Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (27 page)

At least in the telling, the story marked heaven’s displeasure at Abbott’s sins and pride, the triumph of true majesty over the corrupt parasites who had been feeding off, and contributing to, the city’s impoverishment. The Abbott family remained powerful in Salonica for another generation but they were a lavish and cantankerous lot, and their money was soon gone. The villa itself lay in ruins by 1895, though when the British were stationed there in the First World War, the remains of the Turkish bath built for the sultan were just visible as were the overgrown but still impressive gardens. And when the new Imperial Ottoman Bank took over the Abbotts’ palatial townhouse in the Street of the Franks a few years after the sultan’s visit, it was another sign
that the age of money-lenders was coming to an end and being replaced by the power of international capitalism. Most of the city’s inhabitants probably welcomed the change. Money-lenders like Abbott had profited from the system of state monopolies and the acute shortage of local capital. The unflattering image of the “King of the Leeches” which is preserved in the city’s old folk memories speaks as eloquently as any of the petitions presented to the sultan and his servants of the power of this class and the lack of regret which accompanied its passing. Today in a corner of the garden on Odos Frangōn, on the site of the old Imperial Ottoman Bank building, the curious passer-by can make out, peering through overgrown ferns and acacias, an abandoned neo-classical monumental statue of a seated woman: it is the last remnant of the Abbott estate.
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8
Religion in the Age of Reform

