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The range of issues rabbis pronounced on was vast: tenancy disputes, matrimonial, probate and commercial law made up the bread and butter business, but there were also medical matters – what kinds of venereal disease justified a woman in divorcing her husband; or when abortion was permissible. The traumatic rupture of family life experienced by the refugees was reflected in various dilemmas: Could the son of a Jewish man and a black slave inherit his father’s estate? What was the situation of women whose husbands had converted to Christianity and had remained in Spain? How many wives was a man allowed to take? To help decide, entire libraries were brought over from Spain and Italy, and merchants paid scribes and copyists to transcribe rare manuscripts and translate Hebrew texts into Ladino. In fact, rabbis felt at a disadvantage when forced to rule without the judgements of their predecessors to guide them. One, caught outside the city by a supplicant at a time when the plague was raging, apologizes in advance for offering an opinion without having his books at his elbow.
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Controlling power and resources unmatched by their peers elsewhere, Salonica’s rabbis possessed a degree of training and a breadth of outlook which made the city a centre of learning throughout the sixteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. A centre of print culture too: Jewish books were printed there centuries before any appeared in Greek, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish where religious objections to seeing the sacred texts in print held things back. Equipped with the wide-ranging interests of the Spanish rabbinate, exploiting the familiarity with the holy sources that their availability in translation offered, these scholars simultaneously kept in touch with the latest intellectual fashions in western Europe and pursued extensive programmes of study that took them far beyond the confines of scriptural commentary. They applied Aristotle and Aquinas to the tasks of Talmudic exegesis, engaged with Latin literature, Italian humanism and Arab science, and were not surprisingly intensely proud of the range of their expertise. Insulted by charges of parochialism, for instance, one young scholar challenged an older rabbi from Edirne to an intellectual duel:
Come out to the field and let us compete in our knowledge of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of rabbinic literature; in secular sciences – practical and theoretical fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine; in logic – the Organon, in geometry, astronomy Physics; … Generatio et Corruptio, De Anima and Meteora, De Animalia and Ethics. In your profession as well, that of medicine, if in your eyes it is a science, we consider it an occupation of no special distinction and all the more in practical matters. Try me, for you have opened your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner.
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All this was not love of learning for its own sake – though that there was too – so much as the fruits of the sophisticated curriculum required by the city’s scholar-judges, and their response to the opportunities created by Ottoman policy.
Nor did the rabbis, left to their own devices as they mostly were, ignore the fact that they lived in a state run on the basis of the shari’a: Jews might be represented by Muslims professionally if they lived in certain neighbourhoods or belonged to certain guilds; Jewish men [like Christians] converted to Islam for financial advantage or to marry – even on one occasion to get the help of the authorities in wresting another man’s wife away from him; some Jewish women married Muslim men, or converted to facilitate a divorce when their husband was reluctant to grant it. All these situations made a knowledge of the shari’a desirable on the part of the rabbi-judge. But if a degree of familiarity with secular Ottoman law, the Qur’an and the shari’a was common practice in many Ottoman Jewish communities, a few Salonican scholars took their interest in Arab thought even further. ‘I will only mention the name of Abuhamed and his book, because it is very widespread among us,’ notes rabbi Isaac ibn Aroyo, referring to the philosopher al-Ghazali. Rabbi David ibn Shoshan, blind and wealthy, was said to have been not only ‘a master of all wisdom, both Talmud and secular studies, astronomy and philosophy’, but also ‘very familiar with books on the Moslem religion to such an extent that Moslem scholars and judges used to visit him to learn their own religious tomes from him.’ When he moved to Istanbul, ‘the greatest Arab scholars used to honour him there greatly because of his great wisdom.’ One of his students, Jacob HaLevi, translated the Qur’an, a book which we know other Jewish scholars too kept in their libraries.
