Modern Ladino Culture

Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire

Olga Borovaya

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780253005564
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Olga Borovaya explores the emergence and expansion of print culture in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She provides the first comprehensive study of the three major forms of Ladino literary production—the press, belles lettres, and theater—as a single cultural phenomenon. The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology, Modern Ladino Culture offers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization.

Part 1 The Press

1

The Emergence of Modern Cultural Production in Ladino: The Sephardi Press

The press was the earliest and the most influential form of modern Ladino print culture. Alongside European-style schools, it served as an essential medium for the westernization of Ottoman Jewry. Furthermore, it brought into existence Ladino belles lettres and played a crucial role in the development and conceptualization of Sephardi Theater. In addition, despite the poor condition of the extant Ladino periodicals, a thorough reading has allowed me to uncover a considerable amount of new information. For all these reasons, I will dedicate more space to the discussion of the Ladino press than to the other two genres.

In the late nineteenth century, the press had already begun to attract the interest of historians and bibliographers, and it continues to be the most discussed aspect of Sephardi intellectual life. The first among the numerous bibliographies of Ladino periodicals was Meyer Kayserling’s Biblioteca Española-Portuguesa-Judaica (Strasbourg, 1890). But the most authoritative catalog to date is Moshe Gaon’s The Ladino Press (1965), despite the fact that some new data became available after its completion.

A significant number of articles and dissertations on the Ladino press have appeared in recent years in Spain, France, Israel, and the United States, but only Elena Romero’s La Creación literaria en lengua sefardí (1992) offers a systematic survey of the Ladino press, even though it is very brief and is organized in an encyclopedic form. Almost all other studies focus on one newspaper or one journalist.¹ This kind of work should certainly be continued, because such case studies, by filling at least some gaps, will eventually allow us to turn the collage we have been putting together into a more consistent, albeit always tentative, picture of the Ladino press. Yet the amount of available information already allows us to move to the next level of investigation and pose several vital questions that have not been dealt with before, as well as rethink certain conventional assumptions.

The first of these assumptions that I will challenge is the implicitly accepted notion of the Sephardi press as a single entity that emerged in the 1840s in Izmir and reached its peak on the eve of World War I in Salonica. Instead, I will suggest that the Ladino press had multiple beginnings and, under different sociocultural and historical circumstances, it could have evolved in various other directions (though, in any case, it would have served as a vehicle of modern ideas). Undoubtedly, it is the influence of Franco-Judaism spread by the Alliance schools that in the 1870s defined the ideological emphasis and content of Ladino periodicals now taken to be Sephardi journalism par excellence. Thus, instead of offering another version of a single history of the Sephardi press, I will sketch a few discontinuous histories of its beginnings.²

I will also deal with some questions, the answers to which are usually taken for granted: Were Ladino periodicals indeed available to the Sephardi masses? How many people did they really reach? What were the factors affecting their availability? Were the literacy rates as high as some scholars believe? What was the role of the press control mechanisms and what were the limits of the so-called rabbinic censorship in the era of secularization? Finally, I will continue the discussion of the Sephardi audience and its reading practices begun by Matthias Lehmann with regard to the musar literature.

Between 1845 and 1939, approximately three hundred Sephardi periodicals, many of them short-lived, appeared in the Ottoman Empire and its former territories.³ The majority came out in Salonica (105), Istanbul (45), Sofia (30), and Izmir (23), most of them after 1908.⁴ Another fifteen Sephardi publications intended mainly for Ottoman Jews were published in the Habsburg Empire, in Vienna and Zemun (Semlin). It must be emphasized that these statistics are approximate, and we will never have the exact numbers. Yet scholars are, no doubt, aware of all long-lasting publications.

Most Sephardi newspapers appeared in Ladino, but approximately twenty of them, including those published in Egypt, came out in French, and a few were bilingual. The newspapers that combined Ladino with one or more other languages either had particular ideological agendas or were aimed at specific audiences, usually rather assimilated bilingual communities. For instance, the Ladino-Turkish Jeride-i Lisan (Journal of the [Turkish] Language) encouraged Sephardim to learn Turkish, the Ladino-Hebrew El Jidyo (The Jew) promoted Zionism, the Ladino-Bulgarian La Boz de Israel (Voice of Israel) targeted Bulgarians, and the Ladino-Arabic El Mitsraim (The Egypt) addressed Egyptian Sephardim. In this book, I will examine only monolingual Ladino and French newspapers.

