Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (12 page)

Controlling power and resources unmatched by their peers elsewhere,
Salonica’s rabbis possessed a degree of training and a breadth of outlook which made the city a centre of learning throughout the sixteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. An extraordinary centre of print culture too: Jewish books were printed there centuries before any appeared in Greek, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish where religious objections to seeing the sacred texts in print held things back. Equipped with the wide-ranging interests of the Spanish rabbinate, exploiting the familiarity with the holy sources that their availability in translation offered, these scholars simultaneously kept in touch with the latest intellectual fashions in western Europe and pursued extensive programmes of study that took them far beyond the confines of scriptural commentary. They applied Aristotle and Aquinas to the tasks of Talmudic exegesis, engaged with Latin literature, Italian humanism and Arab science, and were not surprisingly intensely proud of the range of their expertise. Insulted by charges of parochialism, for instance, one young scholar challenged an older rabbi from Edirne to an intellectual duel:

Come out to the field and let us compete in our knowledge of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of rabbinic literature; in secular sciences—practical and theoretical fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine; in logic—the
Organon
, in geometry, astronomy
Physics; … Generatio et Corruptio, De Anima
and
Meteora, De Animalibus
and
Ethics.
In your profession as well, that of medicine, if in your eyes it is a science, we consider it an occupation of no special distinction and all the more in practical matters. Try me, for you have opened your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner.
³⁵

All this was not love of learning for its own sake—though that there was too—so much as the fruits of the sophisticated curriculum required by the city’s scholar-judges, and their response to the opportunities created by Ottoman policy.

Nor did the rabbis, left to their own devices as they mostly were, ignore the fact that they lived in a state run on the basis of the
shari’a:
Jews might be represented by Muslims professionally if they lived in certain neighbourhoods or belonged to certain guilds; Jewish men (like Christians) converted to Islam for financial advantage or to marry—even on one occasion to get the help of the authorities in wresting another man’s wife away from him; some Jewish women married
Muslim men, or converted to facilitate a divorce when their husband was reluctant to grant it. All these situations made a knowledge of the
shari’a
desirable on the part of the rabbi-judge. But if a degree of familiarity with secular Ottoman law, the Qur’an and the
shari’a
was common practice in many Ottoman Jewish communities, a few Salonican scholars took their interest in Arab thought even further. “I will only mention the name of Abuhamed and his book, because it is very widespread among us,” notes Rabbi Isaac ibn Aroyo, referring to the philosopher al-Ghazali. Rabbi David ibn Shoshan, blind and wealthy, was said to have been not only “a master of all wisdom, both Talmud and secular studies, astronomy and philosophy,” but also “very familiar with books on the Moslem religion to such an extent that Moslem scholars and judges used to visit him to learn their own religious tomes from him.” When he moved to Istanbul, “the greatest Arab scholars used to honour him there greatly because of his great wisdom.” One of his students, Jacob HaLevi, translated the Qur’an, a book which we know other Jewish scholars too kept in their libraries.
³⁶

W
HERE SALONICA WAS CONCERNED
, the Ottoman strategy proved highly effective, and by attracting a large number of Jews and Marranos, the sultans succeeded in revitalizing the city. By the mid-sixteenth century its population had grown to thirty thousand and it generated the highest per capita yield of taxes in the Balkans and the largest revenue of any urban settlement to the west of Istanbul. It would not be going too far to say that this economic success provided much of the fiscal sinew for the sultan’s military triumphs. The Jewish immigrants embraced the opportunity Bayezid II had given them and brought an entrepreneurial and productive energy which astonished the city’s existing residents. The resulting Hispanization of its culture was long-lasting: although there were ups and downs in the state of the economy, and in standards of rabbinical learning, the cultural imprint of Judeo-Spanish was felt right up to the end of the empire. In 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the edict of expulsion, Spanish journalists and politicians visited the Macedonian port. There they found a continuing link to their own past, an outpost of Iberian life which had been forgotten in the home-country for centuries. In the words of the Spanish senator Dr. Angel Pulido Fernandez, they were
Spaniards without a Homeland;
but this was not quite true. Their homeland was Salonica itself.
³⁷

4
Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles

When I was in Salonica the second time, I received an order to perform contrary deeds and so when I met a Turk on a Greek street I drew my sword & forced him to speak the name of the First and the Second and to make the sign of the cross, and then I did not let him go until he did it; similarly, having met a Greek in a Turkish street I forced him to say the words “Mahomet is the true prophet,” and also the names of the first two & ordered him to lift one finger upward according to the Mahometan custom. And again, when I met a Jew he had to make the sign of the cross for me, and also to pronounce those two names when this happened in a Greek street, while when I met him in a Turkish street he had to raise one finger upward & name those two names. And I was performing those deeds daily.

Y
AKOV FRANK (1726–1791)
, Autohagiography no. 15
^1
*

I
N THE
O
TTOMAN EMPIRE
religious affiliation provided the categories according to which the state classified its subjects. Muslims had to be readily distinguishable from non-Muslims, who existed in a position of legal inferiority. “Their headgear is a saffron yellow turban,” wrote the French agent Nicolas de Nicolay of the Salonican Jews in the mid-sixteenth century, “that of the Greek Christians is blue, and that of the Turks is pure white so that by the difference in colour they may be known apart.” Yellow shoes, bright clothes and white or green turbans were reserved for members of the ruling faith, as were delicate or expensive fabrics. A later traveller, Tournefort, found “the subjects of
the Grand Signior, Christians or Jews, have [their slippers] either red, violet or black. This order is so well-establish’d, and observ’d with such Exactness, that one may know what Religion any one is of by the Feet and the Head.”
²