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Where Salonica was concerned, the Ottoman strategy proved highly effective, and by attracting a large number of Jews and Marranos, the sultans succeeded in revitalizing the city. By the mid-sixteenth century its population had grown to 30,000 and it generated the highest per capita yield of taxes in the Balkans and the largest revenue of any urban settlement to the west of Istanbul. It would not be going too far to say that this economic success provided much of the fiscal sinew for the sultan’s military triumphs. The Jewish immigrants embraced the opportunity Bayezid II had given them and brought an entrepreneurial and productive energy which astonished the city’s existing residents. The resulting Hispanization of its culture was long-lasting: although there were ups and downs in the state of the economy, and in standards of rabbinical learning, the cultural imprint of Judeo-Spanish was felt right up to the end of the empire. In 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the edict of expulsion, Spanish journalists and politicians visited the Macedonian port. There they found a continuing link to their own past, an outpost of Iberian life which had been forgotten in the home-country for centuries. In the words of the Spanish senator Dr Angel Pulido Fernandez, they were Spaniards without a Homeland; but this was not quite true. Their homeland was Salonica itself.
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4 Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles (#ulink_36694a63-8508-5c70-ab37-84b13727b3d4)
‘When I was in Salonica the second time, I received an order to perform contrary deeds and so when I met a Turk on a Greek street I drew my sword & forced him to speak the name of the First and the Second and to make the sign of the cross, and then I did not let him go until he did it; similarly, having met a Greek in a Turkish street I forced him to say the words ‘Mahomet is the true prophet’, and also the names of the first two & ordered him to lift one finger upward according to the Mahometan custom. And again, when I met a Jew he had to make the sign of the cross for me, and also to pronounce those two names when this happened in a Greek street, while when I met him in a Turkish street he had to raise one finger upward & name those two names. And I was performing those deeds daily’
Yakov Frank (1726–1791), Autohagiography no. 15
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IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE religious affiliation provided the categories according to which the state classified its subjects. Muslims had to be readily distinguishable from non-Muslims, who existed in a position of legal inferiority. ‘Their headgear is a saffron yellow turban,’ wrote the French agent Nicolas de Nicolay of the Salonican Jews in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘that of the Greek Christians is blue, and that of the Turks is pure white so that by the difference in colour they may be known apart.’ Yellow shoes, bright clothes and white or green turbans were reserved for members of the ruling faith, as were delicate or expensive fabrics. A later traveller, Tournefort, found ‘the subjects of the Grand Signior, Christians or Jews, have [their slippers] either red, violet or black. This order is so well-establish’d, and observ’d with such Exactness, that one may know what Religion any one is of by the Feet and the Head.’
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But regulations were one thing, and what people did in real life was another, especially when out of sight of the imperial capital. Boundaries were constantly being subverted by accident or design and in a bustling commercial port in particular, religious communities could not be impermeably sealed from one another. Young Muslim boys served as apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim hamals and casual labourers scoured the docks together for work. When well-off Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian servants and milk-nurses, the children of the families intermingled and the boys often became ‘milk-brothers’, a relationship which could endure for many years. In Salonica, with its unique confessional composition, there thus arose what a later visitor described as ‘a sort of fusion between the different peoples who inhabit the place and a happy rapprochement between the races which the nature of their beliefs and the diversity of their origins tends to separate.’
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The stress Islam laid on the unity of God made possible what was, within its own self-imposed limits, an inclusive attitude to other religions of the Book. For unlike the Jews, who regarded themselves as a chosen people, and the Christians who repudiated and distanced themselves from their origins by focusing on the charge of deicide against the Jews, Muslims explicitly acknowledged their own connection to the earlier monotheistic faiths. Christ himself, though not regarded as divine in nature, was celebrated as a prophet – one particularly stern preacher is even reputed to have had someone executed for blaspheming against his name. The adaptation too of churches and Christian shrines for Muslim use could be seen not as deliberate humiliation and desecration – though it was naturally seen that way by Christians – but as a recognition by Muslims that God lingered already in the holy places of their predecessors.
