Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (28 page)

What is striking is that at no stage had the local Ottoman authorities seen a challenge to their own authority. On the contrary, the governor refused to get involved and left matters to the chief rabbi himself. Only the damage to a higher power—European economic interests—forced the latter to back down and rescind his
herem.
This whole affair looks at first sight like something old-fashioned and antiquated, for at a time when western Europe was experiencing class conflict and challenges to established religion, Salonica’s rabbis were asserting their power over the laws of the market. But in fact it would be more accurate to see it as a mark of the extraordinary degree of power Salonica’s chief rabbi had acquired thanks to the sultan’s reforms. For nearly half a century, he was unquestionably one of the most powerful men in the city.

G
REEKS AND
J
EWS

R
ELATIONS BETWEEN
G
REEKS AND
J
EWS
were better in Salonica than elsewhere, but troubled even so. The suspicion between them was reflected in local Jewish proverbs: “to go to Prodrom” (the Hippodrome: a Christian quarter), for instance, was tantamount to finding yourself far from home. The Greek war of independence had been accompanied by massacres of Jews as well as Muslims, and at Easter anti-Jewish feelings often surfaced. In Athens a mob ransacked
the house of a Maltese Jew during an Easter riot in 1847: because he was a British subject, London was drawn in and the so-called “Don Pacifico affair” eventually led to a British blockade of Piraeus. “The Christian populace generally allow no opportunity to pass of insulting their Jewish fellow-citizens, who as a rule submit humbly to this contumelious treatment,” wrote the ethnographer Lucy Garnett, who knew Ottoman society well, “except at Salonica where their superiority in numbers gives them greater assurance.” It did not help that by a quirk of fate, the Orthodox cathedral and the adjoining residence of the metropolitan were situated in the very heart of the Jewish lower town: this gave rise to frequent tensions and quarrels.
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In December 1852, at a time of mounting hostility internationally between Greece and the Ottoman empire, two Greeks the worse for drink—a certain Costandi from Mytilini and Panayiotis from Edirne—triggered off a major brawl—a “fearful, fanatical excitement”—when they passed through a Jewish quarter one Sunday afternoon and insulted a local man. When the latter protested, Costandi hit him and Panayiotis drew his knife and stabbed him twice, killing him on the spot. A “low rabble” of Jews—mostly slaughterers, wood and charcoal porters who had finished work for the day—fell on the two men. More joined in on both sides with knives and pieces of firewood, and by the end, after the outnumbered Greeks had been surrounded and disarmed, one Greek had been killed and several others were wounded. The Ottoman police merely looked on, saying that they “could do nothing without firing their pistols which they were not authorized to do.”
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The next day, the furious archbishop went to the pasha to warn him that the Jews were planning to burn the Greek quarters of the town and to “murder the Christians.” The chief rabbi, Ascher Covo, tried to calm matters by issuing a
herem
forbidding Jews from any dispute “however trifling” with Christians and prohibiting any mention of the affair on pain of expulsion from the community. But the archbishop wanted revenge and kept things at boiling point. His anti-Jewish preachings inflamed feelings so much that Jewish fishermen and traders feared to leave the protection of the city walls; inside the city there were fights and fisticuffs. The pasha was unnerved, and turned to his astrologer for guidance. Accused by the British consul of having released the Greek murderers because he was afraid of the Christians in the town, he responded: “Decidedly I am!” Not the lower orders, he went on, but only the Frankish consuls and the wealthier
Greeks. Indeed the Greek consul tried to keep up the pressure by urging the pasha to take further measures against the imprisoned Jews, and when he ignored this advice, turned to the foreign consuls for support.

