This article explores the establishment of a western European diplomatic presence in Salonica and the impact the local Ottoman administration perceived it to have on the local Jewish population. By studying the records of the şeriat court, the principal official documents produced in eighteenth-century Salonica, the article analyzes the evolving interactions between local Jews and Europeans during the eighteenth century and the rise of a new local Jewish elite whose privileges and prominence stemmed from its contacts with European consuls and merchants. It also examines the ambivalence of the Ottoman administrators toward the growing presence of foreigners in Salonica, which they saw as both a contribution to the local economy and a threat to public order. The growing Ottoman suspicion toward the connections between local non-Muslims and European representatives was evident especially during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the responsibility for enforcing the Ottoman order on non-Muslims who had obtained European protection was transferred from local officials to the imperial center. At this stage, the Ottoman bureaucracy in Istanbul mobilized its resources and began to take administrative steps to enforce the boundaries separating locals from foreigners, monitoring the nomination deeds granted to local non-Muslims (zimmis) and enforcing the status of zimmi on all those whose claim to European protection was proved to be false or to have been misused.
Using sources in Judeo-Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew, this article explores the complex processes through which Ottoman Jewish intellectuals fashioned their own vision of Ottoman Jewish history, positioned Salonica at the center of that narrative, and in the process popularized an image of the city as the “mother of Israel.” Ottoman Jewish history writers internalized Enlightenment discourses about “regeneration,” “civilization,” and “modernity” that also shaped the nineteenth-century historiography of Greek Christian, Ottoman Muslim, French Jewish, and German Jewish intellectuals. This article focuses on how Ottoman Jewish intellectuals translated French Jewish and German Jewish historical narratives about Ottoman Jewry into Judeo-Spanish, adapted and rewrote them, and ultimately overturned them. Discovering that German Jewish historians portrayed Ottoman Jews as being in decline while French Jewish writers adopted a more sympathetic perspective, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recast their own former narrative of tragedy as an exceptional story of Jewish redemption and romance in the Ottoman realm. In reclaiming Ottoman Jewish history they sought to strengthen their position within the Ottoman Empire and to elevate their status in the eyes of world Jewry. The Salonican Jewish intellectuals who participated in this effort presented an image of their city and its storied Jewish past as an idealized symbol of the broader Ottoman Jewish experience and founded a Salonican Jewish historiography that still shapes our understanding of the city’s history today.
Any attempt to map in Turkish historiography the presence of Salonica as a predominantly Jewish Ottoman city is bound to end in frustration due to a general lack of interest in the topic. This is strange if one considers that during the last decades of the empire, Salonica was by far its most active city after Istanbul, which was an unrivaled center of cultural, political, economic, and social modernity. The present situation stems from the reduction of Salonica to the status of a city lost to the Greeks, a vision that further occults the Jewish dimension of its identity and destiny. As such, there is little that connects the history of the city to mainstream Turkish history, other than the fact that it was the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Turkish historiography has stripped Salonica of its historical identity and reality to turn it into yet another “Turkish” city lost during the debacle of the end of the empire. The steamroller of national(ist) history has thus flattened the city’s complex and multilayered past into the grand narrative of the Ottoman Empire as a Turco-Islamic state. Apart from translations of the few Western sources that tell a different story, Turkish historical studies have failed to produce any original work on the subject; even worse, some of the rare works that do exist tend to concentrate on a pseudohistorical and populist account of the Sabbatean community as (yet another) fifth column targeting the integrity of country and nation.
This essay provides a concluding summary of the volume as a whole, showing how it breaks down into historical and theoretical/methodological components and considering the ways in which the volume pushes forward our understanding of Salonican Jewish history by revealing it to be at once a Jewish history, an Ottoman history, and an urban history. In addition to providing a brief summary of each of the contributions to the volume, it aims to synthesize their collective impact by situating the volume as whole within the varied historiographies that to date have considered the history of Salonica’s Jews.
French or Francophone historians have constructed two successive images of Salonica in the modern age. This article discusses these two images—products of two different perspectives, inquiries, and approaches to writing history—and their relationship to the landmark years of 1492 and 1943. The first image bears the mark of Fernand Braudel. It focuses on Salonica as a city of the Mediterranean. The Ottoman expansion between the middle of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century rendered the Mediterranean a site of both confrontation and exchanges. Salonica was connected to multiethnic commercial networks that extended westward to Venice and Livorno. This image of the city emphasizes its mostly Iberian Jewish population, one of the principal minorities—along with Greeks and Armenians—who operated as intermediaries in these networks. The second image was drawn by Salonica’s Jewish intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it did not gain wider scholarly currency until the 1970s and 1980s. It depicts Salonica from the middle of the nineteenth century to the empire’s end as a Jewish city par excellence—“the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” This was also the image of Salonica as the empire’s “window onto the West” and mediator of its modernization.
Through an analysis of data compiled in the Ottoman income and property registers (temettuat) of 1844–45, this article explores the socioeconomic and demographic structures of Salonica’s Jews in order to understand the extent of Jewish poverty in Salonica in the mid-nineteenth century and its causal matrix. It examines the socioeconomic hierarchies within the Jewish community, as well as the position of Jews within broader urban social structures composed mainly of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It also analyzes the mechanisms that Jews employed to deal with this poverty. Finally, it argues that community-based reasons alone cannot explain the existence of widespread severe poverty among Salonica’s Jews in this period; broad fluctuations in the Ottoman economy had a significant impact on all the inhabitants of Salonica and must also be taken into account.