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One should not, obviously, ignore the powerful evidence for the mutual contempt and hostility that could be projected across the religious divides – the janissaries who beat a Christian arms merchant to death in the market, shouting ‘Why are you an unbeliever? So much sorrow you are!’; the Jewish householders who mocked Christian worshippers during holy festivals; the stuffed effigies of Judas burned with much glee by the Orthodox during Easter. (Muslims were occasionally mocked in public too, but only by those who wished to become martyrs.) Popular hostility was palpable against those who converted and abandoned their ancestral faith. Yet even – perhaps especially – when confessional boundaries were not crossed, the daily life of the city fostered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices.
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For contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested in policing people’s private beliefs. In general, they did not care what their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of piety. This attitude was shared by many non-Muslims too. Visiting Catholics, for whom doctrine mattered a great deal, were struck by the perfunctory character of Orthodox observance. ‘Among this people there is immense ignorance not only of councils but of the Christian faith,’ noted a Ukrainian Catholic in the early eighteenth century. ‘They retain the name of Christ and the sign of the cross but nothing else.’ Such accusations of doctrinal ignorance said as much about the accuser as about Salonica’s Christians, for the latter tenaciously observed the feast-days and customs they felt to be important. But it is true that there was far less theological policing under the Ottomans than there was in Christendom at this time, and this laxity of atmosphere and absence of heresy-hunters fostered the emergence of a popular religious culture which more than anything else in the early modern period united the city’s diverse faiths around a common sense of the sacred and divine.
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Marranos and Messiahs
On Sunday 2 January 1724, a Jewish doctor was chatting with one of his Christian patients and telling him his life story. He had grown up a Catholic in the Algarve where he had been baptized and went to church regularly. But his parents had also secretly instructed him in the tenets of Judaism as well and ‘inside he was a Jew’. At the age of thirty, after constant harassment and petty persecutions, he had left Portugal, and for the past fourteen years he had been settled in Salonica where he had returned to his family’s original faith. ‘So stubborn are heathens in their unbelief,’ his shocked patient confided to his diary.
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It was not only Jews who had remained true to their ancestral faith that took the path of exile from the Iberian lands to Salonica, but also large numbers of so-called Marranos and New Christians – in other words, those who had already converted to Catholicism, in some cases many generations before leaving. Some of them – like the doctor – had kept Jewish customs alive secretly for decades, and equipped their children with two names [‘If you ask one of their children: “What’s your name?’”, reported one observer, ‘they will respond: “At home they call me Abraham and in the street Francesco’”]. On the other hand, many others were fully observant Catholics who had been forced from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition, essentially on the grounds of race rather than religion. In Salonica, this group had trouble adjusting to rabbinical Judaism, and the rabbis in turn found it hard to make their minds up about them. The question of whether or not they were ‘still’ Jews divided learned opinion. Many leading rabbis thought not, since many Marranos had only abandoned Iberia (and Catholicism) when forced out. The 1506 Lisbon massacre of Portuguese ‘New Christians’ induced a more sympathetic attitude, but many of Salonica’s Jews and their rabbis, even those descended from Marrano families themselves, remained highly suspicious of the latters’ motives and regarded them as apostates.
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For as they well knew, religion could often serve simply as a flag of convenience. Catholics returned to Judaism as they had left it, to protect their wealth or to inherit property from relatives; in Italy Jews allowed themselves to be baptized for similar reasons. Traders even switched between faiths as they sailed from the Ottoman lands to the Papal states. One seventeenth-century Marrano, Abraam Righetto, in his own words, ‘lived 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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.”
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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.”
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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 that the books foretold the arrival of a second, subordinate Messiah, which unsurprisingly he proclaimed himself to be.
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Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi suspected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct – and his well-known views that ‘God permittest that which is forbidden’ – made highly plausible. Although Mehmed IV’s first impulse seems to have been to have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give him the chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interrogated in the sultan’s presence where one of the royal physicians, Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi – a convert whose original name was Moshe Abravanel – translated for him from Turkish into Judeo-Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte, receiving instruction in Islam from – and offering insights into Judaism to – the Grand Vizier’s personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others, he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later. Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse, the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out.
