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.5
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.6
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.7
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.8
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.9
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’.10
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.11
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