What had started out as a drunken brawl thus quickly turned into a dispute between the two communities at the highest levels exacerbated by the pasha’s ineptitude and uncertainty, and fuelled by the actions of the Greek consul. The following month, the archbishop announced he would excommunicate any Christian who attended the annual soirée given by the Allatinis, the leading Jewish family in the city. Even the blood libel entered the scene when a respectable Greek surgeon saw a suspicious huddle of Jews around an Albanian man and reported to the police that some Jews were planning to seize a Christian to murder him for his blood. The police arrested all concerned and brought them before the pasha where it was discovered that the explanation was quite different. “What am I arrested for?” the Albanian exclaimed. “I have nothing to fear from the Jews, for I gain my bread by lighting the fires of these people on a Saturday!”
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Shortly after this, new communal leadership brought an improvement in relations. In the longer run, the rise of Bulgarian nationalism changed Greek attitudes towards the Porte, and as these became more friendly, so did feelings between Greeks and Jews. In the 1870s, Chief Rabbi Gattegno and Metropolitan Ioacheim patched things up, Greek and Jewish notables attended each other’s official functions and in 1880 the most powerful lay Jewish figure in the city, Moses Allatini, was decorated by the Greek government. Nevertheless a residue of suspicion remained and gangs of Greek and Jewish boys held weekly stone-throwing “battles” to the annoyance of respectable society. Everything depended on the city’s communal elite: when their inter-relations were good, harmony prevailed. For better or worse, the reforms had turned the city’s ecclesiastical leaders into political factors of considerable weight and by increasing their powers over their respective flocks had had the effect of turning street fights into contests of strength, prestige and political influence between the two religions.
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M
ISSIONARIES

O
TTOMAN OPPONENTS OF REFORM
saw the pernicious hand of Christian Europe everywhere, dethroning Islam, protecting Christians, forcing change upon the old order. European diplomats and
travellers agreed but believed they were engaged not in Christianization but in the work of social and political improvement. For some Europeans, however, civilization did indeed require the spread of Christ’s message. The reform era was also the age of the missionaries, the “Bible-men,” who introduced a new and potentially destabilizing element into the balance of power between the faiths of the empire. Discouraged by the Porte from trying to convert Muslims, their energetic efforts among Christians and Jews, their distribution of thousands of Bibles translated into local languages from Bulgarian to Judeo-Spanish and their links with European diplomats all increased their impact far beyond the rather small numbers of converts they actually won over, and marked a new kind of European (and American) assault upon Ottoman religious practices and sensibilities.

It was their stridency and lack of tact—what one British ambassador denounced as their “violent and provocative methods”—that made the missionaries so controversial. The problem was not the Catholics who had maintained their small presence in Salonica since the late seventeenth century and formed a tiny and accepted part of its complex confessional mosaic, but rather those American and British Protestants who were energetically penetrating the eastern Mediterranean from the early 1800s on behalf of groups like the Church Missionary Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Board of Foreign Missions.
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Protestant missionaries seemed magnetically drawn to the numerous Jews of Salonica who offered them the chance to continue where Saint Paul had left off. There was “great eagerness for the Scriptures,” reported one missionary in 1826, after he had distributed several hundred copies of “the Word of God” printed in both Greek and Judeo-Spanish. “If anything is to be done for the Jews in this land of barbarism,” he declared, “Thessalonica offers a fine field … May it please the Disposer of all things to moderate his wrath and give them a helping hand to extricate them from their present errors and enable them to walk once more in the ways of the Lord.”
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Four years later, in the summer of 1830, the missionary Joseph Wolff arrived on behalf of the London Jews’ Society. Wolff was a former German Jew who had converted to Catholicism before becoming an Anglican curate. Married to a Walpole (a kinswoman of the prime minister), this extraordinary figure—later he would take to styling himself “the Apostle of Our Lord Jesus Christ for Palestine, Persia and Bokhara”—specialized in converting Jews, or trying to. He had
been thrown out of Egypt after announcing that according to the Book of Daniel the Jews would be restored to power in Jerusalem and the Turkish empire would collapse. At sea he had been pursued by pirates, ending up on the Macedonian shore two days’ south of Salonica without shoes, coat or money. Undaunted, he began his holy work the day he arrived, preaching in the city and disputing with its rabbis. According to John Meshullam, a Salonica Jew who later converted to Protestantism, Wolff “came into their synagogue, on the Sabbath, and began to address the Jews, on the subject of Messiah and his kingdom.” He distributed his Bibles and put up posters predicting the Messiah’s arrival. Adolphus Slade, an English naval officer who was also present, recorded his impressions:

