by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
While Jews were allowed greater freedoms in the empire than in Europe, and could achieve much greater prosperity, they were still treated with a certain amount of distrust in some quarters. Ottoman Muslims like Evliya Çelebi, for example, were deeply suspicious of the Jewish practice of keeping Kosher and refusing to buy meat from Muslims. Writing about half a century before Lady Mary Montagu, Evliya declared in his travelogue Seyahatname that: ‘The Jews never accept food and drink from other people. Indeed, they do not mingle with others – if they join your company, it is an artificial companionship. All their deeds are calculated to treachery and the killing of Muslims, especially anyone named Muhammad. Even wine they refuse to buy from other people.’25
His anti-Semitism suggests a kind of circle of mutual distrust between Muslims and Jews: the latter were distrusted and disliked because they kept to themselves, which bred a self-protective instinct to isolate themselves even more, which bred distrust, and so on. This was not universal, but it was not unusual, and is still evident today.
Thessaloniki
Greece, with its Romaniot history, has an especially rich Jewish legacy. The great Jewish centre of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years was Salonika, modern-day Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece. In March 2017, I drove there from Athens with my friend Mark, who was in the midst of writing his PhD thesis on the Greek historian Thucydides and welcomed the distraction. The five-hour journey was peppered with much excitement as we passed classical sites on our way: Aulis, Thermopylae and Mount Olympos, which almost caused an accident as Mark swerved at 85km/h while taking in its majesty. It felt like we were rewinding the millennia as we approached Thessaloniki, a city which hosted a Jewish majority until 1912, when it was surrendered to Greek forces, who had outbid the Bulgarian nationalists for possession. Thessaloniki was one of the most prosperous harbours of the empire, in fact much more of a cosmopolitan trading centre than dusty old Athens. It was dominated by Jewish trade, commerce and real estate; when the Greeks entered the city, they found the lingua franca was Ladino (Sephardic Spanish), and in 1911, just before the Greek takeover, the Zionist David Ben-Gurion visited Salonika to study it as a model for the future state of Israel.
Today, it is – at first glance – a thoroughly modern city. Its history does not slap you in the face, as it does in Istanbul or Athens, and that is because in 1917 the old city was consumed in a nine-day fire, making a quarter of the population homeless, destroying mosques and synagogues and condemning the city to an uninspiring 20th-century architectural transformation, as was the case in Izmir.
The few relics that have survived, however, speak of a spectacularly diverse past – the Hagia Sophia Church is once again in full working order, less monumental than its namesake in Istanbul but painstakingly restored with the most dazzling gold-painted icons I have ever squinted at. The brick domes of the 16th-century, Ottoman-built ‘Yahudi Hamam’ (Jewish Bath), by contrast, are the only visible part of an edifice left to crumble – I peered through the dusty glass into rubble, the restoration clearly abandoned by a government with more pressing things on the agenda than 500-year-old minority bathing houses.
I found the Jewish community centre with difficulty; it is on the second floor of an anonymous, marble-floored office building near the hamam. Handing my ID to a guard, I was led in to a well-lit hive of quiet activity; I later found out that twenty people worked there, a fiftieth of the entire current Jewish population of Thessaloniki. The centre is a testament to how seriously the community take the archival management of its history, which is a troubled one; during the Nazi occupation of Thessaloniki during the 1940s, 54,000 Jews -96 per cent of the city’s entire Jewish community – were rounded up and taken to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, 45,000 of them to Auschwitz. There are only three synagogues left (thirty-two were destroyed in the fire of 1917) in the city; the main one, the Monastirioton Synagogue, was closed and guarded by police when I went to see it, much like the Neve Shalom in Istanbul. Inaugurated in 1927, it survived the Nazi occupation only because it was used as a warehouse by the Red Cross.
The woman who answered my questions in the community centre and did not want to be named was polite but cagey at first, glancing at my scruffy notebook before deciding I could be trusted. I asked her about the guards in front of Monastirioton Synagogue.
