Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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of the Sefardim, we see the astonishing capacity of refugees to make an unfamiliar city theirs. Through religious devotion and study, they turned Salonica into a ‘new Jerusalem’ – just as other Jews did with Amsterdam, Vilna, Montpellier, Nimes, Bari and Otranto: wrapping their new place of exile in the mantle of biblical geography was a way of coming to feel at home. ‘The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come there to find a refuge,’ wrote Usque, ‘and this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours.’11
Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though it formed part of the same Ottoman realm. As in Spain itself, the Jews came to feel – as one historian has put it – ‘at home in exile’ and had no desire to uproot themselves once more, not even when the destination was the Land their holy books promised them. But this home was not only their ‘Jerusalem’; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-abandoned homelands – Ispanya, Çeçilyan [Sicilian], Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan [Italian], Otranto, Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others – which survived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917. Their family names – Navarro, Cuenca, Algava – their games, curses and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate Pan d’Espanya [almond sponge cake] on holidays, rodanchas [pumpkin pastries], pastel de kwezo [cheese pie with sesame seed], fijones kon karne [beef and bean stew] and keftikes depoyo [chicken croquettes], and gave visitors dulce de muez verde [green walnut preserve]. People munched pasatempo [dried melon seeds], took the vaporiko across the bay, or enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.12
For this, the primary conduit was language. As a Salonican merchant, Emmanuel Abuaf, tried to explain in 1600 to a puzzled interrogator of the Pisan Inquisition: ‘Our Jewish youngsters, when they begin from the age of six to learn the Scripture, read it and discuss it in the Spanish language, and all the business and trade of the Levant is carried on in Spanish in Hebrew characters … And so it is not hard for Jews to know Spanish even if they are born outside Spain.’13 In Salonica, there was a religious variant – Ladino – and a vernacular which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as ‘Jewish’ [judezmo], and quickly became the language of secular learning and literature, business, science and medicine. Sacred and scholarly texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because ‘this language is the most used among us’. In the docks, among the fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon, Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, Italian and Provencal. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest. ‘The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, Venice and other commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not better,’ noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of Toledo, found that the city’s Jews ‘speak Castilian as fine and well-accented as in the imperial capital’. They were proud of their tongue – its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive. By contrast, the Jews further inland were derisively written off as digi digi – incapable of speaking properly, too inclined to the harsh ds and gs of the Portuguese.14
Serving the Imperial Economy
Early in the sixteenth century, the Porte entrusted the Jews of Salonica with the responsibility of manufacturing the uniforms for the janissary infantry corps, and over the next century this turned the city into one of the principal producers and exporters of cloth in the eastern Mediterranean. Wealthy Jewish merchants bought up the local supply of wool, imported dyes, and set up poorer Jews with equipment and wages for weaving, brushing, dyeing and making up the finished material. Ottoman authorities banned all exports of wool from the region until the needs of the manufacturers had been met and tried to chase back any weavers who tried to leave. By mid-century, the industry was not only supplying military uniforms, but also clothing the city itself and sending exports to Buda and beyond.15
Another imperial corvée a few years later jump-started silver-mining outside the city – crucially easing the desperate Ottoman shortage of precious metals. Because the silver shortage was one of the main constraints on Ottoman economic growth, Grand Vizier Maktul Ibrahim Pasha brought in Jewish metallurgists from newly-conquered Hungary, and within a few years the Siderokapsi mines had become one of the largest silver producers in the empire, with daily caravans making the fifty-mile journey to Salonica and back. Bulgarian and Jewish miners did the hard work, and rich Jewish merchants were commanded to bankroll operations. But running the economy by imperial fiat in this way was not popular with the wealthy. The bankers complained bitterly at an obligation which was not shared by the community as a whole, and which more often than not led to losses rather than profits. They bribed Ottoman officials, hid or fled the city. The industry itself became such a drain on resources that Salonican Jews shunned the miners when they came into town: ‘They would rather meet a bear that lost its cubs than one of those people’.16
In order to curb the impact of such obligations and to allow for greater fiscal predictability, the city’s Jews sent a delegation to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1562 to plead for a reform of their overall tax burden. The move indicated the surprising degree of self-confidence with which the Sefardim dealt with their Ottoman masters. It took many visits, several years, and at least one change of sultan, before an answer was forthcoming. It could easily have resulted – had the imperial mood been rather different – in the delegates losing their lives, as happened to another rabbi when he tried to negotiate a later reduction in the tax burden. But in 1568, it still seemed vital to the Porte to stay on good terms with Salonica’s Jews and the principal delegate, Moises Almosnino, was able to return with welcome news: in return for the abolition of many special taxes, the community committed itself to collecting and handing over an agreed sum annually to the authorities.
For the Ottomans were not modern capitalists. They did not aim at unlimited growth in unrestricted markets but rather at the creation and maintenance of a basically closed system to keep towns alive – in particular the ever-expanding imperial metropole – and to guarantee the domestic production of commodities essential for urban life and the provisioning of the military. Salt, wheat, silver and woollens were what they needed from Salonica, a list to which they occasionally added gunpowder and even cannons. The primary value of the Jews lay in their ability to provide these things, thereby freeing Muslims for other occupations. After a century of Ottoman rule, more than half of the latter were now imams, muezzins, tax collectors, janissaries or other servants of the state and its ruling faith. They administered the city; the Jews ran its economy. It was a division of labour which suited both sides and the city flourished.17
For the rich, the buoyant Ottoman economy allowed them to invest their funds in attractive and profitable outlets such as the tax farms and concessions upon which the sultan relied for the gathering of many of his revenues. Salonican Jews thus came to play an important part in the regional economy of the Ottoman Balkans. Local Jewish sarrafs [bankers] collected taxes from drovers, vineyards, dairy farmers and slave dealers. They bankrolled prominent Muslim office-holders such as the defterdar and local troop and janissary commanders, and farmed the customs concession for Salonica itself – one of the most important sources of revenue for the empire – and the salt pans outside the city, where at their peak more than one thousand peasants worked. Many had interests in the capital, in Vidin, and along the Danube. Much of the wealth of the Nasi-Mendes family – the most