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The Messiah’s conversion was not the end of the matter, however. After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers remained undeflected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves onto the right path – for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all kinds – Jews, Christians and Muslims. Zevi’s apostasy was recast in Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the rabbis managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi’s followers – like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan – never did convert and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.
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The Ma’min
Hundreds more, however, did actually follow Zevi into Islam – some at the time, and others a few years later – and by doing so they gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious communities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Dönmehs [turn-coats], a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Ma’min – the Faithful – a term commonly used by all Muslims.
(#ulink_104e6113-c327-5795-966f-a988e313abcc) There were small groups of them elsewhere, but Zevi’s last wife, Ayse, and her father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Salonica, and after Zevi’s death, they returned there and helped to establish the new sect which he had created. By 1900, the city’s ten-thousand-strong community of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims was one of the most extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional mosaic of the late Ottoman empire.
Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the Sunni-Shia split in mainstream Islam, the internal divisions of the Ma’min stemmed from disagreement over the line of succession which followed their Prophet’s death. In 1683 his widow Ayse hailed her brother Jacob – Zevi’s brother-in-law – as the Querido [Beloved] who had received Zevi’s spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions. Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi’s birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and left Salonica to make the haj in the early 1690s but died during his return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out, both the Izmirlis and the Yakublar [the followers of Jacob Querido] saw themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had ‘withdrawn’ himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology.
(#litres_trial_promo) A few years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and artisanal classes, broke off from the Izmirlis to follow another charismatic leader, the youthful Barouch Russo [known to his followers as Osman Baba], who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi’s spirit but his very reincarnation.
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Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.
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Gradually they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. [Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?] They prayed to their Messiah, ‘our King, our Redeemer’ in ‘the name of God, the God of Israel’, but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city – certainly well into the nineteenth century – was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.
The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma’min girl who had fallen in love with her tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma’min spearheaded the expansion of Muslim – including women’s – schooling in the city, and were prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated huge fortunes, built villas in the European style by the sea and entered the municipal administration. Others were in humbler trades – barbers, coppersmiths, town-criers and butchers.
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Gradually – as with the Marranos of Portugal, from whom many were descended – their connection with their ancestral religion faded. High-class Ma’min married into mainstream Muslim society, though most resided in central quarters, between the Muslim neighbourhoods of the Upper Town and the Jewish quarters below, streets where often the two religions lived side by side. ‘They will be converted purely and simply into Muslims’, predicted one scholar in 1897. But like many of Salonica’s Muslims at this time, the Ma’min also embraced European learning, and identified themselves with secular knowledge, political radicalism and freemasonry. By a strange twist of fate it was thus the Muslim followers of a Jewish messiah who helped turn late nineteenth-century Salonica into the most liberal, progressive and revolutionary city in the empire.
The juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in a fin-de-siècle Ma’min household is vividly evoked in the memoirs of Ahmed Emin Yalman. His father, Osman Tewfik Bey, was a civil servant and a teacher of calligraphy. Living in the house with him and his parents were his uncle and aunt, his seven siblings, two orphaned cousins and at least five servants. ‘The strife between the old and the new was ever present in our house,’ he recollects. His uncle was of the old school: a devout man, he prayed five times a day, abhorred alcohol, and disliked travel or innovation. For some reason, he refused to wear white shirts; ‘a coloured shirt with attached collar was, for him, the extreme limit of westernization in dress to which he felt that one could go without falling into conflict with religion … He objected to the theatre, music, drinking, card playing, and photography – all new inventions which he considered part of Satan’s world.’ Yalman’s father, on the other hand – Osman Tewfik Bey – was ‘a progressive, perhaps even a revolutionary’, who wore ‘the highest possible white collars’, beautiful cravats and stylish shoes in the latest fashion, loved poetry, theatre and anything that was new, taking his children on long trips and photographing them with enthusiasm. He adorned his rooms with their pictures and prayed but rarely.
