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Article Excerpt
Who are these strangers who can be seen in the ghetto of the East Side, sitting outside of coffee-houses smoking strange-looking waterpipes, sipping a dark liquid from tiny cups and playing a game of checkers and dice, a game that we are not familiar with? See the signs on these institutions. They read: "Cafe Constantinople," "Cafe Oriental," Cafe Smyrna," and there are other signs in Hebrew characters that you perhaps cannot read. Are they Jews? No it cannot be; they do not look like Jews; they do not speak Yiddish. Listen; what is that strange tongue they are using? It sounds like Spanish or Mexican. Are they Spaniards or Mexicans? If so, where did they get the coffee-houses, an importation from Greece and Turkey?
--Samuel M. Auerbach, "The Levantine Jew" (1916) (1)
Writing in The Immigrants in America Review, Auerbach offered an image of "Levantine Jews" as "strangers" within the context of a predominantly Yiddish-speaking, eastern European Jewish culture on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the first decades of the twentieth century. Auerbach, like his contemporaries writing in English or Yiddish, provided a perspective that he felt would resonate with his readership. (2) Subsequent accounts of American Jewry have echoed descriptions such as Auerbach's insofar as they have treated Jews from the eastern Mediterranean--described alternatively as "Levantine," "Oriental" or "Sephardi"--as marginal figures in their narratives. Others have omitted completely from their accounts the experiences of these Jews, who stray far from the mold of "normative" American Jewry. In addition to differences in language, culture, geographic origin, and religious traditions (minhagim), the relatively small demographic weight of Jews from the eastern Mediterranean also has contributed to their marginalization in American Jewish historiography. Perhaps as many as sixty thousand Jews from the eastern Mediterranean arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1924, whereas over two million largely Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe arrived during the same period. (3) As a result, Jews from eastern Europe often have stood symbolically for American Jewry of the early twentieth century. (4)
Recent works, such as those issued in conjunction with the 350th anniversary of Jews in America, pay scant attention to Jews from the eastern Mediterranean. They do begin their narratives of American Jewish history with the tale of the twenty-three refugees who fled from the Inquisition in Recife, Brazil, and settled in New Amsterdam in 1654. (5) These "Old Sephardim," however, constituted a group distinct from those Jews who arrived from the eastern Mediterranean during the early twentieth century, and whom scholars have labeled the "New Sephardim." Some members of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue of the "Old Sephardim" in New York, initially argued in the 1910s that the newcomers should not be categorized as "Sephardim" at all. Rather, they advocated labels such as "Levantine" or "Oriental," both terms with derogatory connotations, so as not to muddy their own reputation as the "noble," well-established "Sephardim," the true heirs to the legacy of the Spanish golden age. (6) Contributors to the Ladino and Anglo-Jewish press in America debated and polemicized over the terms "Levantine," "Oriental," and "Sephardi," some distinguishing among the Jews from the eastern Mediterranean according to linguistic community--Ladino, Greek, and Arabic--and viewing only Ladino-speakers, the perceived descendants of medieval Iberian Jewry, as "Sephardim" in a strict sense. (7) The only terms of identification not contested during the early twentieth century were those based on city or town of origin that the newcomers gave themselves and utilized internally.
A few scholars have succeeded in giving voice to the Jews from the eastern Mediterranean who lived in early twentieth-century America. They have filled important lacunae by focusing on the efforts of these immigrants at communal organization, their interactions with the "Old Sephardim" and "Ashkenazim," and their creation of a Ladino press in New York. (8) Such scholars point out city-based identity but often represent it as a source of conflict and an obstacle to overcome in the formation of a broader group identity. This article seeks to push even further and reconsider the received taxonomy of "Levantine," "Sephardi," and "Ladino" by presenting the case of one such constituent city-based group. For Jews from Salonika--Selaniklis, as they called themselves--as for many Jews from the eastern Mediterranean, city-based consciousness constituted their primary vector of identity, one that transcended the experiences of emigration and immigration. (9) To tell their story as Selaniklis (Salonikans) is to tell it in their own terms.
