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.8
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.9
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.’10
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.’11
Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though it formed part of the same Ottoman realm. As in Spain itself, the Jews came to feel – as one historian has put it – ‘at home in exile’ and had no desire to uproot themselves once more, not even when the destination was the Land their holy books promised them. But this home was not only their ‘Jerusalem’; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-abandoned homelands – Ispanya, Çeçilyan [Sicilian], Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan [Italian], Otranto, Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others – which survived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917. Their family names – Navarro, Cuenca, Algava – their games, curses and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate Pan d’Espanya [almond sponge cake] on holidays, rodanchas [pumpkin pastries], pastel de kwezo [cheese pie with sesame seed], fijones kon karne [beef and bean stew] and keftikes depoyo [chicken croquettes], and gave visitors dulce de muez verde [green walnut preserve]. People munched pasatempo [dried melon seeds], took the vaporiko across the bay, or enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.12
For this, the primary conduit was language. As a Salonican merchant, Emmanuel Abuaf, tried to explain in 1600 to a puzzled interrogator of the Pisan Inquisition: ‘Our Jewish youngsters, when they begin from the age of six to learn the Scripture, read it and discuss it in the Spanish language, and all the business and trade of the Levant is carried on in Spanish in Hebrew characters … And so it is not hard for Jews to know Spanish even if they are born outside Spain.’13 In Salonica, there was a religious variant – Ladino – and a vernacular which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as ‘Jewish’ [judezmo], and quickly became the language of secular learning and literature, business, science and medicine. Sacred and scholarly texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because ‘this language is the most used among us’. In the docks, among the fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon, Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, Italian and Provencal. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest. ‘The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, Venice and other commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not better,’ noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of Toledo, found that the city’s Jews ‘speak Castilian as fine and well-accented as in the imperial capital’. They were proud of their tongue – its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive. By contrast, the Jews further inland were derisively written off as digi digi – incapable of speaking properly, too inclined to the harsh ds and gs of the Portuguese.14
Serving the Imperial Economy
Early in the sixteenth century, the Porte entrusted the Jews of Salonica with the responsibility of manufacturing the uniforms for the janissary infantry corps, and over the next century this turned the city into one of the principal producers and exporters of cloth in the eastern Mediterranean. Wealthy Jewish merchants bought up the local supply of wool, imported dyes, and set up poorer Jews with equipment and wages for weaving, brushing, dyeing and making up the finished material. Ottoman authorities banned all exports of wool from the region until the needs of the manufacturers had been met and tried to chase back any weavers who tried to leave. By mid-century, the industry was not only supplying military uniforms, but