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Esin Eden’s memoir of the following generation shows Europeanization taken even further. Hers was a well-to-do family of tobacco merchants which combined a strong consciousness of its Jewish ancestry with pride in its contemporary achievements as part of a special Muslim community, umbilically linked to Salonica itself. The women were all highly educated – one was even a teacher at the famous new Terakki lycée – sociable, energetic and articulate. They smoked lemon-scented cigarettes in the garden of their modern villa by the sea, played cards endlessly, and kept their eyes on the latest European fashions. Their servants were Greek, their furnishings French and German, and their cuisine a mix of ‘traditionally high Ottoman cuisine as well as traditional Sephardic cooking’, though with no concern for the dietary laws of Judaism.
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When the Young Turk revolt broke out in Salonica in 1908, Ma’min economics professors, newspaper men, businessmen and lawyers were among the leading activists and there were three Ma’min ministers in the first Young Turk government. Indeed conspiracy theorists saw the Ma’min everywhere and assumed any Muslim from Salonica must be one. Today some people even argue that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk must have been a Ma’min (there is no evidence for this), and see the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the secular republic of Turkey as their handiwork – the final revenge, as it were, of Sabbatai Zevi, and the unexpected fulfilment of his dreams. In fact, many of the Ma’min themselves had mixed feelings at what was happening in nationalist Turkey: some were Kemalists, others opposed him. In 1923, however, they were all counted as Muslims in the compulsory exchange of populations and packed off to Istanbul, where a small but distinguished community of businessmen, newspaper magnates, industrialists and diplomats has since flourished. As the writer John Freely tells us, their cemetery, in the Valley of the Nightingales above Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is still known as the Selanikliler Mezarligi – the Cemetery of Those from Salonica.
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Meanwhile, in the city which nurtured them for many years in its curiously unconcerned atmosphere, little trace of their presence now remains. Their old quarters were destroyed in the 1917 fire, or in the rebuilding which followed; their cemetery, which lay next to the large Sephardic necropolis outside the walls, became a football field. Today their chief monument is the magnificent fin-de-siècle Yeni Djami, tucked away in a postwar suburb on the way to the airport. Used as an annexe to the Archaeological Museum, its leafy precinct is stacked with ancient grave stelai and mausoleums, and its airy light interior is opened occasionally for exhibitions. Built in 1902 by the local architect Vitaliano Poselli, it is surely one of the most eclectic and unusual mosques in the world, a domed neo-Renaissance villa, with windows framed in the style of late Habsburg Orientalism and pillars which flank the entrance supporting a solid horse-shoe arch straight out of Moorish Spain. Complete with sundial [with Ottoman instructions on how to set your watch] and clocktower, the Yeni Djami sums up the extraordinary blending of influences – Islamic and European, Art Nouveau meets a neo-Baroque Alhambra, with a discreet hint of the ancestral faith in the star of David patterns cut into the upper-floor balconies – which made up the Ma’mins’ world.
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The Sufi Orders
The city, delicately poised in its confessional balance of power – ruled by Muslims, dominated by Jews, in an overwhelmingly Christian hinterland – lent itself to an atmosphere of overlapping devotion. With time it became covered in a dense grid of holy places – fountains, tombs, cemeteries, shrines and monasteries – frequented by members of all faiths in search of divine intercession. One of the most important institutions in the creation of this sanctified world were the heterodox Islamic orders – known to scholars as Sufis and to the public, inaccurately, as dervishes – who played such a pivotal role in consolidating Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Western travellers to the empire never, if they could help it, lost the opportunity to describe these mysterious and otherworldly figures with their whirling dances and strange ritual howlings. But dwelling on such eccentricities – abstracted from their theological context – turned their acolytes into figures of fun and overlooked their central role in bridging confessional divides during the Ottoman centuries.
