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 only sporadically prescriptive.30
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.31
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.32
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.33
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.34
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.
