Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (45 page)

T
HE
N
EW
T
URK

B
Y 1910 THE IDEOLOGY OF
O
TTOMANISM
had more or less collapsed as a way of holding the empire together, and as nationalism spread among its Christian population, it gained ground among Muslims too. Arguments between Ottomanists and Turkish nationalists had been raging within the ranks of the CUP for some years. But who, or what, was a Turk? Although Europeans had been talking about “Turks” for centuries, it had not been a term much used within the empire. The ruling language was an amalgam of Turkish, Arabic and Persian, with a smattering of Greek, Slavic and Italian, and its ruling class—like all imperial ruling classes—included individuals from an astonishing array of different backgrounds—Albanian, French, Venetian, Arab, Jewish and Circassian. Mehmet Nazim—better known as the great Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet—was descended on his mother’s side from the Polish Count Borzenski and from the German Huguenot Karl Detroit, who left Hamburg as a poor cabin-boy and rose to become a field marshal of the Ottoman army. If “Turk” meant simply Muslim, then in the Balkans alone, there were Albanian, Cretan, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Jewish and other Muslims in addition to a scattering of Sudanese slaves, Egyptian market gardeners and the long-established peasant descendants of nomadic Turcoman tribes.

The main issue—how to define a Turk—was explored by the Salonica-based Turkish nationalist Tekin Alp in a series of articles in 1912 on
The Nature and Historical Development of the Turkish National Movement.
According to him, a mere three years earlier, Ottoman Turks had regarded themselves “simply as Mohammedans and never considered their nation as having a separate existence. The Anatolian peasant took the word ‘Turk’ as synonymous with
Kisilbash
(one who wore a red fez). Even among educated classes there were persons who did not know that members of the Turkish race were living outside Turkey.” Popular consciousness changed with the triumph of the CUP and supported its effort to base the empire on the creed of Ottomanism. But as the “Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians” gradually returned “to their mountains and their arms, to resume their struggle against Turkish authority,” the dream of Ottomanism was dispelled. Some at this point advocated Pan-Islamism—“the union of all the Mohammedan elements in the kingdom”—but their arguments were shaken by the rising of Muslim Albanians and by revolts in the Arab peninsula.
These developments strengthened the position of those who “regarded the Turkish element as the saviour of the Ottoman Empire.” In CUP circles, Tekin Alp went on, this idea had gathered ground and was propagated through Salonican newspapers which preached the “foundation of a new language, a new literature and a new purely Turkish civilization.” The old Arabic and Persian elements in Ottoman Turkish would be eradicated and its literature consigned to the past. Ziya Gökalp, often regarded as the founding father of the nationalist movement, had settled in the city where he was the first man to teach sociology in the Ottoman empire. He inspired youthful intellectuals, armed with ammunition drawn from the European theoreticians of romantic and racial nationalism; they founded journals and clubs to promote the use of Turkish and tried to ignore the political limitations of their nationalist vision in a multi-national empire.
¹²

Tekin Alp, though a far less important figure than Gökalp, had been in the thick of these discussions, and had made the transition himself from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism. Subsequently he became a productive intellectual in the interwar Turkish republic. In a work he published in 1928, he preached the Turkification of minorities in Turkey on the basis of patriotic commandments such as: Turkify your names! Speak Turkish! Mingle with Turks! All of this was very much in keeping with nationalist ideology around the world. But one thing about Tekin Alp is worth mentioning: it was not his real name. For this apostle of Turkish nationalism had been born into an orthodox Jewish family in nearby Serres in 1883, and it was as Moise Cohen that he had been known when he first went to Salonica to study to become a rabbi: indeed one of his brothers eventually became rabbi of Serres. So the story of Turkish nationalism is more complicated than appears at first sight and raises the question of how the Jews of Macedonia—in the face of growing Greek and Slavic nationalism, and the rise of the CUP—also chose to define their political identities and fortunes.

