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In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey hamam as a place to prepare for the city’s main mosque, only a stone’s throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica’s Bey hamam, with its separate baths for men and women is one of the outstanding examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until the 1960s, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illuminated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut deep into the domed ceiling.
(#litres_trial_promo)Vakfs also fostered trade. In addition to Bayazid’s central market building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather goods, there was the so-called ‘Egyptian market’ just outside the gate to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained ‘all the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee’. Nearby were the city’s tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century. Ship’s biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and taverns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the Abdur-Reouf mosque – ‘a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place of devotion, respite and recovery’ – founded by a mollah of the city, who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the walls, and endowed this too as a vakf. ‘Day and night,’ reports a seventeenth-century visitor, ‘the faithful are present there, because Muslim traders from the four corners of the globe and god-fearing sailors and sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the ships in the harbour.’
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It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. In 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish market, (next door to that owned by ‘the bey’) as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises of ‘Kostas son of Kokoris’). They also had three stalls in the candle-makers’ market, and two cobblers’ workshops next to those owned by ‘Hadji Ahmed’ and ‘Hadji Hassan’. They owned cook-shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water-mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and acquired yet more properties.
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Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, ‘which the Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers, without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return.’ As the key naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the fifteenth-century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the old Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power controlled the region as a whole.
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Running the City
In the Balkans the Ottomans conquered a region whose cities were already in decline as a result of the political and military instability of the previous centuries. They had, therefore, not only to repopulate them but to reorganize them administratively as well. Salonica itself was brought under the direct control of the sultan and placed by him under the supervision of appointed officers. There was no clear legal or institutional demarcation between the city and its rural hinterland – the same officials were often responsible for both and in contrast to the Romano-Byzantine tradition there was no municipal government in the strict sense. City-based tax farmers controlled the local salteries and city officials were instructed to look after the mines in the Chalkidiki peninsula. Moreover large areas within the walls were given over to vineyards, orchards and pasture, so that the countryside came within the city as well: indeed the Christians who patrolled the sea-walls nightly, as ordered by Murad [in return for tax exemptions] were mostly local shepherds and farmers. Nevertheless, the needs of the urban economy and rhythms of urban life themselves required special attention.
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We lack documents which would show us precisely how Salonica was run in the fifteenth century. But on the basis of what was happening in other provincial towns we have a good idea. There would have been a governor who combined military and urban functions – on the one hand, overall responsibility for the garrisoning of the fortifications, gates, local troop contingents and horses; and on the other, keeping an eye on the local tax officials, especially those who had bought concessions for customs duties, and on the needs of the city in general. The collection of taxes and the running of the market were the Ottoman state’s priorities. It laid out, in enormous detail, the duties to be levied on each good brought into the city, and the governor was supposed to check that these were properly paid. The guardian of the gates examined the produce and animals brought in by farmers and traders. Another official called the muhtesib regulated the buying and selling of ‘all that God has created’. He and his assistants paid weekly visits to the flour market and the slaughter-houses, checking weights and measures and monitoring the price and quality of silver. He also kept an eye on the behaviour of slaves and made sure they prayed regularly, and looked out for any signs of public drunkenness or debauchery. Production itself was organized in trade guilds, some – like the butchers, confined to one religion – others (like the shoe-makers), mixed. In Salonica – unlike many other places – guild members did not cluster together in the same residential areas.
This was a system of multiple legal jurisdictions. The governor and several of his subordinates had powers of arrest and imprisonment. The city’s chief law officer and public notary was the kadi but there was sometimes another judge, subordinate to him, whose remit covered ‘everything that could trouble public order’ – murders, rape, adultery, robberies – crimes which in the Balkans at least were often judged not according to the divine law but ‘on the basis of custom’ or royal decree. For the empire had a triple system of law with the shari’a providing a foundation, the body of customary law – adet – which varied from place to place, and the decrees and regulations issued by the sultan himself – the kanun.