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Many of these mystical orders borrowed heavily from the shamanistic traditions of central Asian nomad life and from the eastern Christianity they found around them. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were powerful forces in their own right, supported by – and supportive of – sultans like Murad II, who founded a large Mevlevi monastery in Edirne. When Ottoman troops conquered the Balkans, they were accompanied and sometimes preceded by holy men who spread the ideas of the missionary-warrior Haci Bektash, the poet Rumi and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband. Their highly unorthodox visions of the ways to God were shared in religious brotherhoods financed by pious benefactions. Some of their leaders – men like the fifteenth-century heretic sheykh Bedreddin – saw themselves as the Mahdi, revealing the secret of divine unity across faiths, and legalizing what the shari’a had previously forbidden. From the early sixteenth century, as the Ottoman state, and its clerical class, the ulema, conquered the Arab lands and became more conscious of the responsibility of the caliphate and the dangers of Persian heterodoxy, these unorthodox and sometimes heretical movements came under attack. In the mid-seventeenth century, Vani Effendi, the puritanical court preacher who converted Sabbatai Zevi, was outraged by the permissive attitude of some of them to stimulants such as coffee, alcohol and opium, as well as by their worship of saints and their pantheist tendencies. Murad IV took a dim view of such practices, and at least one tobacco-smoking mufti of Salonica got in trouble as a result. In practice, however, many leading statesmen and clergymen were also ‘brothers’ of one group or another, and generally they prospered.
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Most major orders had their representatives in a place as important as Salonica where there were more than twenty shrines and monasteries, guarding all the city’s gates and approaches. We know of the existence of the Halvetiye, who expanded into the Balkans in the sixteenth century and gave the city several of its muftis. Even during the First World War, the Rifa’i were still attracting tourists to their ceremonies: Alicia Little watched them jumping and howling, and was struck by their generous hospitality and their courtesy to guests. One nineteenth-century Albanian merchant, who made his fortune in Egypt, allowed his villa in the new suburb along the seashore to be used as a Melami tekke; among its adepts were the head of the Military School, an army colonel, a local book-dealer and a Czech political refugee who had converted to Islam.
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There were tekkes of the Nakshbandis, the Sa’dis and many others. The magnificent gardens and cypresses of the Mevlevi monastery, situated strategically next to a reservoir which stored much of the city’s drinking water, attracted many of the city’s notable families and appear to have been popular with wealthy Ma’min as well. The Mevlevi were extremely well-funded, and controlled access to the tomb of Ayios Dimitrios and many other holy places in the city. They retained close ties with local Christians and were reportedly ‘always to be found in company with the Greek [monks].’ One British diplomat at the end of the nineteenth century recounts a long conversation with a senior Mevlevi sheykh, a man whose ‘shaggy yellow beard and golden spectacles made him look more like a German professor than a dancing dervish’. Together, in the sheykh’s office, the two men drank raki, discussed photography – local prejudices hindered him using his Kodak, the sheykh complained – and talked about the impact a new translation of the central Mevlevi text, the Mesnevi, had made in London. ‘He did not care about the introduction of Mohammedanism into England,’ noted the British diplomat, ‘but he had hoped that people might have seen that the mystic principles enunciated in the Mesnevi were compatible with all religions and could be grafted on Christianity as well as on Islam.’
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Of all the Sufi orders in the Balkans, perhaps the most successful and influential were the Bektashi. They had monastic foundations everywhere and they were very closely associated with the janissary corps, the militia of forcibly converted Christian boys which was the spearhead of the Ottoman army. Often they took over existing holy places, saints’ tombs and Christian churches, a practice which had started in Anatolia and continued with the Ottoman advance into Europe. In the early twentieth century, the brilliant young British scholar Hasluck charted the dozens of Bektashi foundations which still existed at the time of the Balkan Wars as far north as Budapest, most of which (outside Albania, which is even today an important centre) have long since disappeared. In such places, people came, lit candles and stuck rags in nearby trees – a common way of soliciting saintly assistance. In Macedonia, the Evrenos family supported the order; in Salonica itself, it owned several modestly-appointed tekkes.