‘They’ve always been there. We are very well integrated here but we do encounter anti-Semitism sometimes. There have been incidents in the past few years – for example, the Elie Wiesel Holocaust memorial in Athens was desecrated in 2014 by ultra-nationalist groups.’ (This was followed by a second act of vandalism on the same memorial in December 2017.)
Two thousand Jews returned to Thessaloniki after the end of the Second World War, some of them survivors of the concentration camps, others returning from hiding places in the mountains. My interviewee had a dramatic but representative family story from the occupation: her grandmother met her husband-to-be in 1939 before they were separated by the war. She was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, while he joined the local resistance in Thessaloniki – ‘that’s how he survived the war’. On her return, they married. Many of those who survived the camps set out for South America rather than return to Greece, and many had already left before the occupation – for example Jack Sassoon, the father of world-famous hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, who relocated to Shepherd’s Bush in West London along with several members of his community. My interviewee told me with regret that the centre had recently stopped organising Ladino lessons, although ‘we try to keep the language alive’.
While their language ebbs in the 21st century, the suffering of Thessaloniki’s Jews is finally being acknowledged after a long period of the previous century in which they were noticeably absent from Greek history books. In November 2017, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem held a ceremony to thank a 106-year-old woman from Thessaloniki and her late husband for saving five members of a Jewish family from the Nazis by hiding them in their house. The mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris, wore a Star of David during his re-election ceremony in 2014 in protest at the far-right Golden Dawn party’s presence on the local council, and called the deportation of the Jews the city’s ‘darkest moment in history’.26
I reflected as I left Thessaloniki that there are subtler moments of darkness in the city’s history that may never be acknowledged. How does one commemorate the confusion and heartbreak of the incoming refugees from Asia Minor in 1923 – the ‘squirming, writhing mass of human misery’ described by an American diplomat who watched 7,000 Greek Orthodox subjects of the former Ottoman Empire dock at Salonika port – or the suddenly pariah-like status of the ethnic Turks who stayed behind in Western Thrace? Today, Thessaloniki hosts a great number of refugees from the Middle East, the lucky ones who made it via Turkey to the Greek islands and to the mainland. Thessaloniki has always been a city of refugees, some more welcome than others.
Hidden Synagogues
Like Greece, Spain and Portugal are also trying to right previous wrongs – in their case, from half a millenium ago. In 2015, the two governments introduced a law to allow anyone in the world who could prove their Sephardic ancestry to be granted citizenship; it was a move designed to atone for the ‘historic mistake’ of 1492, when all the native Jews were expelled from the region by Ferdinand II of Aragon. Between 2012 and 2017, more than 4,500 Turkish Jews applied to take advantage of the offer. My friend Dalya is in the process of doing so, as is another Turkish friend, the photographer Yusuf Sayman, who didn’t even know he had any connection to Judaism until he turned eighteen and was informed by a cousin that he belonged to a kabbalist sect.
I found out about Yusuf’s mysterious roots when he casually mentioned that the mosque in the upmarket Istanbul neighbourhood of Teşvikye has a nickname: gavur cami or ‘infidel mosque’. What does an infidel mosque even mean? I asked him.
‘Have you ever noticed that no one cares if the women go in with their heads
uncovered, and that women can also join in the funeral processions of the men?’ Yusuf answered.
I had, but I had assumed it was because Teşvikye is a very secular, wealthy neighbourhood where no one bothered about these things.
‘No’ said Yusuf. ‘It’s because they’re not really Muslim. They are donme, and I know this because – surprise! – I am one too.’
The dönme are crypto-Jews who worshipped for hundreds of years in the empire, and later in Turkey, under the guise of Islam. Although they call themselves Ma’aminim (‘believers’ in Hebrew, Mümin in Turkish), they are known as ‘donme’, which has a pejorative undertone – ‘converted’ or ‘turncoat’. Their story was one of incredible subterfuge and persistence, and its hero was Sabbatai Sevi, a thirty-nine-year-old Jew from Smyrna who declared himself the Messiah and caused upheaval throughout the empire in the years preceding 1666 - what many believed would be The Year of the Beast’, a kind of Satanic Judgement Day.