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With no municipal authority to watch over the city, it was up to the governor to organize its policing, fire prevention, sewage disposal and hygiene. Policing came out of the pockets of merchants and local people who paid the pasvant [from the Persian word for nightwatchman] to patrol their neighbourhood. Four hundred years later, visitors to Salonica were still being kept awake by the unfamiliar sound of his metal-tipped staff tapping out the hours on the cobbles as he made his rounds. Householders also paid for rubbish to be collected, and were supposed to be responsible for the condition of pathways outside their homes. Guilds had the responsibility to provide young men for fire duty, but the frequency with which the city was hit by devastating conflagrations was testimony to their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, the water system was surprisingly sophisticated – early travellers commented on the abundance of public wells and fountains – and the flow could be controlled and directed in an emergency to where it was needed.
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Thanks to the survival of a 1478 cadastral register, the third which the conscientious Ottoman scribes had prepared since the conquest (but the first to survive), we have a fairly precise picture of who was living where roughly half a century after the conquest. The pattern of settlement indicates a kind of transition from the Byzantine period to the Ottoman city in its heyday. A total of just over ten thousand people lived there – so the population had recovered at least up to the level it may have been when the Ottoman army burst in – roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, with the former still very slightly in the majority. The Muslims were immigrants and there do not appear to have been many converts from among the Christians, in contrast with some other former Byzantine towns.
The Byzantine past lingered on, and could be discerned in the Greek names which continued to be used for neighbourhoods and districts. The Ottoman scribes faithfully referred to Ayo Dimitri, Ofalo, Podrom [from the old Hippodrome], Ayo Mine, Asomat after the old churches. Even Akhiropit [Acheiropoietos] was used although the church had been converted into a mosque; it would be replaced by a Turkish name only in the next century. Large churches – such as Ayia Sofia – and the Vlatadon Monastery still lived off their estates. The garrison was made up of Ottoman troops, but Christians were assigned the responsibility for maintaining and even manning the sea walls and the towers – an arrangement which another governor in the start of the seventeenth century regarded as a security risk and put an end to. As the details of the Vlatadon monks’ property portfolio show, Muslims and Christians lived and worked side by side, probably because Murad had settled newcomers in the homes of departed or dead Christians. Indeed Christians still outnumbered Muslims in the old quarters on either side of the main street.
Only in the Upper Town – a hint of the future pattern of residence – were Muslims now in the majority. There they enjoyed the best access to water and fresh air. The poor lived in humble single-storey homes whose courtyards were hidden from the street behind whitewashed walls; the wealthy slowly built themselves larger stone mansions with overhanging screened balconies and private wells in their extensive gardens, connected to the city’s water system. Cypresses and plane trees provided shade, and there were numerous kiosks which allowed people to escape the sun and drink from fountains while enjoying the views over the town. The highest officials were granted regular deliveries of ice from Mount Hortiatis, which they used mostly in the preparation of sherbet, one of the most popular beverages. In the eighteenth century if not before, they started painting their houses and ornamenting them with verses from the Qur’an picked out in red.
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Imperial edicts had successfully replenished the city with the trades for which it would shortly become renowned – leather and textile-workers in particular – together with the donkey and camel-drivers, tailors, bakers, grocers, fishermen, cobblers and shopkeepers without which no urban life could be sustained. The city was now producing its own rice, soap, knives, wax, stoves, sherbet, pillows and pottery. Saffron, meat, cheese and grains were all supplied locally. Fish were so plentiful that local astrologers claimed the city itself lay under the sign of Pisces. Scribes provide one badly needed skill; the fifteen hamam attendants – a surprisingly high number at this early date – another. And the presence of merchants, a furrier, a jeweller and a silversmith all indicate the revival of international trade and wealth.
Yet the city was still far from its prime. Many houses had been abandoned or demolished, and great stretches of the area within the walls, especially on the upper slopes, were given over to pasture, orchards, vineyards and agriculture. Two farmers are mentioned in the 1478 register, but many more of the inhabitants tended their own gardens (the word the Ottoman scribe uses is a Slavic one, bashtina, a sign of the close linkage between the Slavs and the land) or grazed their sheep, horses, oxen and donkeys on open ground. Centuries later, when the population had grown to more than 100,000, the quasi-rural character of Salonica’s upper reaches was still visible: Ottoman photographs show isolated buildings surrounded by fields within the walls – the Muslim neighbourhood inside the fortress perimeter was virtually a separate village – while the city’s fresh milk was produced by animals which lived alongside their downtown owners right up until 1920. In fact, most of the time under the sultans there was more meadow within the walls than housing. A Venetian ambassador passed through at the end of sixteenth century and what struck him – despite the ‘fine and wide streets downtown, a fountain in almost every one, many columns visible along them, some ruined and some whole’ – was that the city was ‘sparsely inhabited’.