The First Beginning of the Ladino Press

Scholars agree that the Ladino press emerged in the aftermath of the Damascus Affair, more precisely, the blood libels in Damascus and Rhodes in early 1840. In both places, Jews were accused of murdering Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes and were imprisoned and tortured. Having learned about this through Jewish leaders in Istanbul, French and British Jews, acting jointly, managed to save the prisoners, achieve their exoneration, and obtain a denial of the blood libel from the sultan.⁵ These events demonstrated the importance of information for building international Jewish solidarity, which led to the unprecedented rise of the Jewish press in various parts of the world.⁶

Yet there is a more immediate connection than scholars used to assume between the two blood libels and the birth of the first Ladino periodical in 1845. While it cannot be established whether Sir Moses Montefiore, a key figure in resolving the Damascus crisis, and Rafael Uziel, the editor of the first Ladino periodical, met during the former’s brief stay in Izmir in October 1840,⁷ it is certain that the great English philanthropist was aware of the paper’s emergence and closure. Moreover, he was among those who had welcomed Uziel’s plan to establish a Ladino periodical in Izmir three and a half years earlier, in May 1842.

The first Ladino newspaper, Sha’arei mizrach (Gates of the East, 1845–1846), was published by Rafael Uziel, a merchant of Italian extraction and a resident of Izmir, in close association with Isaac Pincherle, an Italian merchant also residing in Izmir, and his brother David, a lawyer who spent most of his time in London and belonged to the same Sephardi congregation, Bevis Marks, as Moses Montefiore.⁸ While there is some information on the Pincherle brothers, nearly nothing is known about Uziel,⁹ and, until now, scholars were in disagreement even about the identity of the first Sephardi journalist. Were Rafael Uziel and Isaac Pincherle two different people or the same person?¹⁰ An analysis of Sha’arei mizrach and the contemporaneous European Jewish press puts an end to this discussion.¹¹

Rafael Uziel undoubtedly belonged to a Franco family. Francos were foreign merchants—mainly Italians, Jews among them—who lived in the Ottoman Empire but were protected by their respective governments.¹² In the nineteenth century, many Francos and their descendants, such as Abraham de Camondo in Istanbul and Moïse Allatini in Salonica, played a crucial role in the development of Jewish education and the Jewish press. A note in Les Archives Israélites directly points to Uziel’s Italian origins by referring to him as Raphael Uziello (312). Furthermore, the book stamp printed on number 16 of his periodical (which by that time had a second, Ladino title, Las Puertas del Oryente) says, “Le Porte dell’Oryente / Raffael Uziel.”

Regardless of where he was born, Uziel’s first language must have been Italian. Some of his readers complained that his Ladino was “incorrect,” apparently referring to a great number of Italianisms in his articles (no. 1, 2; no. 4, 32). A thorough linguistic analysis of Sha’arei mizrach undertaken by David Bunis demonstrates a strong Italian influence at all levels, and even establishes certain features characteristic of the Venetian or Livornese dialects.¹³ Sha’arei mizrach has other peculiarities pointing to its editor’s European background. Thus, number 16 is dated 2 Heshvan 5607, but the masthead also indicates the Christian date, November 4, 1846, which means that Uziel converted the Hebrew date to the Gregorian calendar, which was not introduced in the Ottoman Empire until 1916.

Uziel’s paper has another curious feature: proper names and such words as “sublime puerta” And “sultan” are often capitalized. The editor replaces the first Rashi letter of the word with a square one of a bigger size, like those used for the headings. He does not do this consistently from issue to issue, but when he does he follows the rules of most Romance languages. Though Uziel does not explain this odd practice, it was most likely an attempt at Europeanizing Ladino. We do not know where Rafael Uziel received his education, but it is obvious that he studied in Europe. He must have spent some time at the talmud torah in Livorno, as he knew it well enough to compare it with the one in Izmir (no. 6, 41).