Sabbatai Sevi, who was worshipped across the empire from the distant Balkan towns of the west to Aleppo in the south-east, possessed all the peculiarities one would hope for in a self-proclaimed Messiah – a loud and persistent singing voice, bright red hair and amazingly progressive, if ambitious, ideas. He promised to cure women of ‘the curse of Eve’, advocated free love for both sexes and encouraged blasphemy. In the words of Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sabbatai Sevi was ‘clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics.’27
News of these antics – erotic or otherwise – reached Sultan Mehmet IV, who felt compelled first to imprison Sabbatai Sevi for a few months and then to order his execution: a figure declaring himself the Messiah was a gross contravention of the laws by which the caliph allowed other religions to exist under his rule. However, it was not to be. Sabbatai Sevi saved himself by ostentatiously converting to Islam on the advice of a sympathetic Ladino-Ottoman Turkish translator in the sultan’s court, and promptly set sail for Salonika. Most of his flock abandoned him, disgusted by his conversion, but around 300 families followed him to the city, where he vacillated between preaching his newly proclaimed religion of Islam, and a kind of covert, Sufi-infused Judaism. Some of his followers did genuinely convert to Islam; others did not. Before he was banished to a remote Albanian port in 1672, where he soon died, he often travelled to Istanbul, where he advised the Grand Vizier on Judaism while receiving Islamic instruction in return.
What is interesting is the question of how Sabbatai Sevi got away with it, when it would have been easy for the sultan to go ahead with the execution and teach a lesson to other cult leaders. However, such was Sabbatai Sevi’s influence that it is possible the sultan judged it best to avoid a potential insurrection, while taking care to publish the official story that a repentant sinner had converted to Islam. Either way, his legacy prevailed. At the turn of the century, the donme community in Thessaloniki numbered about 15,000. In the 1923 population exchange between Greece and the new Republic of Turkey, they were counted as Muslims, rounded up and sent to Turkey, 400 years after the ancestors came over from Smyrna. There, in a Republic which, although officially secular, was far less accommodating of non-Sunni minorities, the donme were regarded with suspicion and today, they are still targeted by a vague anti-Semitism, as well as something subtler: the disdain felt for people who have betrayed an ancestral faith in order to save themselves.
In Turkey, members of the donme community typically do not find out their identity until they turn eighteen, as my friend Yusuf explained to me.
‘Eighteen is traditionally the time when you’re about to get married, so you’re told to make sure you don’t marry an outsider. But it has to be late because the whole thing is so secretive, you can’t tell children because they might tell someone.’
Yusuf is unmarried, and actually found out by accident.
‘It was weird, Alev. My parents were the least religious people in the world, both of them Marxists actually. I learned the word “Allah” at school, I had never heard it before. Then when I was eighteen this distant cousin from my mother’s side of the family appeared, he must have been in his early thirties – he was crazily into this donme thing. He started inviting me to Shabbat dinners. I had a year of Shabbat dinners, just him and me in his basement. He was on a mission to convert me – and he did, for a while.’
Yusuf proceeded to describe his ‘donme stage’ like someone looking back with amusement at an adolescent punk or pothead stage.
‘For the next couple of years, I was really into being dönme, it sounded super cool to be Jewish. I used to wear the Star of David on a necklace under my shirt, I even went on an exchange programme to Israel and desperately wanted to go to college in Tel Aviv. The funny thing was, all that time I had a photo of Yasser Arafat hanging in my bedroom. That crazy cousin went and lived in a kibbutz in Israel for three years, and he tried to get the rabbis to recognize the dönme but it didn’t work. Then the other dönme got angry at him, and they made sure he couldn’t work in Istanbul. Why? Because they want to stay secretive, not declared like the other Jews. And the Jews don’t like the dönme because they are not ‘proper’Jews.’
I asked him what his parents made of his rebellious dönme stage.
