Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower

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СКАЧАТЬ as sparsely in the 1590s as it had been a century earlier. For after 1500 Salonica’s population suddenly doubled, and soared to thirty thousand by 1520, putting pressure on housing for the first time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the city. The newcomers emanated from an unexpected quarter – the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were taking Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the Jews from their kingdom. Attracted by Bayazid’s promises of economic concessions and political protection, Spanish-speaking Jews arrived in droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him round, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained within the walls – Muslims, Christians and Jews – this last, which had been entirely absent from the population register of 1478, had suddenly become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.

       3 The Arrival of the Sefardim

      WHEN EVLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantastic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon – ‘may God’s blessing be upon him’ – had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba when she looked down and saw ‘in the region of Athens, in the land of the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue’. There he built her a palace ‘whose traces are still visible’, before they moved on eastwards to Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city’s walls to the ‘philosopher Philikos’ and his son Selanik ‘after whom it is named still’. Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine ‘slew the Greek nation in one night and gained control of the fortress’. Hebrew kings did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually took over, and ‘until our own days, the city is full of Jews’.¹

      Evliya’s tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time of his visit in 1667–68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families [or Romaniotes]; despite often severe persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a Jewish presence for perhaps the first time in over a millennium. This was why in the 1478 register they did not appear. But then came a new wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Christendom, and the Ottoman willingness to take advantage of this.²

       Flight across the Mediterranean

      When the English expelled their Jews in 1290, they inaugurated a policy which spread widely over the next two centuries. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of banishment forced thousands from a homeland where they had known great security and prosperity. Sicily and Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples followed suit. By the mid-sixteenth century, Jews had been evicted from much of western Europe. A few existed on sufferance, while many others converted or went underground as Marranos and New Christians, preserving their customs behind a Catholic façade. The centre of gravity of the Jewish world shifted eastwards – to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman domains.³

      In Spain itself not everyone favoured the expulsions. (Perhaps this was why a different policy was chosen towards the far more numerous Muslims of Andalucía who were forcibly converted, and only expelled much later.) ‘Many were of the opinion,’ wrote the scholar and Inquisitor Jeronimo de Zurita, ‘that the king was making a mistake to throw out of his realms people who were so industrious and hard-working, and so outstanding in his realms both in number and esteem as well as in dedication to making money.’ A later generation of Inquisitors feared that the Jews who had been driven out ‘took with them the substance and wealth of these realms, transferring to our enemies the trade and commerce of which they are the proprietors not only in Europe but throughout the world.’⁴

      The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power between Islam and Catholicism. One might almost see this as the contest to reunify the Roman Empire between the two great monotheistic religions that had succeeded it: on the one side, the Spanish Catholic monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, the Ottoman sultans, themselves heirs to the Roman Empire of the East, and rulers of the largest and most powerful Muslim empire in the world. Its climax, in the sixteenth century, pitted Charles V, possessor of the imperial throne of Germany and ruler of the Netherlands, the Austrian lands, the Spanish monarchy and its possessions in Sicily and Naples, Mexico and Peru, against Suleyman the Magnificent who held undisputed sway from Hungary to Yemen, from Algiers to Baghdad. Ottoman forces had swept north to the gates of Vienna and conquered the Arab lands while Ottoman navies clashed with the Holy League in the Mediterranean and captured Rhodes, Cyprus and Tunis, wintered in Toulon, seized Nice and terrorized the Italian coast. The Habsburgs looked for an ally in Persia; the French and English approached the Porte. It was an early modern world war.⁵

      In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman authorities exploited their enemy’s anti-Jewish measures just as they had welcomed other Jewish refugees from Christian persecution in the past. They were People of the Book, and they possessed valuable skills. Sultan Murad II had a Jewish translator in his service; his successors relied upon Jewish doctors and bankers. Those fleeing Iberia would bring more knowledge and expertise with them. In the matter-of-fact words of one contemporary Jewish chronicler: ‘A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans.’⁶ The French agent Nicolas de Nicolay noted:

      [The Jews] have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.⁷

      The newcomers were not enough in numbers to affect the demographic balance in the empire – the Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian, the Asian and Arab lands overwhelmingly Muslim. But they revitalized urban life after many decades of war.

      And of all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited most. Since 1453, while Istanbul’s population had been growing at an incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, turning it into perhaps the largest city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind. Bayezid had been concerned at its slow recovery and had been doing what he could to promote it himself. Did he order the authorities to direct the Jews there? It seems likely, although no such directive has survived. According to a later chronicler, he sent orders to provincial governors to welcome the newcomers. Since СКАЧАТЬ