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Yet not nearly as sparsely in the 1590s as it had been a century earlier. For after 1500 Salonica’s population suddenly doubled, and soared to thirty thousand by 1520, putting pressure on housing for the first time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the city. The newcomers emanated from an unexpected quarter – the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were taking Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the Jews from their kingdom. Attracted by Bayazid’s promises of economic concessions and political protection, Spanish-speaking Jews arrived in droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him round, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained within the walls – Muslims, Christians and Jews – this last, which had been entirely absent from the population register of 1478, had suddenly become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.
3 The Arrival of the Sefardim (#ulink_63bee8ba-b9ec-51eb-a1a7-f330e51df0df)
WHEN EVLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantastic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon – ‘may God’s blessing be upon him’ – had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba when she looked down and saw ‘in the region of Athens, in the land of the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue’. There he built her a palace ‘whose traces are still visible’, before they moved on eastwards to Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city’s walls to the ‘philosopher Philikos’ and his son Selanik ‘after whom it is named still’. Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine ‘slew the Greek nation in one night and gained control of the fortress’. Hebrew kings did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually took over, and ‘until our own days, the city is full of Jews’.
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Evliya’s tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time of his visit in 1667–68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families [or Romaniotes]; despite often severe persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a Jewish presence for perhaps the first time in over a millennium. This was why in the 1478 register they did not appear. But then came a new wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Christendom, and the Ottoman willingness to take advantage of this.
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Flight across the Mediterranean
When the English expelled their Jews in 1290, they inaugurated a policy which spread widely over the next two centuries. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of banishment forced thousands from a homeland where they had known great security and prosperity. Sicily and Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples followed suit. By the mid-sixteenth century, Jews had been evicted from much of western Europe. A few existed on sufferance, while many others converted or went underground as Marranos and New Christians, preserving their customs behind a Catholic façade. The centre of gravity of the Jewish world shifted eastwards – to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman domains.
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In Spain itself not everyone favoured the expulsions. (Perhaps this was why a different policy was chosen towards the far more numerous Muslims of Andalucía who were forcibly converted, and only expelled much later.) ‘Many were of the opinion,’ wrote the scholar and Inquisitor Jeronimo de Zurita, ‘that the king was making a mistake to throw out of his realms people who were so industrious and hard-working, and so outstanding in his realms both in number and esteem as well as in dedication to making money.’ A later generation of Inquisitors feared that the Jews who had been driven out ‘took with them the substance and wealth of these realms, transferring to our enemies the trade and commerce of which they are the proprietors not only in Europe but throughout the world.’
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The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power between Islam and Catholicism. One might almost see this as the contest to reunify the Roman Empire between the two great monotheistic religions that had succeeded it: on the one side, the Spanish Catholic monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, the Ottoman sultans, themselves heirs to the Roman Empire of the East, and rulers of the largest and most powerful Muslim empire in the world. Its climax, in the sixteenth century, pitted Charles V, possessor of the imperial throne of Germany and ruler of the Netherlands, the Austrian lands, the Spanish monarchy and its possessions in Sicily and Naples, Mexico and Peru, against Suleyman the Magnificent who held undisputed sway from Hungary to Yemen, from Algiers to Baghdad. Ottoman forces had swept north to the gates of Vienna and conquered the Arab lands while Ottoman navies clashed with the Holy League in the Mediterranean and captured Rhodes, Cyprus and Tunis, wintered in Toulon, seized Nice and terrorized the Italian coast. The Habsburgs looked for an ally in Persia; the French and English approached the Porte. It was an early modern world war.
