Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (14 page)

Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.
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Over time they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the
haj
, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of
Moharrem
, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. (Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?) They prayed to their Messiah, “our King, our Redeemer,” in “the name of God, the God of Israel,” but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city—certainly
well into the nineteenth century—was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.

The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a
Ma’min
girl who had fallen in love with her Muslim tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed.
Ma’min
spearheaded the expansion of Muslim—including women’s—schooling in the city, and were prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated huge fortunes, built villas in the European style by the sea and entered the municipal administration. Others were in humbler trades—barbers, coppersmiths, town-criers and butchers.
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Gradually—as with the Marranos of Portugal, from whom many were descended—their connection with their ancestral religion faded. High-class
Ma’min
married into mainstream Muslim society, though most resided in central quarters, between the Muslim neighbourhoods of the Upper Town and the Jewish quarters below, streets where often the two religions lived side by side. “They will be converted purely and simply into Muslims,” predicted one scholar in 1897. But like many of Salonica’s Muslims at this time, the
Ma’min
also embraced European learning, and identified themselves with secular knowledge, political radicalism and freemasonry. By a strange twist of fate it was thus the Muslim followers of a Jewish messiah who helped turn late-nineteenth-century Salonica into the most liberal, progressive and revolutionary city in the empire.

The juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in a fin-de-siècle
Ma’min
household is vividly evoked in the memoirs of Ahmed Emin Yalman. His father, Osman Tewfik Bey, was a civil servant and a teacher of calligraphy. Living in the house with him and his parents were his uncle and aunt, his seven siblings, two orphaned cousins and at least five
servants. “The strife between the old and the new was ever present in our house,” he recollects. His uncle was of the old school: a devout man, he prayed five times a day, abhorred alcohol, and disliked travel or innovation. For some reason, he refused to wear white shirts; “a coloured shirt with attached collar was, for him, the extreme limit of westernization in dress to which he felt that one could go without falling into conflict with religion … He objected to the theatre, music, drinking, card playing, and photography—all new inventions which he considered part of Satan’s world.” Yalman’s father, on the other hand—Osman Tewfik Bey—was “a progressive, perhaps even a revolutionary,” who wore “the highest possible white collars,” beautiful cravats and stylish shoes in the latest fashion, loved poetry, theatre and anything that was new, taking his children on long trips and photographing them with enthusiasm. He adorned his rooms with their pictures and prayed but rarely.
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Esin Eden’s memoir of the following generation shows Europeanization taken even further. Hers was a well-to-do family of tobacco merchants which combined a strong consciousness of its Jewish ancestry with pride in its contemporary achievements as part of a special Muslim community, umbilically linked to Salonica itself. The women were all highly educated—one was even a teacher at the famous new Terakki lycée—sociable, energetic and articulate. They smoked lemon-scented cigarettes in the garden of their modern villa by the sea, played cards endlessly and kept their eyes on the latest European fashions. Their servants were Greek, their furnishings French and German, and their cuisine a mix of “traditionally high Ottoman cuisine as well as traditional Sephardic cooking,” though with no concern for the dietary laws of Judaism.
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When the Young Turk revolt broke out in Salonica in 1908,
Ma’min
economics professors, newspaper men, businessmen and lawyers were among the leading activists and there were three
Ma’min
ministers in the first Young Turk government. Indeed conspiracy theorists saw the
Ma’min
everywhere and assumed any Muslim from Salonica must be one. Today some people even argue that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk must have been a
Ma’min
(there is no evidence for this), and see the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the secular republic of Turkey as their handiwork—the final revenge, as it were, of Sabbatai Zevi, and the unexpected fulfilment of his dreams. In fact, many of the
Ma’min
themselves had mixed feelings at what was happening in nationalist Turkey: some were Kemalists, others opposed him. In
1923, however, they were all counted as Muslims in the compulsory exchange of populations and packed off to Istanbul, where a small but distinguished community of businessmen, newspaper magnates, industrialists and diplomats has since flourished. As the writer John Freely tells us, their cemetery, in the Valley of the Nightingales above Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is still known as the
Selanikliler Mezarligi
—the Cemetery of Those from Salonica.
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Meanwhile, in the city which nurtured them for many years in its curiously unconcerned atmosphere, little trace of their presence now remains. Their old quarters were destroyed in the 1917 fire, or in the rebuilding which followed; their cemetery, which lay next to the large Sephardic necropolis outside the walls, became a football field. Today their chief monument is the magnificent fin-de-siècle
Yeni Djami
, tucked away in a postwar suburb on the way to the airport. Used as an annexe to the Archaeological Museum, its leafy precinct is stacked with ancient grave stelai and mausoleums, and its airy light interior is opened occasionally for exhibitions. Built in 1902 by the local architect Vitaliano Poselli, it is surely one of the most eclectic and unusual mosques in the world, a domed neo-Renaissance villa, with windows framed in the style of late Habsburg Orientalism and pillars which flank the entrance supporting a solid horse-shoe arch straight out of Moorish Spain. Complete with sundial (with Ottoman instructions on how to set your watch) and clocktower, the Yeni Djami sums up the extraordinary blending of influences—Islamic and European, Art Nouveau meets a neo-Baroque Alhambra, with a discreet hint of the ancestral faith in the star of David patterns cut into the upper-floor balconies—which made up the
Ma’mins’
world.
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T
HE
S
UFI
O
RDERS