J
EWS
, Z
IONISTS AND
T
URKS

T
HE YOUNG
M
OISE
C
OHEN
was active within the city’s branch of the CUP since, like many Jews there, he initially saw Ottomanism as the perfect expression of his community’s interests. Few Jews believed they would be better off in one of the Christian successor states than they were in an empire where their loyalty made them trusted, and none
can have thought that Salonica in particular—the city they dominated—would develop to their benefit if it became part of Greece or Bulgaria. The rise of Balkan nationalism thus increased the intensity of the Jews’ identification with the Ottoman state. Indeed, Jews from Thessaly had made their way
into
the city in the 1890s after the latter province was handed over to Greece, and Jews from Bulgaria had resettled in Constantinople and Smyrna. Cohen was therefore preaching to the converted when he wrote articles promoting the idea of harmony between Turks and Jews. In May 1910 he established a
Ligue d’Ottomanisation
in the city.

Given this strong support for Ottomanism, it is not surprising that many of Salonica’s Jews were unsympathetic to the idea of Jewish nationalism, nor that emissaries of the new central European creed of Zionism found the going hard there. In 1908 the energetic Zionist ideologist Vladimir Jabotinsky came to Salonica and called for Jews in the Ottoman empire not to follow the errors of their Austrian brethren; they must show that they were proud of their own culture and cultivate a sense of Jewish nationhood:

As a flower with petals, Turkey today as a garden and the Turkish Empire as a gardener must assure all flowers can conserve their own sweetness and flourish. The Turkish people have proven their spirit of tolerance for religions. When they will learn that nationality has also to be tolerated, they will also respect this.
¹³

But Salonica’s Jewish elite did not need an Ashkenazi outsider to lecture them on communal self-pride and although some members of his audience believed it was possible to combine Ottomanism and Zionism, most did not. The chief rabbi, Jacob Meir, who arrived in 1907 from Palestine—the first-ever not to have been born in the city—was sympathetic, and the following year a breakaway group founded a pro-Zionist newspaper. But a deep sense of allegiance to the empire and its rulers was still the norm. Moise Cohen himself attended the Ninth World Zionist Congress in Hamburg the following year and tried to explain to his audience why he did not share their beliefs. When the future David Ben-Gurion came to study in Salonica, the local Zionist movement was in the doldrums. According to one of his biographers, although he found the city enchanting, he was “as a Zionist ill at ease,” and he left after several months.
¹⁴

In fact, had some Salonica Jews had their way, there would
have been no Jewish colonization of Palestine at all. They did not oppose the idea of settlement, just the Zionists’ choice of destination since they believed that Jewish immigration, properly directed, could bolster their own position in Macedonia. In Salonica Jews predominated; but in the countryside they were few and far between. Colonization could help change that. At the time of the 1891 Russian pogroms, Abdul Hamid had sounded out the chief rabbi about the merits of settling Jews
en masse
in the empire. Although an organized policy did not materialize, east European Jews continued to arrive in Istanbul and Salonica. The prominent journalist Saadi Levy, editor of the
Journal de Salonique
, entertained the idea of resettling colonists in Macedonia itself and Moise Cohen even advocated the policy at the 1909 Zionist Congress, though the bulk of the delegates can hardly have been pleased to hear it.
¹⁵

In CUP circles, too, Jewish immigration was being discussed as part of a broader scheme for solving the Macedonia problem through demographic engineering. The decline of Ottoman power had been accompanied for at least a century by the immigration of waves of Muslim refugees—more than one million of them—uprooted from their old homes. Latterly, thousands had been arriving from Bulgaria, Serbia and Crete, many settling in the city. After the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia, the 1909 Austro-Turkish peace settlement guaranteed the religious rights of Bosnian Muslims and made the sultan, as caliph, responsible for their welfare. But some in the CUP saw the Muslims of the lost provinces as a national rather than a religious resource and an official CUP committee proposed encouraging them all to leave their homes. If sufficient numbers emigrated into the empire, they could be used to colonize Macedonia and increase the proportion of non-Christians.
¹⁶