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The Bektashi themselves had a close connection with the worship of Christ. Their use of bread and wine in their rituals, their stress on the twelve Imams [akin to the twelve apostles], and many other features of their rites all bore a close resemblance to Christian practice. In southern Albania, according to Hasluck, legend claimed that Haji Bektash was himself from a Christian family – he had converted to Islam before coming to recognize the superiority of his original faith, whereupon he invented Bektashism as a bridge between the two. The lack of any basis in fact for the story should not disguise its symbolic truth. As one close observer of the movement explained: ‘It is their doctrine to be liberal towards all professions and religions, and to consider all men as equal in the eyes of God.’
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The Powers of the City
Beneath the confessional divides and helped by such creeds, there existed a kind of submerged popular religion, defined by common belief in the location and timing of divine power. Take the calendar itself: whether under their Christian or Muslim titles, St George’s Day in the spring and St Dimitrios’s Day in the winter marked key points in the year for business and legal arrangements affecting the entire society, the dates for instance when residential leases expired, shepherds moved between lowland and upland pastures, and bread prices were set by the local authorities.
Salonica’s Casimiye Mosque, which had formerly been St Dimitrios’s church, saw the cult of the city’s patron saint continuing under Muslim auspices. Casim himself was an example – one of many in the Balkans – of those holy figures who were Islamicized versions of Christian saints. Dimitrios’s tomb was kept open for pilgrims of both faiths by the Mevlevi officials who looked after the mosque. Near the very end of the empire, a French traveller caught the final moments of this arrangement and described how it worked. He was ushered into a dark chapel by the hodja, together with two Greeks who had come for divine help. This conversation followed:
‘Your name?’ asked the Turk …‘Georgios’, replied the Greek, and the Turk, repeating ‘Georgios’, held the knot in the flame, then commented to the Greek with an air of satisfaction that the knot had not burned. A second time. ‘The name of your father and your mother?’ ‘Nikolaos my father, Calliope my mother.’ ‘And your children?’ And when he had thus made three knots carefully, he put the sacred cord in a small packet which he dipped in the oil of the lamp, added a few bits of soil from the tomb, wrapped it all up and handed it to the Greek who seemed entirely content. Then he explained: ‘If you are ill, or your father, your mother, your children, put the knot on the suffering part and you will be cured.’ After which, turning to me, the Turk asked ‘And you?’ I shook my head. The Greek was amazed and believed I had not understood and explained it all to me. When I continued to refuse he seemed regretful. ‘Einai kalon’ [It is good] he told me sympathetically … and the two Greeks, together with the Muslim sacristan, left the mosque happily.
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These rituals were not especially unusual, though the setting was. ‘If your heart is perplexed with sorrow,’ the Prophet Mohammed is said to have advised, ‘go seek consolation at the graves of holy men.’ Muslims – especially women – made the ziyaret at times of domestic need, and the Arabic term was taken over by Salonica’s Jews, who spoke of going on a ziyara to pray at the tomb of rabbis or deceased relatives. Christian women used both the Jewish cemetery and Muslim mausoleums when collecting earth from freshly dug graves to use against evil spirits. Mousa Baba, Meydan-Sultan Baba and Gul Baba gathered pilgrims to their tombs, even after the twentieth-century exodus of the city’s Turks. In the 1930s, Christian women from nearby neighbourhoods were still lighting candles at the tomb of Mousa Baba and asking his help [against malaria], to the surprise of some Greek commentators who could not understand how they could do this ‘in a city where hundreds of martyrs and holy saints were tortured and martyred in the name of Christ’. The answer was that for many of those who came to seek his help, Mousa Baba was not really a Muslim holy man at all. Rather he was Saint George himself, who had metamorphosed into a Turk with supernatural powers: ‘I heard this when we refugees first came here from Thrace, from a Turkish woman, who told me she had heard it from elderly Turkish women who had explained it to her.’ Why had Saint George assumed this disguise? For the same reason that Sabbatai Zevi had converted, according to his followers: to make the unbelievers believe.