But regulations were one thing, and what people did in real life was another, especially when out of sight of the imperial capital. Boundaries were constantly being subverted by accident or design and in a bustling commercial port in particular, religious communities could not be impermeably sealed from one another. Young Muslim boys served as apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim
hamals
and casual labourers scoured the docks together for work. When well-off Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian servants and milk-nurses, the children of the families intermingled and the boys often became “milk-brothers,” a relationship which could endure for many years. In Salonica, with its unique confessional composition, there thus arose what a later visitor described as “a sort of fusion between the different peoples who inhabit the place and a happy rapprochement between the races which the nature of their beliefs and the diversity of their origins tends to separate.”
³

The stress Islam laid on the unity of God made possible what was, within its own self-imposed limits, an inclusive attitude to other religions of the Book. For unlike the Jews, who regarded themselves as a chosen people, and the Christians who repudiated and distanced themselves from their origins by focusing on the charge of deicide against the Jews, Muslims explicitly acknowledged their own connection to the earlier monotheistic faiths. Christ himself, though not regarded as divine in nature, was celebrated as a prophet—one particularly stern preacher is even reputed to have had someone executed for blaspheming against his name. The adaptation too of churches and Christian shrines for Muslim use could be seen not as deliberate humiliation and desecration—though it was naturally seen that way by Christians—but as a recognition by Muslims that God lingered already in the holy places of their predecessors.
⁴

One should not, obviously, ignore the powerful evidence for the mutual contempt and hostility that could be projected across the religious divides—the janissaries who beat a Christian arms merchant to death in the market, shouting, “Why are you an unbeliever? So much sorrow you are!”; the Jewish householders who mocked Christian worshippers during holy festivals; the stuffed effigies of Judas burned with much glee by the Orthodox during Easter. (Muslims were occasionally
mocked in public too, but only by those who wished to become martyrs.) Popular hostility was palpable against those who converted and abandoned their ancestral faith. Yet even—perhaps especially—when confessional boundaries were not crossed, the daily life of the city fostered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices.
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For contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested in policing people’s private beliefs. In general, they did not care what their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of piety. This attitude was shared by many non-Muslims too. Visiting Catholics, for whom doctrine mattered a great deal, were struck by the perfunctory character of Orthodox observance. “Among this people there is immense ignorance not only of councils but of the Christian faith,” noted a Ukrainian Catholic in the early eighteenth century. “They retain the name of Christ and the sign of the cross but nothing else.” Such accusations of doctrinal ignorance said as much about the accuser as about Salonica’s Christians, for the latter tenaciously observed the feast-days and customs they felt to be important. But it is true that there was far less theological policing under the Ottomans than there was in Christendom at this time, and this laxity of atmosphere and absence of heresy-hunters fostered the emergence of a popular religious culture which more than anything else in the early modern period united the city’s diverse faiths around a common sense of the sacred and divine.
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M
ARRANOS AND
M
ESSIAHS

O
N
S
UNDAY
, 2 J
ANUARY
1724, a Jewish doctor was chatting with one of his Christian patients and telling him his life story. He had grown up a Catholic in the Algarve where he had been baptized and went to church regularly. But his parents had also secretly instructed him in the tenets of Judaism as well and “inside he was a Jew.” At the age of thirty, after constant harassment and petty persecutions, he had left Portugal, and for the past fourteen years he had been settled in Salonica, where he had returned to his family’s original faith. “So stubborn are heathens in their unbelief,” his shocked patient confided to his diary.
⁷

It was not only Jews who had remained true to their ancestral faith that took the path of exile from the Iberian lands to Salonica, but
also large numbers of so-called Marranos and New Christians—in other words, those who had already converted to Catholicism, in some cases many generations before leaving. Some of them—like the doctor—had kept Jewish customs alive secretly for decades, and equipped their children with two names (“If you ask one of their children: ‘What’s your name?’ ” reported one observer, “they will respond: ‘At home they call me Abraham and in the street Francesco.’ ”). On the other hand, many others were fully observant Catholics who had been forced from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition, essentially on the grounds of race rather than religion. In Salonica, this group had trouble adjusting to rabbinical Judaism, and the rabbis in turn found it hard to make their minds up about them. The question of whether or not they were “still” Jews divided learned opinion. Several leading rabbis thought
not
, since many Marranos had only abandoned Iberia (and Catholicism) when forced out. The 1506 Lisbon massacre of Portuguese “New Christians” induced a more sympathetic attitude, but many of Salonica’s Jews and their rabbis, even those descended from Marrano families themselves, remained highly suspicious of the latters’ motives and regarded them as apostates.
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For as they well knew, religion could often serve simply as a flag of convenience. Catholics returned to Judaism as they had left it, to protect their wealth or to inherit property from relatives; in Italy Jews allowed themselves to be baptized for similar reasons. Traders even switched between faiths as they sailed from the Ottoman lands to the Papal states. One seventeenth-century Marrano, Abraam Righetto, in his own words, “lived as a Jew but sometimes went to church and ate and drank often with Christians.” Another, Moise Israel, also known by his Christian name of Francesco Maria Leoncini, was baptized no less than three times as he shifted to and fro, and “was making merchandise of sacred religion” in the graphic words of an outraged commentator. Such men were dismissed by contemporaries as “ships with two rudders,” but they were not particularly uncommon. A certain Samuel Levi went even further, converting to Islam as a boy in Salonica—mostly, according to him, to avoid punishment at school—then reverting to Judaism once safely across the Adriatic to marry an Ottoman Jewish woman—
la Turchetta
—in the Venice ghetto, before ending up baptized as a Catholic by the Bishop of Ferrara.
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