This article also joins recent work, such as that by Rebecca Kobrin on the Bialystoker "diaspora," that diversifies what we know of immigrant American Jewry, community by community, and requires us to reconsider the geographic and conceptual lines between "Old World" and "New." (10) As those from the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Salonikans provide a valuable case study of a community whose story loomed large in the cultural history and collective memory of the Sephardi world. Utilizing the Ladino press from New York and Salonika, archives of the Jewish community of Salonika and of the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, ships' manifests and records of Ellis Island's Special Board of Inquiries, consular reports from Salonika, memoirs, and a handful of other archival sources, this article seeks to analyze the reasons given by Salonikan Jews and their contemporaries to explain why Salonikan Jews left their natal city and came to the United States during the early twentieth century, and to explore the distinctiveness of their migration experiences. Their continued identification as Salonikans provided them with a sense of continuity during a period of rupture and dislocation. The obstacles the immigrants encountered during the immigration process and the difficulties experienced by those who remained in Salonika form part of this transnational history. Although they physically left Salonika, those Selaniklis who came to America sought to perpetuate a sense of Salonikan Jewishness through their cafe culture, caricatured above by Auerbach, and their early modes of communal organization. As they aimed to maintain this link throughout the interwar period, they transformed what Salonikan Jewishness meant in the United States and in Salonika itself.
The "Jerusalem of the Balkans"
The developing trend of Jewish emigration from Salonika during the early twentieth century ironically overturned the established image of Salonika as a Jewish safe haven. The sixteenth-century Portuguese Jewish poet, Samuel Usque, mythologized Salonika as a refuge for Jews following their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and further Iberian persecutions of the sixteenth century:
It is the mother of Israel which has grown stronger on the foundations of the religion, which yields excellent plants and fruit trees, unequalled the world over. Its fruits are delicious, because watered by rivers, Jews of other countries, persecuted and banished, have come to seek refuge there, and this town has received them with love and cordiality, as if it were our revered mother Jerusalem. (11)
As in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Salonika served as a city of refuge for Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reinvigorated its mythic status as a Jewish safe haven and as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans." (12) During this later period, however, the influx of Jews to Salonika did not result exclusively from persecutions, although they did play an important role. As a result of a blood libel on the Ionian island of Corfu in 1891, clashes in the town of Larissa (in what is today Greece) following the Greek-Ottoman War of 1897, and guerilla warfare during the first years of the twentieth century between Greek and Bulgarian nationalists in the Macedonian hinterland, Jewish refugees arrived in Salonika from these locales. These specific incidents accompanied a general trend of Jews' leaving territories recently annexed by emerging Balkan nation-states such as Greece and Bulgaria, and relocating to regions that remained under Ottoman control. (13) The Ottoman state provided the Jews and other monotheistic non-Muslim populations--namely Christians--with the power of self-organization in exchange for certain taxes. Salonika, Istanbul (the imperial capital), and Izmir represented the largest urban Jewish communities organized according to this framework. As non-Muslims, Jews remained secondclass subjects, but such an arrangement seemed preferable to the uncertain position in which Jews in the newly forming Balkan nation-states expected to find themselves. (14) Furthermore, Jewish refugees fleeing from eastern Europe in the 1890s, and after pogroms in Kishenev in 1903 and Odessa in 1905, also settled in Salonika. (15)
Jewish migration to Salonika should also be situated within the context of larger population movements tied to increasing urbanization and industrialization in the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those living in provincial Ottoman areas and who were in search of improved economic opportunities--by no means Jews alone--increasingly settled in larger cities such as Salonika. (16) In keeping with their system of organizing subject populations according to religion, the Ottoman authorities maintained a special register of Jews as part of the 1884 census that listed over one hundred families from small towns including Gallipoli (Gelibolu), Larissa (Yeni Sehir), Dardanelles (Canakkale), Kavalla, Serres, Drama, and Kastoria who now resided in Salonika. (17) A register from 1905 similarly recorded over 350 Jewish families who had settled in Salonika from many of the same outlying towns. (18) Few entries in either register indicated individuals who had come from other urban centers such as Istanbul or Izmir.