I have listened with delight to Mr. Wolff. He is eloquent and persuasive, with four languages—Hebrew, Italian, German and English—in which to clothe his thoughts gracefully; besides having a tolerable knowledge of Arabic and Persian. But on one subject his enthusiasm rather taxes his auditor’s patience, if not precisely of his opinion. He has published, and he believes, that in the year 1847 Christ will come in the clouds, surrounded by angels and commence his reign in Jerusalem for one thousand years.
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Wolff’s activities soon attracted a huge crowd and he had to pay a Turkish guard to watch over his poster in order to prevent it being torn down. As he reported proudly back to London: “In a few hours 2000 Jews were assembled around it, who read it. A Turkish soldier stood near it, in order that no one might tear it up. The chief of the soldiers, who placed a man there, desired an Arabic Bible as a reward.” This was exactly the kind of action that was likely to cause trouble. “The whole city was upside down,” reported Slade. According to Meshullam, some Jews were so “enraged” that they asked the pasha to execute him. Others reacted cautiously, waiting to see what their elders would decree, or opining that as there were still seventeen years to wait, they would make up their minds in good time since “few men are so old as not to hope for as many as seventeen years more life.” Slanderous rumours started to circulate—hotly denied by Wolff—that he had been offering four thousand piastres to anyone who converted. Very soon, the chief rabbi ordered all Jews who had received Bibles from Wolff to burn them, and the unfortunate missionary was ordered to cease
disturbing the peace by the pasha himself who told him that he considered it “highly improper” to invite people to change their religion. The final ignominy was when his own superiors in London publicly disowned his tactics. After a fortnight, in which he failed to make any conversions, he set sail for Smyrna.
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More discreet than Wolff, others continued to distribute their Bibles: over the coming decades, the offices of the American Bible Society in the Levant sent out copies in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, modern Greek and Turkish. Twenty years after him, these labourers for “the Book of Life” still found Salonica’s Jews “shrewd disputants and bitter opponents … bigoted and self-righteous, and priding themselves especially on the long renown their city has had in the Jewish World for learning and Rabbinical Lore.” Although they held theological discussions together in private, in public missionaries were fiercely opposed by the religious leaders of the community: Chief Rabbi Saul Molho established Bible-reading groups to refute passages cited by the missionaries in favour of Christianity, published pamphlets against the New Testament, and issued excommunications against anyone found dealing with the missionaries themselves. The return on investment in missionary activities was a poor one. “The utter unprofitableness of these gentlemen cannot be sufficiently pointed out,” wrote Slade. One tireless Scottish missionary, Mr. Crosbie, settled in Salonica in 1860 and opened a small school. When he died in 1904, it was doubted that he had made a single convert.
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C
ONVERSION
: T
HE
1876 M
URDERS

W
ITHIN THE EMPIRE CONVERSION
was never a straightforward matter; it aroused strong feelings and needed to be handled with care. But it was not uncommon: Christian and Jewish girls often converted to Islam on marrying and entering a Muslim man’s
haremlik
, not for theological reasons but to escape the disapproval of relatives. “The temptations of money, family dissensions, menaces, or it may be an amorous temperament are the principal motives which place Christian women and girls within the power of Mohamedans,” noted an observer in 1858. Once apostasy from Islam no longer incurred the death penalty, Protestant missions again sought to target Muslims, and the authorities feared that some Muslim men would convert as a way of avoiding military service. In fact their fears were not groundless.
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