On the eve of the 1909 Zionist Congress, Nazim Bey, a senior figure within the CUP, told a Jewish journalist that two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims were ready to emigrate “at the first signal,” and suggested that within a short space of time more than one million Muslim settlers might be brought into Macedonia—not only from Bosnia, but also from Bulgaria, Romania, the Crimea and central Asia; Jewish colonists, he went on, would be a welcome addition. Romanian Jewish farmers were to be settled in the Vardar valley and subsidized: five thousand had already arrived and there was room for more “right up to the doors of Salonica itself.” “Upon this Judeo-Muslim project,” he told the journalist, “rested the life or death of European Turkey.”
Lobbied by senior Zionist officials, the CUP repeated its line: it was opposed to the idea of Jewish colonization in Palestine and the national aspiration this represented but Jewish settlers were a different matter entirely in places where they would not predominate. To Jabotinsky, Nazim gave this response: “There are no Greeks and no Armenians, we, all of us, are Ottomans; and we would welcome Jewish immigration—to Macedonia.” The Zionists were disheartened by such ideas, not least because they appeared to meet with approval in Jewish circles in Salonica itself.
¹⁷

The CUP policy was already in its early stages. In Kosovo and Skopje several thousand Bosnian immigrants were being prepared for rural resettlement. Nazim Bey purchased land for them in Macedonia. In November 1910 the first seven hundred families passed through Salonica en route to the slopes of Mount Olympos: hundreds more were not far behind. The new arrivals took over common lands and drove out Christian peasants; Bulgarian and Macedonian groups objected bitterly, but could do nothing except bide their time until they got their chance for revenge. Only Habsburg counter-propaganda to persuade Bosnian Muslims to stay, and the latter’s own reluctance to leave their homes, limited the success of the CUP’s scheme.
¹⁸
Yet they were only a little ahead of their time. In just a few years, Balkan states would be pushing populations around on a huge scale, the Habsburgs and their way of thinking would vanish, and Macedonia would indeed be colonized, though not by Muslims or Jews.

T
HE
E
MERGENCE OF
W
ORKER
P
OLITICS

N
ATIONALISM WAS NOT THE ONLY SUCCESSFUL CREDO
to make its appearance in the political ferment which followed the Young Turk revolution. Salonica was the most industrially advanced city in the Ottoman Balkans and after 1908, a vigorous workers’ movement, led chiefly by Jewish and Bulgarian intellectuals, exploded into life. It placed itself at the head of the city’s numerous labouring classes and became in a short space of time so active and militant that it turned into the chief political concern of the city’s new masters who—like the other astonished inhabitants—had to familiarize themselves with the sight of union marches, sit-ins, strikes, lock-outs and parades.

Behind the unrest lay the plight of the city’s workforce. The fishermen and boatmen who plied the bay, the porters,
hamals
and
dock-workers all earned a pittance; often they could not afford to send their children to school. In the cotton mills, employees were expected to work a fifteen-hour day in summer with only thirty-five minutes for lunch. They were almost all girls, working to save up for their dowry. “No recognized scale of wages exists,” reported a British observer, “and it is needless to say that there is no Factory Act in force to protect the operatives against their harsh task masters.” Local work was often only available for a few months each year, for the city’s economy as a whole still rose and fell according to the seasonal rhythms of the agriculture in the Macedonian hinterland. “Business runs normally during the first four months, reduced in January and February, which happens every year owing to conditions in communications in Macedonia in winter time.” This was written in 1928, but things were just the same twenty years earlier.
¹⁹

Children were pressed into work from an early age—as shoe-blacks, shop attendants, newspaper sellers and street vendors—and many more were left unsupervised on the streets where they fought for
baksheesh
from foreign visitors, pestering sailors and living outdoors. Domestic service was still the main way poor girls earned their dowry. And prostitution was a major industry for local women as well as foreigners. Scattered references in the archives make it clear that it was not unknown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But at the end of the nineteenth century—with the rise of a new culture of public parks, cafés, beer-gardens and dance-halls—it assumed new proportions. In 1879 journalists denounced the “depraved women” who haunted the city’s beer-halls, and demanded they be driven away. The following year Christian, Jewish and Muslim community leaders protested to the municipality at their presence in the heart of the city. But by 1910, girls of all races and religions were working its more than one hundred brothels in a separate quarter near the railways. Neither the rabbis nor the other notables of the city seemed very concerned about the problem. “What do you expect?” one told a visiting investigator. “The Jews sell their children like chickens!”
²⁰