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In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman authorities exploited their enemy’s anti-Jewish measures just as they had welcomed other Jewish refugees from Christian persecution in the past. They were People of the Book, and they possessed valuable skills. Sultan Murad II had a Jewish translator in his service; his successors relied upon Jewish doctors and bankers. Those fleeing Iberia would bring more knowledge and expertise with them. In the matter-of-fact words of one contemporary Jewish chronicler: ‘A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The French agent Nicolas de Nicolay noted:
[The Jews] have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.
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The newcomers were not enough in numbers to affect the demographic balance in the empire – the Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian, the Asian and Arab lands overwhelmingly Muslim. But they revitalized urban life after many decades of war.
And of all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited most. Since 1453, while Istanbul’s population had been growing at an incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, turning it into perhaps the largest city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind. Bayezid had been concerned at its slow recovery and had been doing what he could to promote it himself. Did he order the authorities to direct the Jews there? It seems likely, although no such directive has survived. According to a later chronicler, he sent orders to provincial governors to welcome the newcomers. Since Salonica was the empire’s main European port, many were bound to make their way there in any case. As wave after wave of Iberian refugees arrived at the docks, the city grew by leaps and bounds. By 1520, more than half its thirty thousand inhabitants were Jewish, and it had turned into one of the most important ports of the eastern Mediterranean.
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Perhaps only now did the real break with Byzantium take place. In 1478 Salonica was still a Greek city where more than half of the inhabitants were Christians; by 1519, they were less than one quarter. Was it a sign of their growing weakness that between 1490 and 1540 several of their most magnificent churches – including Ayios Dimitrios itself – were turned into mosques? A century later still, if we are to judge from Ottoman records, the number of Christians had fallen further, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the whole. While Istanbul remained heavily populated by Greeks, local Christians saw Salonica re-emerging into something resembling its former prosperity under a Muslim administration and a largely Jewish labour-force.
Not surprisingly, Greco-Jewish relations were infused with tension. Occasional stories of anti-Jewish machinations at the Porte, long-running complaints that the newcomers paid too little tax, bitter commercial rivalries between Christian and Jewish merchants, the emergence of the blood libel in the late sixteenth century, even the odd riot, assault and looting of Jewish properties following fire or plague – these are the scattered documentary indications of the Greeks’ deep-rooted resentment at the newcomers. It cannot have been easy living as a minority in the city they regarded as theirs. Jewish children laughed at the Orthodox priests, with their long hair tied up in a bun: está un papas became a way of saying it was time to visit the barber. We learn from a 1700 court case that the Greek inhabitants of Ayios Minas were so fed up with Jewish neighbours throwing their garbage into the churchyard, and mocking them from the surrounding windows during holiday services, that they appealed to the Ottoman authorities to get them to stop. The balance of confessional power within the city had shifted sharply.
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For the Jews themselves, a mass of displaced refugees living with other recent immigrants among the toppled columns, half-buried temples and ruined mementoes of the city’s Roman and Byzantine past, this Macedonian port was at first equally strange and alienating. Lost ‘in a country which is not theirs’, they struggled to make sense of forced migration from ‘the lands of the West’. Some were Jews; others were converts to Catholicism. With their families forced apart, many mourned dead relatives, and wondered if their missing ones would ever return or if new consorts would succeed in giving them children to replace those they had lost. The trauma of exile is a familiar refrain in Salonican history. One rabbi was forced to remind his congregation ‘to stop cursing the Almighty and to accept as just everything that has happened.’
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If Europe had become for them – as it was for the Marrano poet Samuel Usque – ‘my hell on earth’, we can scarcely be surprised: Salonica, by contrast, was their refuge and liberation. ‘There is a city in the Turkish kingdom,’ he wrote, ‘which formerly belonged to the Greeks, and in our days is a true mother-city in Judaism. For it is established on the very deep foundations of the Law. And it is filled with the choicest plants and most fruitful trees, presently known anywhere on the face of our globe. These fruits are divine, because they are watered by an abundant stream of charities. The city’s walls are made of holy deeds of the greatest worth.’ When Jews in Provence scouted out conditions there, they received the reply: ‘Come and join us in Turkey and you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty.’ In the experience 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.’