R
EFORM

T
HE
O
TTOMAN EMPIRE
was an Islamic state and the Ottoman sultan was also Warrior of the Faith, Custodian of Sacred Relics, Protector of the Pilgrimage and Servitor of the Two Holy Cities. As for the governor of Salonica, his most prized symbol of authority was the silver-bound Qur’an known as the “cherished book of the province.” For all the licence shown to the other People of the Book—especially in the Balkans, where Muslims were a minority of the population—it was always clear that Sunni Islam was the ruling religion. Yet in the nineteenth century, Islam’s primacy came under challenge. Nowhere was the impact of the reforms more keenly felt than in the transformation of the relationship between the empire’s faiths.
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Reform meant, in the first place, a new attentiveness on the part of the sultan and his ministers to Ottoman Christians. The empire remained an important centre of Orthodox life and mid-century Salonica alone had at least twice as many inhabitants as Athens—Izmir, Alexandria and the capital itself many more. In 1830 Sultan Mahmud II ordered any Greek captives who had been seized in the course of the revolt to be released and made it clear he still counted on the support of his Christian subjects. In a radical departure from older imperial political tradition, he encouraged new churches to be built, replaced the established official dress codes with uniforms based on European models, and introduced the red fez for all his subjects in place of the old colour-coded turbans, a huge symbolic step forward for non-Muslims. As for his successor, Abdul Mecid, his Gulhané decree promised the empire’s inhabitants that “of whatever religion or sect they may be;
they shall enjoy them without exception.” Although principles took a long time to be translated into practice, the position of Christians was unmistakably improving.
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If Christian Europe welcomed these developments, many Muslims deplored the way the
shari’a
had been dethroned and replaced with new laws, institutions and procedures slavishly adopted from the Franks. The state had been captured, according to one critic, by a coterie of “Frenchified playboys,” who were little more than a voice for foreign interests. By crushing the janissaries, a small unelected group of reformers had destroyed defenders of Muslim interests, and by incorporating the
vakfs
and their revenues into a new official Ministry of
Vakfs
they hoped to control the religious establishment as well. The
kadi
courts were slowly being deprived of their old administrative functions and replaced by tribunals manned by poorly trained pen-pushers ignorant of religious law. Village heads were informed that the Sultan’s reforms did not contravene the Qur’an, but resistance on religious grounds persisted. As an anonymous scholar wrote in 1870: “Only those that come from the ranks of the
ulema
deserve to be called clerks.”
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Most Muslims remained loyal to the imperial house, but in the 1830s some were momentarily tempted to look elsewhere in defence of their faith. After all, from Algeria to Persia, the Caucasus and Mughal India, Islam seemed to be under assault from Europe. Within the empire, there was enormous enthusiasm for Mehmed Ali’s new Egyptian regime, a regime described by one historian as “the last Oriental effort to found a power on the shores of the Mediterranean which should be independent of the West.” In Salonica, there was an “Egyptian party” that waited eagerly for Ali’s troops to arrive. Pamphlets urged “all good Musulmans … to hold themselves ready to take arms in defence of their faith,” and reports that an Egyptian fleet had been spotted off the coast of Macedonia were greeted with joy before it turned out the ships were British. But the resolution of the crisis in 1841, when Ali submitted to the sultan, dulled the lustre of his name. When he paid a visit to his birthplace in nearby Kavalla a few years later, the ruler of Egypt returned to Cairo disappointed by his reception. Many of the local beys had not even bothered to await his arrival, and had gone back to their farms.
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After Mehmed Ali, there was no one to turn to. Yet the weight of Muslim opposition to any alteration in the place of traditional institutions remained. In the 1850s Christians round Salonica still found
it almost impossible to obtain justice against Muslims in criminal cases, and murders and robberies routinely went unpunished. In 1851 Christian testimony was admitted in a local criminal court for the first time, but it was not for another decade that it was given decisive weight when contradicted by Muslim witnesses. “Are we the masters of this empire or not?” demanded some of the beys, protesting on the “part of Islamism” against the constant infringement by foreign powers of the “rights of the Turkish nation.” A visiting dervish preached that Europe was “devoted to the extermination of Muslims,” and claimed that the sultan, by giving in to their demands, had shown himself to be no more than a
gavur.
“Let us massacre the infidels whom the Prophet and our first Sultans conquered,” he went on, “And then we will go throughout
Frenghistan
[the land of the Franks] sword in hand, and all will be well with us.” When Abdul Mecid died in 1861, the view in the local coffee-houses was that he had been “too favourably disposed to Christians,” and many of Salonica’s Muslims, including highly placed functionaries, openly hoped that his successor would bring back the janissaries and revoke the reforms.
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This did not happen. Instead the number of non-Muslims in the civil service rose, and in 1868 a Council of State with non-Muslim members was created. In the provinces progress was slower: as late as 1867, justice in Salonica was still loaded against non-Muslims, taxes remained inequitable and the clause relating to Christians being appointed to official positions remained a “dead letter.” Ibrahim Bey, the
mufti
, resisted reform of the local courts, and as he was very popular among the poorer Muslims of the city, Salonica’s governors hesitated to take him on. But the lead from the top was clear: the Porte instructed Salonica’s
mollah
to speak respectfully when he addressed the Greek metropolitan, and to refer politely to the “Christian” religion. “Looking at things reasonably,” wrote the British ambassador, Sir Henry Bulwer in 1864, “it is but just to observe that this government is about the most tolerant in Europe.”
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The old ideology of the sultan as Defender of the Faith was now no longer appropriate for the new-look empire. It was supplanted by a new creed of Ottomanism, an allegiance to the dynasty itself that supposedly crossed religious boundaries. As the government gazette for the province declared in May 1876:

Even though for centuries among us there has not existed something we might call public opinion, on account of our different religions, nonetheless Ottomans, Christians, Jews and in a word all those bearing the name of Osmanli and living under the sceptre of His Imperial Excellency have lived as faithful subjects of all ranks, as patriots and as a single unit of nationalities, each lending a helping hand to the other as brothers, none ever daring to attack the honour, property, life or religious customs of the other, and everyone enjoying complete freedom in the exercise of his social privileges.
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The new policy was underlined in religious holidays and official ceremonies. After the Ottoman fleet arrived in port, Greek priests from the city performed mass for its Christian sailors in the Beshchinar gardens, and Turkish naval officers complimented the archbishop on a “very appropriate sermon.” When the chief rabbi Raphael Ascher Covo died at the end of 1874 after twenty-six years in office, his funeral was attended by the staff of the governor, the president of the town council, the Greek archbishop, consuls and other notables: the procession was “one of the largest ever witnessed in European Turkey.” All shops were closed, Jewish firemen in the service of the North British and Mercantile Insurance companies provided the guard of honour lining the streets, and bells were rung as the bier passed the Orthodox cathedral.” A century earlier, such an occasion would have been inconceivable.
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E
XCOMMUNICATION
: T
HE
C
HIEF
R
ABBI
A
SCENDANT