With the increased urban population, industrialization, and expanded economic opportunities, by the turn of the twentieth century Jews came to constitute close to half of the 170,000 residents of Salonika. Turks, Greeks, Donme, Levantines, Bulgarians, Armenians, and Roma represented the remainder of the population of this cosmopolitan, Ottoman port city on the Aegean Sea. (19) Historians have called the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a "golden age" for Salonika and especially its Jewish population, whose members played leading roles in the economy and constituted the largest Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire. (20) Jews in Salonika participated in a complex trans-Mediterranean commercial network and played active roles in the Ottoman economy as middlemen, exporting cereal, cotton, wool, and silk, and opening some of the first factories for bricks, flour, soap, and tobacco in the Balkan region. Industrialization of the city and the construction of a modern port rendered Salonika an important commercial hub for the eastern Mediterranean. (21)
A correspondent for the Catholic World in 1900 even referred to Salonika as a "New Jerusalem"--a variation on the theme of "Jerusalem of the Balkans"--which encapsulated the preponderance, prosperity, and diversity of the city's Jewish population at the time. (22) Jews occupied positions in a variety of social strata, with a particularly large working class. Some served as lawyers, bankers, and businessmen, while many more worked as fishermen, stevedores, porters, tobacco laborers, peddlers, and small merchants. (23) When David Ben-Gurion visited in 1911, he acknowledged the prominence of Jews in numerous segments of society, characterizing Salonika as "a Hebrew labor town, the only one in the world." He was impressed by the fact that the port of the city closed every Saturday in observance of the Jewish Sabbath. (24) The community also benefited from the advent of the Ladino press and of modern education, stemming from the efforts of Jewish institutions such as the Paris-based Alliance Israelite Universelle, which had established its first school in Salonika in 1873. (25)
Alongside the emergence of the new golden age for the Jews of Salonika and the trend of immigration to the city, a contrasting trend of out-migration developed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Scholars focusing on eastern Mediterranean Jewish immigrants to the United States argue that "political instability" and "economic hardship," both of which correspond to an image of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, provided the overriding "push" factors. (26) In enumerating five factors that spurred these Jews to emigrate during the period 1880 to 1924, one scholar adds "antisemitism" to economic hardship, unfavorable political climate, compulsory Ottoman military conscription, and natural disasters. (27) But the impetuses for the emigration of Jews during this long period cannot be linked exclusively to a picture of the Ottoman Empire as the "Sick Man of Europe." Furthermore, specific variables operating in distinct locales affected the rate and extent of emigration differently: one should not presume that the reasons why Jews left Salonika could also apply, without modification, to Istanbul, Ioannina, or Aleppo.
Other scholars point to the Young Turk revolution, launched from Salonika in 1908, which overthrew sultan Abdul Hamid II and reinstituted the constitution of 1876, as a turning point for Ottoman Jewry and for Jewish emigration from the empire. (28) In the wake of the revolution, the new administration required Jews and Christians to serve in the Ottoman military for the first time, overturning the custom of non-Muslims paying taxes in exchange for military exemption. Scholars have argued that, following the declaration of compulsory military conscription (1909), young Jewish men immediately "voted with their feet" and decided to emigrate rather than serve in the Ottoman army. (29) They suggest that evasion of the Ottoman army inaugurated the initial, substantial wave of Jewish emigration from the Ottoman Empire--and from Salonika--and indicate that the bulk of these emigres went to the United States. (30) While this may be a valid claim to a certain extent, it cannot be substantiated by statistics culled from the ships' manifests of Ellis Island, at least not in the case of Salonika. These statistics indicate that in 1909 and 1910, the initial years in which compulsory military conscription was to have gone into effect, there was no substantial increase in the number of Jews who arrived at Ellis Island from Salonika. In fact, in relation to the total population of Salonika, Jews were proportionally underrepresented among the total number of Salonikan immigrants (see Table I). (31)
There are several ways to account for the discrepancy between claims made by scholars and available statistics. A recent study of the Ladino press in Istanbul in the wake of the decree of compulsory Ottoman military conscription argues that Jews generally disapproved of this new measure. "Disapproval," however, does not necessarily translate directly into opting for emigration. (32) Furthermore, the implementation of conscription measures presumably varied from locale to locale, and Jewish responses in Salonika likely differed from those in the Ottoman capital and other regions of the empire. Other recent studies even doubt the degree to which the Young Turks successfully implemented their new conscription policy; some argue that the conscription of non-Muslims remained unimplemented for several years after its initial declaration in 1909. (33)
Evasion of real or anticipated Ottoman military conscription still may have provided some impetus for Jewish emigration from Salonika--let alone other Ottoman cities--regardless of whether such a claim can be confirmed by statistics tabulated from Ellis Island passenger lists. But until such confirmation can be ascertained, the claim should be made more speculatively than the dominant position taken in the scholarly literature. It seems, however, that the perception of Jewish migration in the wake of the conscription of non-Muslims developed quickly and became naturalized in the standard narrative of Jewish emigration from the Ottoman Empire. "A sin bit the Turk [el togar]," Moise Soulam, a Salonikan native, asserted in a poem published in 1914 in La America, New York's first Ladino weekly, "for he conscripted the non-Muslim to the military [askyer],/because of this, many Jews of Turkey emigrated,/ and the greatest part of them installed themselves in America." (34) It is noteworthy, however, that Soulam was not among those who immigrated to evade the Ottoman military; in fact, far from it. In another contribution to La America, he characterized himself as a "true Ottoman," implying that his motivation for emigration lay elsewhere. (35) Referring to Ottoman Jews living in the United...
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