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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.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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 politically successful and prominent Jewish dynasty of the sixteenth century – was invested in concessions of this kind.
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Capital accumulation was easy because Salonica was such a well-placed trading base. It reached northwards into the inland fairs and markets of the Balkans, south and east [via Jewish-Muslim partner-ships] to the Asian trading routes that led to Persia, Yemen and India, and westwards through the Adriatic to Venice and the other Italian ports. Italian, Arab and Armenian merchants all participated in this traffic: but where the crucial Mediterranean triangle with Egypt and Venice was concerned, no one could compete with the extraordinary network of familial and confessional affiliates that made the Salonican Jews and Marranos so powerful. Shifting between Catholicism [when in Ancona or Venice] and Judaism [in the Ottoman lands], they dominated the Adriatic carrying trade, helped to build up Split as a major port for Venetian dealings with the Levant, and wielded their Ottoman connections whenever the Papacy and the Inquisition turned nasty. They combined commerce with espionage and ran the best intelligence networks in the entire region. So confident did they feel, that some threatened a boycott of Papal ports when the authorities in Ancona started up the auto-da-fé in 1556, and one even talked about spreading plague deliberately to frighten the Catholics in an early attempt at biological warfare.
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Greeks and Turks must have been astonished at the assertiveness of the newcomers, for the Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews they had known had always kept a low profile. In the early years, it is true, the Sefardim tried to tread cautiously. Congregants were reminded by their rabbis to keep their voices down when they prayed so that they would not be heard outside. In external appearance, synagogues were modest and unobtrusive and even larger ones, like the communal Talmud Torah, were hidden well away from the main thoroughfares, in the heart of the Jewish-populated district. Thanks to the benevolence of the Ottoman authorities, however, more than twenty-five synagogues were built in less than two decades. After the fire of 1545, a delegation from Salonica visited the Porte and obtained permission for many to be rebuilt.
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But the Iberian Jews had always known how to live well, and their noble families had been unabashedly conspicuous, with large retinues of servants and African slaves. Even before Murad III introduced new sumptuary legislation in the 1570s to curb Jewish and Christian luxury in the capital, the extravagant silk and gold-laced costumes of rich Salonican Jews, the displays of jewellery to which the wealthier women were prone – they were particularly fond of bracelets, gold necklaces and pearl chokers worn ‘so close to one another and so thick one would think they were riveted on to one another’ – the noise of musicians at parties and weddings, where men and women danced together – to the dismay of Greek Jews – were all attracting unfavourable comment. In 1554 a rabbinical ordinance ruled that ‘no woman who has reached maturity, including married women, may take outside her home, into the markets or the streets, any silver or gold article, rings, chains or gems, or any such object except one ring on her finger.’ Murad himself had, according to an apocryphal story, been so angered by Jewish ostentation that he even contemplated putting all the Jews of the empire to death. Fear of exciting envy often lay behind the rabbis’ efforts to urge restraint. It took more than rabbinical commands, however, to stop women wearing the diamond rozetas, almendras [‘almonds’], chokers, earrings, coin necklaces and headpieces which still awed visitors to Salonica in the early twentieth century.
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It must have been as much the sheer number of the newcomers as their behaviour which struck those who had known the town before their arrival. The once sparsely populated streets filled up and population densities soared. At first Jews settled where they could, renting from the Christian and Muslim landlords who owned the bulk of the housing stock. The very first communal ordinance tried to prevent Jews outbidding one another to avoid driving up prices. But the continuous influx led to many central districts becoming heavily settled. Muslims started to move up the higher slopes – enjoying better views, drainage and ventilation, more space and less noise – while the Greeks – mostly tailors, craftsmen, cobblers, masons and metalworkers, a few remaining scions of old, distinguished Byzantine families among them – were pushed into the margins, near Ayios Minas in the west, and around the remains of the old Hippodrome.