T
HE CITY, DELICATELY POISED
in its confessional balance of power—ruled by Muslims, dominated by Jews, in an overwhelmingly Christian hinterland—lent itself to an atmosphere of overlapping devotion. With time it became covered in a dense grid of holy places—fountains, tombs, cemeteries, shrines and monasteries—frequented by members of all faiths in search of divine intercession. One of the most important institutions in the creation of this sanctified world were the heterodox Islamic orders—known to scholars as Sufis and to the public, inaccurately, as dervishes—who played such a pivotal role in
consolidating Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Western travellers to the empire never, if they could help it, lost the opportunity to describe these mysterious and otherworldly figures with their whirling dances and strange ritual howlings. But dwelling on such eccentricities—abstracted from their theological context—turned their acolytes into figures of fun and overlooked their central role in bridging confessional divides during the Ottoman centuries.
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Many of these mystical orders borrowed heavily from the shamanistic traditions of central Asian nomad life and from the eastern Christianity they found around them. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were powerful forces in their own right, supported by—and supportive of—sultans like Murad II, who founded a large Mevlevi monastery in Edirne. When Ottoman troops conquered the Balkans, they were accompanied and sometimes preceded by holy men who spread the ideas of the missionary-warrior Haci Bektash, the poet Rumi and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband. Their highly unorthodox visions of the ways to God were shared in religious brotherhoods financed by pious benefactions. Some of their leaders—men like the fifteenth-century heretic
sheykh
Bedreddin—saw themselves as the Mahdi, revealing the secret of divine unity across faiths, and legalizing what the
shari’a
had previously forbidden. From the early sixteenth century, as the Ottoman state, and its clerical class, the
ulema
, conquered the Arab lands and became more conscious of the responsibility of the caliphate and the dangers of Persian heterodoxy, these unorthodox and sometimes heretical movements came under attack. In the mid-seventeenth century, Vani Effendi, the puritanical court preacher who converted Sabbatai Zevi, was outraged by the permissive attitude of some of them to stimulants such as coffee, alcohol and opium, as well as by their worship of saints and their pantheist tendencies. Murad IV took a dim view of such practices, and at least one tobacco-smoking
mufti
of Salonica got in trouble as a result. In practice, however, many leading statesmen and clergymen were also “brothers” of one group or another, and generally they prospered.
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Most major orders had their representatives in a place as important as Salonica where there were more than twenty shrines and monasteries, guarding all the city’s gates and approaches. We know of the existence of the Halvetiye, who expanded into the Balkans in the sixteenth century and gave the city several of its
muftis.
Even during the First World War, the Rifa’i were still attracting tourists to their ceremonies: Alicia Little watched them jumping and howling, and was struck
by their generous hospitality and their courtesy to guests. One nineteenth-century Albanian merchant, who made his fortune in Egypt, allowed his villa in the new suburb along the seashore to be used as a Melami
tekke;
among its adepts were the head of the Military School, an army colonel, a local book-dealer and a Czech political refugee who had converted to Islam.
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There were
tekkes
of the Nakshbandis, the Sa’dis and many others. The magnificent gardens and cypresses of the Mevlevi monastery, situated strategically next to a reservoir which stored much of the city’s drinking water, attracted many of the city’s notable families and appear to have been popular with wealthy
Ma’min
as well. The Mevlevi were extremely well-funded, and controlled access to the tomb of Ayios Dimitrios and many other holy places in the city. They retained close ties with local Christians and were reportedly “always to be found in company with the Greek [monks].” One British diplomat at the end of the nineteenth century recounts a long conversation with a senior Mevlevi
sheykh
, a man whose “shaggy yellow beard and golden spectacles made him look more like a German professor than a dancing dervish.” Together, in the
sheykh
’s office, the two men drank raki, discussed photography—local prejudices hindered him using his Kodak, the
sheykh
complained—and talked about the impact a new translation of the central Mevlevi text, the
Mesnevi
, had made in London. “He did not care about the introduction of Mohammedanism into England,” noted the British diplomat, “but he had hoped that people might have seen that the mystic principles enunciated in the
Mesnevi
were compatible with all religions and could be grafted on Christianity as well as on Islam.”
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