The Pincherle brothers, members of a prominent Triestine family, came to Izmir in 1929. That year, Isaac established his company, I. Pincherle & Co. (Der Orient, August 8, 1840, 245), which played an important role in the 1840s in helping the city to recover after the Great Fire of July 1841. In fact, the only time Uziel mentions Isaac Pincherle is precisely in this connection. In issue number 5 of Sha’arei mizrach, he speaks of “the honorable Isaac Pincherle, a merchant established in Izmir, a man of much good, known for his kind deeds at the time of the fire” (33).

Isaac Pincherle was not only a respectable merchant but also an activist who was instrumental in helping the Jews of Rhodes from the very beginning of the blood libel crisis. Later, on May 29, 1840, he sent a letter to London aimed at attracting the attention of British officials to the conduct of the English consul in Rhodes, who had initiated the libel, and urging them to discharge him.¹⁴ During the investigation in the summer of 1840, he brought four members of the Rhodes community to Istanbul and helped them to produce and publicize an account of the tragic events (Der Orient, August 8, 1840, 245–248).

David Pincherle, Esq., as he was referred to in the Anglo-Jewish press, was both a merchant and a lawyer. Sometime before 1846, he co-founded Peter Miller & David Pincherle in Izmir. It was described as a joint stock company which had close relations with Venetian merchants but whose activities were directed toward the German market.¹⁵ Judging by the notes in the Jewish Chronicle, the Voice of Jacob, and the latter’s list of subscribers, sometime between 1843 and 1846 David Pincherle moved to London, where he opened an office right outside the city. According to the two periodicals, he contributed to many of Montefiore’s charities and enthusiastically supported the idea of raising funds to pay for a portrait of the great philanthropist¹⁶ (Jewish Chronicle, January 2, 1846, 55).

Settled in London, David Pincherle frequently traveled to Izmir. One of his missions on these trips was to deliver English periodicals and bring back the news of Ottoman Sephardim, which would later appear in the two Anglo-Jewish papers. It was David Pincherle who informed British Jews about the establishment and closure of Uziel’s periodical and who often summarized its articles. Moreover, in February–March 1846, he published at least three advertisements in the Jewish Chronicle urging the public to subscribe to Gates of the East.

It is impossible to tell how the Pincherle brothers met Uziel but, given the small size of the local Jewish community and the occupation of the three Italians, this must have happened rather quickly. We do not know what brought Isaac and David Pincherle there, but Izmir, a port city on the western Anatolian coast of the Aegean Sea, began to attract European merchants in the seventeenth century, when the Francos’ quarter was first established. From the beginning, the Ottomans’ influence in Izmir was rather weak, and to a large degree the city was created by Europeans. Turkish was only one of the many languages spoken there, and all travel accounts and nineteenth-century European press reports state that most inhabitants spoke some form of French or English, which they learned from foreign sailors. The Levantine culture that developed in Izmir during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was culturally and ethnically Western European, Italian, Armenian, and Greek.

According to the Ottoman Census of 1831, there were 3,530 Jewish males in Izmir,¹⁷ which means that the indigenous Jewish population numbered around 7,000. However, as is well known, foreign Jews residing in Ottoman cities preferred not to join the local communities so as to avoid paying communal taxes and, therefore, usually they were not counted. Yet Izmir and other port cities had significant numbers of European Jews who actively participated in the community’s life. In 1841, the Voice of Jacob called the German-Jewish periodical Die Israelitische Annalen’s estimate of Izmir’s Jewish population at 10,000 “an understatement” (October 29, 21). On the basis of these estimates and some other data, it is safe to assume that in the early 1840s, Izmir’s Jewish community numbered between 10,000 and 12,000, including the foreigners.

Before the Great Fire of July 29, 1841, which affected mainly t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation, Transcription, Proper Names, and Dates
• Introduction
• Part 1. The Press
• Part 2. Belles Lettres
• Part 3. Theater
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index