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South of Egnatia, with the exception of the market districts to the west, the twisting lanes of the lower town belonged to the newcomers. Here wealthy notables lived together with the large mass of Jewish artisans, workmen, hamals, fishermen, pedlars and the destitute, cooped up in small apartments handed down from generation to generation. The overall impression of the Jewish quarters was scarcely one of magnificence. Clusters of modest homes hidden behind their walls and large barred gates were grouped around shared cortijos into which housewives threw their refuse. As the city filled up, extra storeys were added to the old wooden houses, and overhanging upper floors jutted out into the street. Every so often, the claustrophobic and airless alleys opened unpredictably into a small placa or placeta. Rutted backstreets hid the synagogues and communal buildings.
These were the least hygienic or desirable residential areas, where all the refuse of the city made its way down the slopes to collect in stagnant pools by the dank stones of the sea-walls. The old harbour built by Constantine had silted up and turned into a large sewage dump, the Monturo, whose noxious presence pervaded the lower town. The tanneries and slaughter-houses were located on the western fringes, but workmen kept evil-smelling vats of urine, used for tanning leather and dying wool, in their homes. People were driven mad by the din of hammers in the metal foundries; others complained of getting ill from the fumes of lead-workers and silversmiths – like the smell of the bakeries but worse, according to one sufferer. Living on top of one another, neighbours suffered when one new tenant decided to turn his bedroom into a kitchen, projecting effluent into the common passageway. The combination of overcrowding – especially after the devastating fire of 1545 – and intense manufacturing activity meant that life in the city’s Jewish quarters continued to be defined by its smells, its noise and its lack of privacy. Why did people remain there, in squalor, when large tracts of the upper city lay empty? Was it choice – a desire to remain close together, strategically located between the commercial district and the city walls, their very density warding off intruders? Or was it necessity – the upper slopes of the city being already owned and settled, even if more sporadically, by Muslims? Either way, the living conditions of Salonican Jewry provoked dismay right up until the fires of 1890 and 1917, which finally dispersed the old neighbourhoods and erased the old streets from the map so definitively that not even their outlines can now be traced amid the glitzy tree-lined shopping avenues which have replaced them.
The Power of the Rabbis
Historians of the Ottoman empire often extoll its hierarchical system of communal autonomy through which the sultan supposedly appointed leaders of each confessional group [or millet] and made them responsible for collecting taxes, administering justice and ecclesiastical affairs. The autonomy was real enough, but where, in the case of the Jews, was the hierarchy? It is true that in 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed the Conqueror appointed a chief rabbi just as he had a Greek patriarch: the first incumbent was an elderly Romaniote rabbi who had served under the last Byzantine emperor. But this position probably applied only to the capital rather than to the empire as a whole, did not last for long and was then left vacant. Once Salonica emerged as the largest Jewish community in the empire, dwarfing that in Istanbul itself, the authority of the chief rabbi of the capital depended on obtaining the obedience of Salonican Jewry. But this was not forthcoming. ‘There is no town subordinated to another town,’ insisted one Salonican rabbi early in the sixteenth century. What he meant was that his town would be subordinated to no other.
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The usual rule among Jews was that newcomers conformed to local practice. But the overwhelming numbers of the immigrants, and their well-developed sense of cultural superiority, put this principle to the test. The Spanish and Italian Jews regarded the established traditions of the Griegos (Greeks) or the Alemanos (Germans) as they were now somewhat dismissively known, as distinctly inferior. ‘Ni ajo duke ni Tudesco bueno,’ – neither can we find sweet garlic nor a good German [Jew] – was a local saying. No one likes being condescended to. Outside Salonica, the French naturalist Pierre Belon witnessed an argument that flared up around a fish-stall. Did the claria have scales or not? Some Jews gathered and said that as it did not, it could be eaten. Others – ‘newly come from Spain’ – said they could see minute traces of scales and accused the first group of lax observance. A fist-fight was about to erupt before the fish was taken off for further inspection.
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Rabbis took the same unbending line over the superiority of the Sefardic way that their congregants had done in the fish-market. As early as 1509, one wrote:
It is well-known that Sephardic Jews and their hakhanim [rabbis] in this kingdom, together with the other congregations who join them, comprise the majority here, may the Lord be praised. The land was given uniquely to them, and they are its majesty, its radiance and splendour, a light unto the land and all who dwell in it. Surely, they were not brought hither in order to depart! For all these places are ours too, and it would be worthy of all the minority peoples who first resided in this kingdom to follow their example and do as they do in all that pertains to the Torah and its customs.
