Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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as a Jew but sometimes went to church and ate and drank often with Christians’. Another, Moise Israel, also known by his Christian name of Francesco Maria Leoncini, was baptized no less than three times as he shifted to and fro, and ‘was making merchandise of sacred religion’ in the graphic words of an outraged commentator. Such men were dismissed by contemporaries as ‘ships with two rudders’, but they were not particularly uncommon. A certain Samuel Levi went even further, converting to Islam as a boy in Salonica – mostly, according to him, to avoid punishment at school – then reverting to Judaism once safely across the Adriatic to marry an Ottoman Jewish woman – la Turchetta – in the Venice ghetto, before ending up baptized as a Catholic by the Bishop of Ferrara.9
Salonica offered the Marranos the possibility of a less concealed, perilous and ambiguous kind of life, and the activities of the Portuguese Inquisition after 1536 led many to make their home there. Yet even those who returned to Judaism for good preserved characteristic features of the old ways. Their past experience of the clandestine life, their inevitably suspicious attitude towards religious authority, as well as their exposure to Catholic illuminism, inclined them to esoteric beliefs and mysticism. Salonica became a renowned centre of Kabbalah where eminent rabbis were guided by heavenly voices and taught their pupils to comprehend the divine will through the use of secret forms of calculation known only to initiates.
And with Kabbalah came the taste for messianic speculation. Each bout of persecution since the end of the thirteenth century had generated prophecies of imminent redemption for the Jews. Their exodus from Spain, the Ottoman conquest of the biblical lands, and the onset of the titanic struggle between the Spanish crown and the Ottoman sultans, stoked up apocalyptic expectations to a new pitch. The learned Isaac Abravanel, whose library was one of the most important in Salonica, calculated that the process of redemption would begin in 1503 and be completed by 1531. Others saw in the conflict between Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent the biblical clash of Gog and Magog which according to the scholars would usher in the ‘kingmessiah’.10
In 1524, a mysterious Jewish adventurer called David Ruebeni arrived in Venice and presented himself as prince of one of the lost tribes of Israel. He gained an audience with the Pope and told the Holy Roman Emperor to arm the Jews so that they might regain Palestine. Crossing his path was an even less modest figure – a Portuguese New Christian called Diego Pires. After rediscovering his Jewish roots and changing his name to Solomon Molcho, he studied the Kaballah in Salonica with some of the city’s most eminent rabbis and gradually made the transition to messianic prophet. He predicted the sack of Rome – which occurred at the hands of imperial troops in 1527 – and then declared himself to be the Messiah, and went to Rome itself, in accordance with the apocalyptic programme, where he sat for thirty days in rags by the city gates praying for its destruction. Before being burned at the stake, Molcho saw the future: the Tiber was flooding over, and Turkish troops were bursting into the seat of the Papacy. The truly striking thing about Molcho is how many people believed in him and preserved and reinterpreted his messianic timetables. Relics of the martyr were carried across Europe and a century after his death, they were still being displayed in the Pinkas Shul in Prague.11
By the mid-seventeenth century, millenarian fever had grown, if anything, more intense. In the centres of Jewish mysticism, Salonica and Safed in particular, scholars prepared for the coming of the Messiah. The apocalyptically-minded saw positive signs in the murderous wars of religion in central Europe, the Turkish campaigns in Poland and the Mediterranean, the admission of Jews into the Protestant lands, and the persecution of east European Jewry by the Cossacks. Expectations – both Jewish and Christian – focused on the year 1666. ‘According to the Predictions of several Christian writers, especially of such who Comment on the Apocalyps, or Revelations,’ wrote one commentator, ‘this year of 1666 was to prove a Year of Wonders, and Strange Revolutions in the World.’ Protestants looked forward to the Jews’ conversion, Jews themselves to their imminent return to Zion. Rumours ran across Europe, and it was reported ‘that a Ship was arrived in the Northern parts of Scotland with her Sails and Cordage of Silk, Navigated by Mariners who spake nothing but Hebrew; with this Motto on their Sails, The Twelve Tribes of Israel.’12
That winter a forty-year-old Jewish scholar from Izmir headed for Istanbul with the declared intention of toppling the sultan and ushering in the day of redemption. Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaiming himself the Messiah on and off for some years while he wandered through the rabbinical academies of the eastern Mediterranean. Helped by wealthy Jewish backers in Egypt, and by a promotional campaign launched on his behalf by a young Gaza rabbi, he was mobbed by supporters when he returned to his home-town. According to one account ‘he immediately started to appear as a Monarch, dressed in golden and silken clothes, most beautiful and rich. He used to carry a sort of Sceptre in his hand and to go about Town always escorted by a great number of Jews, some of whome, to honour him, would spread carpets on the streets for him to step on.’13
It was only, however, once he headed for the capital, announcing he was planning to depose the sultan himself, that the Ottoman authorities became alarmed. By this point, he had thrown the entire Jewish world into turmoil. From Buda to Aleppo and Cairo, thousands declared their allegiance and shouted down the doubters. ‘It was strange to see how the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabatai and his Doctrine flew through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited’, noted an English observer. ‘I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to prepare themselves and Families for a Journey to Jerusalem: All their Discourses, their Dreams and disposal of their Affairs tended to no other Design but a re-establishment in the Land of Promise, to Greatness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah.”14
Nowhere was the frenzy greater than in Salonica, where Zevi was a well-known figure. He had spent some years studying there with local scholars, and preached regularly in the synagogue of the Marranos. In 1659 he had outraged his audience by pronouncing the divine name and was excommunicated and forced to leave. Now, however, the city was gripped by millenarian hysteria. Anticipating the Messiah’s arrival, rabbis ordered acts of penance and fasting; in their enthusiasm some acolytes starved themselves to death, or whipped themselves till their backs were bleeding. ‘Others buryed themselves in their Gardens, covering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads onely excepted remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the cold and moisture: others would indure to have melted Wax dropt upon their Shoulders, others to rowl themselves in Snow, and throw their Bodies in the Coldest season of Winter into the Sea, or Frozen Waters.’ Preparing to go and meet him, shopkeepers sold off their stock at bargain prices, parents married off their children and all sought ‘to purge their Consciences of Sin.’ Christians and Muslims looked on in bemusement and scorn. When a French onlooker smiled at the wild abandon of the crowds, a young Jewish boy told him ‘that I had nothing to smile about since shortly we would all become their slaves by the virtue of their Messiah.”15
Even Zevi’s arrest en route to the capital, and his subsequent detention, did not diminish his influence. To the Grand Vizier he denied ever having claimed he was the Messiah; but at the same time, he addressed the Jews of the capital as ‘The Only Son and Firstborn of God, Messiah and Saviour of the World.’ Delegations visited him from as far afield as Holland, Poland, Germany and Persia, and hundreds of pilgrims made their way to see him. A light – so bright as to blind those who looked upon it – was said to have shone from his face and a crown of fire was seen above his head. He was dressed in expensive garments paid for by his admirers; in return, he sent out instructions for new festivals to be celebrated in his honour. Only in Istanbul did doubters publicly resist his claims. In the Balkans his supporters held sway; women dressed themselves in white and prepared to ‘go and slay demons’. His fame even prompted another Kabbalist, a Polish Jew named Nehemiah, to make his way to Gallipoli, where Zevi was being held, to tell him