‘My father didn’t care. My mother really liked this cousin but she was very unhappy I was going to these Shabbat dinners. I think if he hadn’t turned up she would never have told me. She wanted to be the last person to know about our dönme history, she wanted that knowledge to die with her. It wasn’t an anti-Semitic thing, she wasn’t ashamed – it was a Marxist thing. She was an atheist and I think she would have been annoyed if I turned out a practising Muslim, or a practising anything, actually.’
Then Yusuf stopped, half-remembering something.
‘But I realized later that – unconsciously, I think – she would tell me stories about Jews when I was a child. For example, she told me that three people made the 20th century: Marx, Einstein and Freud. She was kind of telling me the Jewish story of history. She was mainly friends with non-Muslims too, I guess they had something in common – her best friend, she was properly Jewish, and her other best friend was Armenian.’
I asked Yusuf whether he felt any different when he found out about his family identity
‘I always felt different, when I was growing up. I thought maybe that was because my parents were leftists – there is a sense you’re not the same as others. No one ever told me I was Muslim, it was obvious I was not Muslim. I remember having friends similar to me, but there was always some kind of connection to Islam in their families, some aunt who would go to the mosque, that we didn’t have. Maybe I’m wrong, I am reconstructing memories right now – but all I know is I knew I was different as a child. When I learned that I was dönme, it made total sense.’
Ultimately, Yusuf is mainly interested in his dönme heritage for pragmatic reasons.
You know Sephardic Jews are getting Spanish and Portuguese citizenship? I’m working on it, too, but it’s a real pain in the ass – I am applying for Portuguese because the Portuguese government don’t make you do a language test. It’s harder for dönme to prove they’re Jewish, although apparently, the Turkish government know exactly who the dönme are because in 1942 they put everyone’s religious status on record for the Varlik Vergisi.’
The Varlik Vergisi was a property tax imposed in 1942 by the Turkish Republic after Atatürk’s death on the country’s non-Muslim minorities on the pretext of raising funds for a potential entry into the Second World War. In reality, it was nothing more than an ill-disguised method of transferring businesses and capital to the hands of the Muslim community, a grossly exaggerated version of the taxes imposed by the Ottoman sultans. Armenian Christians were the hardest hit, with assessments that often amounted to many times their net worth, followed by the Jews and Greek Christians who were treated only slightly more leniently (Muslim
s paid a comparitively negligible amount). Some of those who could not pay within the stipulated fifteen days committed suicide; others were sent to labour camps in eastern Anatolia, or fled the country, leaving most of their belongings behind (resulting in a great surplus of antiques in Istanbul, where most minorities lived). The result of the tax was that, as Yusuf pointed out, there was a record of the country’s non-Muslim communities, soon much reduced. Even before the government introduced online access to the state archives, Yusuf had visited the nüfus idaresi [civil registry office] to access his.
‘One of the ways you can prove that you qualify for Portuguese citizenship is that there are known Jewish or dönme institutions – for example, in Nişantaşi in Istanbul there is the Işik Lisesi [a high school founded in 1885 on the secular curriculum established by Atatürk’s old dönme headmaster, Şemsi Efendi]. This is a known dönme establishment and my mum’s dad was their lawyer, so that is proof. Also, certain parts of certain cemeteries are reserved for dönme, everyone knows that. And the Portuguese government accepts that.’
When I ask Yusuf why he is putting himself through all this paperwork, his answer is typically deadpan:
‘It wouldn’t hurt to have an EU passport.’
Another Turkish Jewish friend of mine, Sami, is in his sixties and received his Spanish citizenship in 2015, before the language test requirement was introduced. Over seventies are exempt, but Sami says he has plenty of friends struggling to pass. ‘My friends are in their sixties, trying to learn Spanish, can you imagine?’ Unusually, Sami comes from a mixed Jewish family – his father was an Ashkenazi whose parents had come to Istanbul fleeing a pogrom in Ukraine in the late 1890s. His mother’s Sephardic parents came from Salonika at the turn of the 20th century, along with thousands of other Sephardic Jews who left as nationalist tensions rose.