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Less than twenty years since the expulsions, this was a stunning display of arrogance – turning the Romaniotes [Greek-speaking Jews], who had lived in those lands since antiquity, into a subservient minority. Such an attitude created friction with Istanbul where Romaniotes were more numerous and not inclined to bow so easily. In Salonica itself, the argument for Spanish superiority was repeated over and over again until it needed no longer to be made. ‘As matters stand today in Salonica,’ commented rabbi Samuel de Medina in the 1560s, ‘the holy communities of Calabria, Provincia, Sicilia and Apulia have all adopted the ways of Sefarad, and only the holy community of Ashkenaz [Germany] has not changed its ways.’ Thus it was not only because of the lack of a Jewish hierarchy comparable to that which structured the Orthodox Church that the model of communal administration suggested by the patriarchate was bound to fail. Salonica’s largely Sefardic Jewry never for a moment contemplated allowing itself to fall under the guidance of a Romaniote chief rabbi.
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Yet not only did the Ottoman authorities apparently not bother with a centralized imperial Jewish hierarchy based in the capital, they scarcely bothered to formalize how the Jews organized themselves in Salonica either. Under the Byzantine emperors, there was apparently a Jewish ‘provost’. No such post was established by the Ottomans. The community could not fix upon a single chief rabbi, and its early efforts to set up a triumvirate of elderly but respected figures met the same fate as the chief rabbinate in the capital. There was thus not even a Jewish counterpart to the city’s Greek metropolitan. For a time, the local authorities appointed a spokesman for the Jews to act as intermediary between the community and themselves. But the only mention of this figure in the historical record paints him as an unmitigated disaster, who used the position for his own advancement, insulted respected rabbis and eventually, through his blasphemous conduct, brought down the wrath of God in the shape of the fire and plague of 1545. We do not hear about a successor: if he existed, he was of no importance. More or less all that mattered for the local Ottoman authorities was that taxes were regularly paid to the court of the kadi or to the assigned collectors. The community as a whole gathered as an assembly of synagogue representatives to apportion taxes. When there were difficulties it sent elders to Istanbul to plead at court, or contacted prominent Jewish notables for help.
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In fact, in many ways it is misleading to talk about a Jewish community in Salonica at all. From the outside, Jews could be identified by language and officially-imposed dress and colour codes. But with the exception of a small number of institutions which were organized for the common good – the redemption fund that ransomed Jewish slaves and captives, or the Talmud Torah, the community’s combined school, shelter [for travellers and the poor], insane asylum and hospital – what the Sefardim created for themselves was a highly de-centralized, indeed almost anarchic system, in which Jewish life revolved around the individual synagogue, and Jews argued bitterly among themselves as to what constituted right practice. Fifteenth-century Spain had in fact been not a unitary country so much as a collection of disparate cities, regions and states united eventually under the authority of a single monarch; it was this keenly local and often rivalrous sense of place that was reproduced in Salonica.
From the outset, congregations guarded their independence jealously from each other. Synagogues multiplied – a fundamental principle of Jewish life was that everyone had to belong to one congregation or another – and within half a century there were more than twenty. Not all were of equal standing or size and many of the larger ones were constantly splitting apart thanks to the factionalism which seemed endemic to the community: before long, the Sicilians were divided into ‘Old’ and ‘New’ as were the ‘Spanish Refugees’. But the congregation was, at least at first, a link to the past and a way of keeping those who spoke the same language together. No significant differences of liturgy or practice divided the worshippers in the New Lisbon or Evora synagogues; only the small Romaniote Etz Haim and the Ashkenazi congregations might have pleaded the preservation of their traditions. Nevertheless whether the differences were liturgical or purely cultural and linguistic, each group preserved its autonomy as passionately as if its very identity was at stake. ‘In Salonica each and every man speaks in the tongue of his own people,’ wrote the rabbi Yosef ibn Lev in the 1560s. ‘When the refugees arrived after the expulsion, they designated kehalim [congregations] each according to his tongue … Every kahal supports its own poor, and each and every kahal is singly recorded into the king’s register. Every kahal is like a city unto itself.’