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Power to keep the dead at rest was one of the chief attributes of religious authority, the reverse side of the power to curse or excommunicate. Both powers formed a key weapon in the armoury of the city’s spiritual leaders but also transcended the bounds of religious community. According to a local story an archbishop converted to Islam and became a leading mollah. While he was still a Christian he had, in a moment of anger, cursed one of his congregation: ‘May the earth refuse to receive you!’ The man died and after three years passed his body was exhumed. Of course it was found in pristine condition ‘just as if he had been buried the day before’ – the power of the excommunication had evidently endured even though the cleric himself had since converted, and only he could revoke it, even though he was now a Muslim: ‘Having obtained the Pasha’s permission, he repaired to the open tomb, knelt beside it, lifted his hands and prayed for a few minutes. He had hardly risen to his feet when, wondrous to relate, the flesh of the corpse crumbled away from the bones and the skeleton remained bare and clean as it had never known pollution.’ Christian, Muslim or Jew, one looked wherever it was necessary to make the spell work and bring peace to the living and the dead.
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For the city was peopled by spirits – evil as well as good. ‘There are invisible influences everywhere in Turkey’, writes Fanny Blunt, a long-time resident of Salonica, in her classic study of Ottoman beliefs and customs – vampires in cemeteries, spirits guarding treasures buried in haunted houses, djinns in abandoned konaks, and enticing white-clad peris who gathered anywhere near running water. Fountains were dangerous, especially at certain times of the year, and antiquities like the Arch of Galerius were well known to possess evil powers, if approached from the wrong angle. Church leaders tried to draw doctrinal distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of the supernatural, but Salonica’s inhabitants did not bother. If the rabbi or bishop could not help them, they appealed to witches, wise men or healers. The religious authorities never felt seriously threatened by such practices, and it is a striking difference with Christian Europe that there were never witchcraft trials in the Ottoman domains. Devils, demons and evil spirits – euphemistically termed ‘those from below’, or ‘those without number’, or more placatingly, ‘the best of us’ – were a fact of life.
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‘De ozo ke lo guadre el Dio – May God guard him from the Eye’, elderly Jewish ladies muttered. Was there anyone in the city who did not fear being jinxed by the evil eye – to mati for the Greeks, the fena göz for the Turks – and sought remedies against it? All avoided excessive compliments and feared those who paid them, cursing them under their breath. Moises Bourlas tells us in his wonderful memoirs how his mother was sitting out in the sun one fine Saturday with her neighbours, gossiping and chewing pumpkin seeds when some gypsy fortune-tellers passed them and shouted: ‘Fine for you, ladies, sitting in the sun and eating pumpkin seeds!’ To which his mother instantly and prudently replied – sotto voce in Judeo-Spanish, so that they could not understand: ‘Tu ozo en mi kulo’ [Your eye in my arse].
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Fanny Blunt lists accepted remedies: ‘garlic, cheriot, wild thyme, boar’s tusks, hares’ heads, terebinth, alum, blue glass, turqoise, pearls, the bloodstone, carnelian, eggs [principally those of the ostrich], a gland extracted from the neck of the ass, written amulets and a thousand other objects.’ She tried out the ass gland on her husband, the British consul, when he was ill, and reported it a success. For keeping babies in good health, experts recommended old gold coins, a cock’s spur or silver phylacteries containing cotton wool from the inauguration of a new church [for Christians], bits of paper with the Star of David drawn on them [Jews], or the pentagram [Muslims]. Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child.
Spells required counter-spells. Mendicant dervishes and gypsy women were believed to know secret remedies, especially for afflicted animals. Hodjas provided pest control in the shape of small squares of paper with holy inscriptions that were nailed to the wall of afflicted rooms and Jews wore amulets containing verses from the Torah to ward off the ‘spirits of the air’ which caused depression or fever. Blunt describes some striking cases of cross-faith activity: a Turkish woman snatching hairs from the beard of a Jewish pedlar as a remedy for fever; Muslim children having prayers read over them in church; Christian children similarly blessed by Muslim hodjas, who would blow or spit on them, or twist a piece of cotton thread around their wrist to stop their fever. Doctors were not much esteemed; the reputation of la indulcadera – the healer – stood much higher. Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled.
Orthodoxy: Tax-Collectors and Martyrs
