’s fortune to relatives, it was primarily filled with elaborate instructions for the establishment of a yeshiva¹ in his name. The will also bears testimony to the centrality of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel more generally to the religious universe of its author. In accordance with Jewish practice, ben Natan’s will clarified that he wished to be buried in Jerusalem or another of the Four Holy Cities of Jewish tradition. Although it presents the Land of Israel as a pivot of the author’s religious devotion, the will also highlights ben Natan’s international ties: the funds to support his project would come from Livorno, Venice, and Amsterdam—centers that housed thriving Sephardi communities during the period—thus pointing to ben Natan’s participation in a network that was at once economic, familial, and cultural.

[I], Abraham, son of Hayim Natan, . . . give all of my property to said persons for the endowment I am establishing in order to provide for a house of study for hakhamim,² as is written and explained in a separate writ. . . . [I hereby state] that if I have any living descendants they will be given 5,000 arayot³ each and no more; moreover, if God allows me to ascend to Jerusalem and be buried there, or in Hebron or Safed, or anywhere in the Land of Israel where I may die, the local holy community shall be given 200 kuruş and any other necessities for my burial and a tombstone that befits my honor. If the hesger ⁴ is already established, the hakhamim who are chosen shall study Torah each Thursday night for a whole year following my death, as is the custom, and they shall receive a special bonus of ten silver coins each per night. And if the hesger is not yet established, ten hakhamim shall be chosen to study Torah from among the best in the town. They will receive a bonus of ten silver coins for each of the seven days of my mourning, and they shall perform the veilada⁵ every Thursday night, and they shall also study on the night of the seventh day of Pesah [Passover] and on the night of Shavu'ot [Pentacost] and on the night of Rosh Hashanah and on the night of Yom Kippur and on the night of Hoshana Raba and on the night of my yahrzeit.⁶ They will be accorded the aforementioned sum each night; and they will also be given all expenses required for their nightly study, such as oil and candles, etc. I also request that every year 1,000 silver coins shall be given from my estate so that these hakhamim can perform a nightly study vigil at the tomb of Rachel or the Prophet Samuel. A yearly sum of one hundred arayot [should be put aside] for my mother’s expenses as long as she lives, and after her death, one hundred arayot will be given for her burial expenses, including a tombstone and all that might be needed as befits her honor. And my wife shall be given one hundred arayot a year as long as she remains unmarried to honor my memory. All other inheritors shall share a total of 500 arayot.

Notes

*Manuscript ARC.4° 1271/511, Archive of Ya'akov Shaul Elyashar, Department of Archives, National Library of Israel. Translated from Hebrew and introduced by Yaron Ben-Naeh.

1. A traditional Jewish academy for the advanced study of Talmud (Jewish oral law), written commentary, and other rabbinic texts.

2. Literally, wise men; rabbinic scholars.

3. Literally, lions; Dutch lion thalers, known variously as arslanlı or esedi kuruş in Turkish.

4. Study house, or type of yeshiva.

5. Nightly study vigil.

6. Lel ptirati in the original; the anniversary of a death date.

3. MANUMISSION OF A JEWISH SLAVE IN SALONICA [1700]

*

Documents generated by the courts of eighteenth-century Ottoman Salonica provide a window into the lives of ordinary people who lived and labored in or traveled through the city. The following document records a legal compromise brokered in Salonica’s Islamic law court by a Muslim slave owner and his fugitive Jewish slave. Having traveled great distances after fleeing servitude, the slave, identified only as Abraham, successfully rebuffed his former master’s claims of ownership by buying his independence. Although his ingenuity and tenaciousness may have been unusual, Abraham’s path from the Crimean Peninsula to Salonica, and from slavery to freedom, demonstrates the extraordinary personal transformations that were sometimes available even to the most marginal figures in Ottoman society.

The individual named Mürtaza Beşe ibn-i Hasan was originally an inhabitant of the protected city of Akmescit⁷ in the Crimean Peninsula, which is situated in the Tatar region. He is currently staying in the secured city of Salonica as a traveler. Of his own will he confirmed and gave a declaration in the şeriat ⁸ court in the presence of a tall and black-eyed Jew by origin, who is the subject of this legal document; a young man whose beard had not yet grown named Abraham: I purchased the abovementioned Abraham a year and a half prior to the registration of this document from someone called Kasab, who lives in the city of Kilis, in return for 125 esedi kuruş.⁹ Afterwards, about a year ago, the abovementioned Abraham ran away from me. Now I found him in the abovementioned secured city. When I submitted a claim of servitude [against him], he rejected [my claim]. Consequently many disputes erupted between us. At the present time, the abovementioned Abraham paid and gave me 60 esedi kuruş. I likewise took and received the mentioned sum of money. In return I manumitted him. Following his declaration that from this day onwards the abovementioned Abraham is a free man like other people who were born free, these events were registered . . . on 25 Şevval of the year 1111 [April 15, 1700].

Notes

*Sicil vol. 6, p. 113, 25 Şevval 1111 (15 April 1700), held in the collections of the Historical Archives of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece). Translated from Ottoman Turkish by Eyal Ginio.

7. Today Simferopol, Crimea.

8. Turkish equivalent of the Arabic shari'a, or Islamic law.

9. A Dutch currency circulating within the Ottoman Empire, also known as arslanlı kuruş in Turkish.

4. A RABBI IN ISTANBUL INTERPRETS THE BIBLE FOR LADINO READERS (1730)

*

A popular biblical commentary in Ladino consisting of eighteen volumes produced by a dozen authors between the years 1730 and 1899, the Me'am Lo'ez was designed to be broadly accessible to all Ottoman Sephardim. Its title, literally from a foreign people, indicates that it was written in a language other than Hebrew. Although the volumes of the Me'am Lo'ez differed from each other in scope, style, and worldview, they shared a single pedagogical agenda shaped by Rabbi Jacob Huli (1689–1732) of Istanbul, who authored the first two volumes of the series. Driven by the belief that most Ottoman Sephardim knew little about Judaism and barely understood Hebrew, Huli sought to create an educational tool that could teach his coreligionists the rabbinic tradition, offer interpretations of the Bible, and replace the complex ethical works of earlier centuries with straightforward guidance. He also aimed to provide his readers with suitable secular knowledge and entertainment so as to shield them from the influence of books written by non-Jews. In the introduction to the work, Huli stated that his goal was to explain the Torah to the foolish and ignorant masses, including men and women and the youth of Israel. Judging by the number of their reprints, Huli’s volumes enjoyed great popularity, becoming classics of Ladino literature.

Now, because of our sins, the world has changed and declined and degenerated to such a degree that very few people are able to read a biblical verse correctly. And such hunger overcame [the people] that all the preparations made by the men we mentioned above and the tables they laid are not enough to sate it and to enable people to read two words of the Law,¹⁰ because they do not understand the holy tongue, and even those who know the words do not understand what they are saying. And every day [the scriptures] are studied less and less, and the Law of the people [of Israel] and the precepts of Judaism are forgotten. And when on the Sabbath the cantor reads the weekly Torah portion, many people have no idea of its content or what it means. And