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

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      Another imperial corvée a few years later jump-started silver-mining outside the city – crucially easing the desperate Ottoman shortage of precious metals. Because the silver shortage was one of the main constraints on Ottoman economic growth, Grand Vizier Maktul Ibrahim Pasha brought in Jewish metallurgists from newly-conquered Hungary, and within a few years the Siderokapsi mines had become one of the largest silver producers in the empire, with daily caravans making the fifty-mile journey to Salonica and back. Bulgarian and Jewish miners did the hard work, and rich Jewish merchants were commanded to bankroll operations. But running the economy by imperial fiat in this way was not popular with the wealthy. The bankers complained bitterly at an obligation which was not shared by the community as a whole, and which more often than not led to losses rather than profits. They bribed Ottoman officials, hid or fled the city. The industry itself became such a drain on resources that Salonican Jews shunned the miners when they came into town: ‘They would rather meet a bear that lost its cubs than one of those people’.¹⁶

      In order to curb the impact of such obligations and to allow for greater fiscal predictability, the city’s Jews sent a delegation to Suleyman the Magnificent in 1562 to plead for a reform of their overall tax burden. The move indicated the surprising degree of self-confidence with which the Sefardim dealt with their Ottoman masters. It took many visits, several years, and at least one change of sultan, before an answer was forthcoming. It could easily have resulted – had the imperial mood been rather different – in the delegates losing their lives, as happened to another rabbi when he tried to negotiate a later reduction in the tax burden. But in 1568, it still seemed vital to the Porte to stay on good terms with Salonica’s Jews and the principal delegate, Moises Almosnino, was able to return with welcome news: in return for the abolition of many special taxes, the community committed itself to collecting and handing over an agreed sum annually to the authorities.

      For the Ottomans were not modern capitalists. They did not aim at unlimited growth in unrestricted markets but rather at the creation and maintenance of a basically closed system to keep towns alive – in particular the ever-expanding imperial metropole – and to guarantee the domestic production of commodities essential for urban life and the provisioning of the military. Salt, wheat, silver and woollens were what they needed from Salonica, a list to which they occasionally added gunpowder and even cannons. The primary value of the Jews lay in their ability to provide these things, thereby freeing Muslims for other occupations. After a century of Ottoman rule, more than half of the latter were now imams, muezzins, tax collectors, janissaries or other servants of the state and its ruling faith. They administered the city; the Jews ran its economy. It was a division of labour which suited both sides and the city flourished.¹⁷

      For the rich, the buoyant Ottoman economy allowed them to invest their funds in attractive and profitable outlets such as the tax farms and concessions upon which the sultan relied for the gathering of many of his revenues. Salonican Jews thus came to play an important part in the regional economy of the Ottoman Balkans. Local Jewish sarrafs [bankers] collected taxes from drovers, vineyards, dairy farmers and slave dealers. They bankrolled prominent Muslim office-holders such as the defterdar and local troop and janissary commanders, and farmed the customs concession for Salonica itself – one of the most important sources of revenue for the empire – and the salt pans outside the city, where at their peak more than one thousand peasants worked. Many had interests in the capital, in Vidin, and along the Danube. Much of the wealth of the Nasi-Mendes family – the most politically successful and prominent Jewish dynasty of the sixteenth century – was invested in concessions of this kind.¹⁸

      Capital accumulation was easy because Salonica was such a well-placed trading base. It reached northwards into the inland fairs and markets of the Balkans, south and east [via Jewish-Muslim partner-ships] to the Asian trading routes that led to Persia, Yemen and India, and westwards through the Adriatic to Venice and the other Italian ports. Italian, Arab and Armenian merchants all participated in this traffic: but where the crucial Mediterranean triangle with Egypt and Venice was concerned, no one could compete with the extraordinary network of familial and confessional affiliates that made the Salonican Jews and Marranos so powerful. Shifting between Catholicism [when in Ancona or Venice] and Judaism [in the Ottoman lands], they dominated the Adriatic carrying trade, helped to build up Split as a major port for Venetian dealings with the Levant, and wielded their Ottoman connections whenever the Papacy and the Inquisition turned nasty. They combined commerce with espionage and ran the best intelligence networks in the entire region. So confident did they feel, that some threatened a boycott of Papal ports when the authorities in Ancona started up the auto-da-fé in 1556, and one even talked about spreading plague deliberately to frighten the Catholics in an early attempt at biological warfare.¹⁹

      Greeks and Turks must have been astonished at the assertiveness of the newcomers, for the Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews they had known had always kept a low profile. In the early years, it is true, the Sefardim tried to tread cautiously. Congregants were reminded by their rabbis to keep their voices down when they prayed so that they would not be heard outside. In external appearance, synagogues were modest and unobtrusive and even larger ones, like the communal Talmud Torah, were hidden well away from the main thoroughfares, in the heart of the Jewish-populated district. Thanks to the benevolence of the Ottoman authorities, however, more than twenty-five synagogues were built in less than two decades. After the fire of 1545, a delegation from Salonica visited the Porte and obtained permission for many to be rebuilt.²⁰

      But the Iberian Jews had always known how to live well, and their noble families had been unabashedly conspicuous, with large retinues of servants and African slaves. Even before Murad III introduced new sumptuary legislation in the 1570s to curb Jewish and Christian luxury in the capital, the extravagant silk and gold-laced costumes of rich Salonican Jews, the displays of jewellery to which the wealthier women were prone – they were particularly fond of bracelets, gold necklaces and pearl chokers worn ‘so close to one another and so thick one would think they were riveted on to one another’ – the noise of musicians at parties and weddings, where men and women danced together – to the dismay of Greek Jews – were all attracting unfavourable comment. In 1554 a rabbinical ordinance ruled that ‘no woman who has reached maturity, including married women, may take outside her home, into the markets or the streets, any silver or gold article, rings, chains or gems, or any such object except one ring on her finger.’ Murad himself had, according to an apocryphal story, been so angered by Jewish ostentation that he even contemplated putting all the Jews of the empire to death. Fear of exciting envy often lay behind the rabbis’ efforts to urge restraint. It took more than rabbinical commands, however, to stop women wearing the diamond rozetas, almendras [‘almonds’], chokers, earrings, coin necklaces and headpieces which still awed visitors to Salonica in the early twentieth century.²¹

      It must have been as much the sheer number of the newcomers as their behaviour which struck those who had known the town before their arrival. The once sparsely populated streets filled up and population densities soared. At first Jews settled where they could, renting from the Christian and Muslim landlords who owned the bulk of the housing stock. The very first communal ordinance tried to prevent Jews outbidding one another to avoid driving up prices. But the continuous influx led to many central districts becoming heavily settled. Muslims started to move up the higher slopes – enjoying better views, drainage and ventilation, more space and less noise – while the Greeks – mostly tailors, craftsmen, cobblers, masons and metalworkers, a few remaining scions of old, distinguished Byzantine families among them – were pushed into the margins, near Ayios Minas in the west, and around the remains of the old Hippodrome.²²

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