Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
‘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.24
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.25
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.26
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.27
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.’28
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.29
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