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This then was what the city actually meant for most Jews – a kahal based in a squat and modestly decorated building, unobtrusive from the street and plainly adorned inside, from which they ran their charity funds, their burial societies and study groups. There they organized the allocation and collection of taxes and agreed salaries for their cantor, ritual slaughterers, the mohel [responsible for circumcisions] and rabbi. Since usually only the taxable members of the community voted on communal policies, the domination of the notables was a frequent bone of contention with the poorer members.
Not surprisingly, such a system was highly unstable. Indeed the Jews were well-known for their dissension and often bemoaned the lack of fellow-feeling. Acute tensions between rich and poor, extreme factionalism, and the lack of any central organization made wider agreement very difficult and delayed badly-needed social reforms: marriages took place with startling informality outside the supervision of rabbis, leading unfortunate girls astray; conversions – especially of slaves – to Judaism were perfunctory; moreover, any rabbi was free to issue ordinances and excommunications, and some on occasions evidently abused these rights. In 1565 it was finally agreed that an ordinance could be applied to the community as a whole only when it was signed by a majority of the rabbis in the city.
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Rabbis formed a privileged ruling caste free of communal or government taxes. There was, of course, an Ottoman court system, presided over by the kadi, an appointed official, who dispensed justice throughout the city. The kadi courts, though designed primarily for Muslims [who were treated on a different footing to non-Muslims], were considerate of Jewish religious demands: they never obliged a Jew to appear on the Jewish Sabbath, and sent Jewish witnesses to the rabbi when it was necessary to swear an oath. But the kadi did not try to monopolize the provision of justice, and it was the rabbinical courts which constituted the chief means through which Jews settled their differences. Because they were never given any formal legal recognition, these existed for centuries in a kind of legal limbo sanctioned by the force of custom. It was an extraordinary state of affairs and one which offers an important clue into the way the Ottoman authorities ran their state: strictly regimented where taxes and production were concerned, it was in other areas – such as law – almost uninvolved and only sporadically prescriptive.
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Interventions by the Ottoman authorities in rabbinical affairs were rare. It is true that a kadi would be deeply displeased to learn that rabbis treated his court with disdain, or to be informed that Jews were being urged by their rabbis not to use them. But only rarely did he stir into action. In one case, a dispute between two contenders for the position of rabbi in the Aragon synagogue led to the kadi stepping in and making the appointment himself; but this rendered the victorious candidate so unpopular with his congregants, who were after all paying his salary, that he was forced soon after to move on. Another kadi dismissed a rabbi for instructing his congregants not to have recourse to the Ottoman courts. But in this case it was the congregants themselves who had shopped their rabbi by bringing his alleged remarks to the attention of the authorities so as to get rid of him, and in any case he was employed soon after by another congregation.
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In fact Jews did attend the Muslim courts, despite rabbinical injunctions against their doing so, usually to register commercial agreements, or divorce settlements in case of future legal disputes [for which the rabbinical courts were useless precisely because of their unofficial status]. Jewish workers ran to the courtroom to disclaim responsibility when a soldier’s gun accidentally went off in their yard and killed someone: only a judgement from the Ottoman judge could help them escape paying a blood price for a death which they had not caused. Otherwise, the Ottoman authorities seemed happy for the rabbis to run the legal affairs of their community, cooperating with them and giving them support, for instance, in enforcing sentences, an area where the rabbis often felt their weakness. Without this backing, the rabbinical courts could not have functioned.
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For the main point about this system was the enormous power it gave to the rabbis themselves. Although they were appointed and paid by the lay notables who ran the synagogues, Ottoman practice in effect turned them into something approximating Jewish kadis – religiously-trained lawyers. But this is not really so surprising when one bears in mind how, over time, Salonica’s Jews were beginning to adapt some Ottoman legal institutions to their own needs – for instance, the charitable foundation [vakf ] and inheritable usufruct [yediki] – and starting to follow Muslim custom by growing their beards longer, wearing turbans, robes and outer cloaks, and making their women cover themselves more than in the past. In the law, as in other areas of life, the Jews of Sefarad were becoming Ottoman.