F
OR THERE WAS A STRIKING ASYMMETRY
in the impact of the reforms. Whilst they brought the
ulema
more tightly under the state’s control and curbed the power of Muslim religious elites, they actually increased the administrative power, authority and prestige of the non-Muslim religious leaders. Ottoman modernization was not, in other words, about the construction of new French-style secular citizens, for whom religion would be an entirely private matter, and the old collective identities did not vanish into a bright new dawn of European individualism: on the contrary, the equality under the law promised by the reforms was for communities, not individuals. As Muslims lost power, Christians and Jews gained it. More than ever, therefore, it was to the leaders of their communities, rather than to the Porte or the pasha, that most of Salonica’s non-Muslims turned.

Where the city’s Orthodox flock, still approximately one quarter of Salonica’s population, was concerned, the 1839 decrees did little to change its basic administrative structure: on the one hand, a committee of bishops governed ecclesiastical affairs; on the other, a mixed council of churchmen and laymen dealt with secular matters. Both were presided over by the metropolitan bishop, who remained responsible to the Patriarchate in the capital. This was basically the old system, scarcely altered either by the 1821 massacres or by the reforms of the first half of the nineteenth century.

For Salonica’s Jews, it was a different matter since the position of chief rabbi of the city was recognized officially only in 1836. The religious, legal and administrative head of the community, he was responsible for the collection and allocation of taxes, the interpretation of laws, and the punishment of offenders. He could call on the Ottoman authorities for assistance, and he had the right to ride on horseback when visiting the governor. Saul Molho, the chief rabbi between 1839 and 1849, took every opportunity to assert his prestige, and made sure he was always accompanied by a large crowd of followers. “His gestures have a symbolic value,” writes the historian Joseph Nehama, “all his utterances are impregnated with sanctity. His acts too reverberate in people’s souls. He is very choleric and his rages—very frequent—make people tremble.” “The influence which the chief rabbi has here is truly astonishing,” missionaries reported. “Besides the power which he possesses in secular affairs, by virtue of his appointment by the Sublime Porte, he exerts no less influence in matters purely religious. His advanced age, his rigid abstemiousness, his using no spectacles when reading, though aged ninety-six, and such qualities, go very far with the superstitious Jews of this place. He is greatly feared by them, and almost adored. Some affirm that if the world possessed another rabbi like him, Messiah would have come long ago.”
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The chief rabbi could imprison Jewish offenders and also had another weapon at his disposal—excommunication (
herem
). The mild form of this lasted thirty days, and required the guilty party to repent, to wear old clothes and to leave his beard unshaven and his feet bare. There was also a more serious version. “A Jew, my Lord,” Blunt explained to his ambassador, “who suffers excommunication, must either become a Christian, turn Turk, or die, for whilst under that edict they cannot purchase food, no Jew can speak to them, and they are not allowed even the solace of seeing their wives, children or relatives.” Not infrequently—if local Jewish opinion was to be believed—this resulted in the speedy death of the sinner.
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Excommunications had been frequently issued by rabbis in the past. But the chief rabbi profited from the centralization of communal power, the waning of Greek influence after 1821 and the growing grip of the Jews on the city’s economy. “The Bankers, Cashiers, Buyers and Sellers of imports and exports are Jews, the Porters, Boatmen and persons necessary to employ in preparing wools, cottons, silks, grain and seeds of all Kinds for exportation are all Jews, and very many of the Shops, where all the necessities of life are to be purchased, are kept by Jews,” reported the British consul. In these circumstances, even the threat of excommunication could bring the city to a halt. In April 1839 a Jewish child was abducted near a church and it was announced that any Jew who did business with a Christian before the matter was resolved would be cast out. The town came to a standstill, the bazaar closed, and merchants found their accounts frozen. Poor Jews threatened to march into the European quarter to “set fire to every house” if the child was not handed over. Significantly, only the intervention of the British ambassador ended the affair and brought the town back to life.
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