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To three good people I love to walk with: Fred, Ira, and Julius
Kamina kon buenos, te hazeras uno de eyos.
Walk with good people and you will become one of them.
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WRITERS
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This is the story of a single Sephardic family whose roots connect them to a
place and community that no longer exist. The place was the port city of
Ottoman Salonica, present-day Thessaloniki, Greece, one of the few cities in
modern Europe ever to claim a Jewish majority. The community was made
up mostly of Ladino- (or Judeo-Spanish) speaking Jews—Sephardic families
who traced their ancestry back to Sepharad, medieval Iberia, from which
they were expelled in the 1490s, but who, for the next five centuries, called
the Ottoman Empire, southeastern Europe, and Salonica home.
Today, the papers of the Levy family are spread across nine countries
and three continents. The single largest collection, the papers of Leon Levy,
is kept by his four grandchildren in a private vault in Rio de Janeiro. It
consists of nearly five thousand handwritten and typed letters, telegrams,
photographs, legal and medical documents, and miscellanea—address books,
expired passports, and more: by far the largest private archive I have
encountered as a professional historian and near obsessive document hunter.
In a suitcase in a spare garage, in a retirement village outside
Johannesburg, there is another repository of Levy family papers. Smaller
than the Rio collection, the South African one is nonetheless of
immeasurable historical value. It includes such cherished souvenirs as a
silhouette cut in Salonica in 1919 capturing the likeness of a young woman
about to emigrate from her native city, never to return.
Other family papers have turned up in private hands in England. One
collection, boxed up in a home in London, has survived multiple migrations,
from Greece to Great Britain to Germany to India, back to Great Britain and
on to the United States. Another, housed in a scenic village outside
Manchester, contains fragile glass slides taken in 1917 in Salonica’s Jewish
cemetery, then the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe.
Yet more documents, photographs, and objects have materialized in
Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Israel,
Italy, Portugal, and the United States: not only family-owned papers, but
documents and photographs held by thirty archives. Travel documents;
naturalization papers; birth, death, and medical records; letters exchanged by
relatives, lovers, and friends; business papers; even a baptismal certificate.
All told, these scattered sources have allowed me to trace an intimate arc of
the twentieth century.
The Levy family papers catalogue the lives and losses of multiple
generations, contain papers written in eight languages, and reflect
correspondence among members of a single family spanning the globe. This
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is a Jewish story, an Ottoman story, a European story, a Mediterranean
story, and a diasporic story, a story of how women, men, and children
experienced wars, genocide, and migration, the collapse of old regimes and
the rise of new nations. The Levy papers also reveal how this family loved
and quarreled, struggled and succeeded, clung to one another and watched
the ties that once bound them slip from their grasp.
As the first papers in the Levy family collections were amassed, around
the time of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), Salonica and its Jewish
community were undergoing an irrevocable transformation. Nationalism
provoked the transition of Salonica from an Ottoman city with a Jewish
plurality to a Greek city with a Christian majority. Emigration drove the
city’s Jews, and the Levy family, across the globe.
Map of the Levy family diaspora
Ladino speakers began to abandon their language in favor of various
adopted tongues. Genocide eradicated 98 percent of the Jews who remained
in Salonica during the Second World War, leaving survivors crippled by one
of the highest rates of annihilation to affect a single community in Europe.
The Levy family lived all this. They knew Salonica when one was more
likely to hear Ladino on the street than any other language. As leading
publishers and editors in the city, they helped chronicle and shape modernity
9
as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews. Wars redrew borders around them,
transforming them from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members moved
across boundaries and hemispheres, with some leaving in optimism and
others in shame. The Holocaust eviscerated their clan, destroying entire
branches of the family tree. The losses that so devastated those left behind
disrupted intimacies and led to new relationships among survivors driven
together by grief, seeking solace in one another and, in some cases,
cooperating to file reparation claims from Germany. Slowly, agonizingly,
they rebuilt.
My encounter with the Levy family has its roots in another book, one I
coedited with my colleague, former teacher, and friend, Aron Rodrigue. In
2012, Aron and I published a translation of the first known Ladino memoir
(Isaac Jerusalmi, zikhrono livrakha [z”l], of blessed memory, served as
translator).1 The memoir was composed by a Levy patriarch, Sa’adi Besalel
Ashkenazi a-Levi (1820–1903), whom contemporaries called Sa’adi.
Sa’adi’s memoir fills ninety-five pages of a humble notebook—the sort of
ledger a small-business owner might use to keep track of expenses. Written
in elegant soletreo, the unique cursive handwriting of Ladino, the pages are
dotted with Hebrew words in calligraphic block letters. The margins show
Sa’adi’s meticulous additions and corrections, some in blue pencil. Sa’adi
would revise and polish the document for a decade, until blindness overtook
him. A lifelong publisher, Sa’adi made this notebook his last and most
intimate creation.
Astonishingly, Sa’adi’s notebook passed through four generations of his
family, traveling from Salonica to Paris, from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, and,
finally, from Rio to Jerusalem—somehow eluding destruction, even in the
face of the dispersal of Sa’adi’s descendants over multiple countries and the
annihilation of Salonica’s Jewish community. Later, after I spent years
grappling with Sa’adi’s words, I wondered what had become of this
remarkable family from Ottoman Salonica.
The slenderest of leads enabled me to write this book. In 1977, Sadi
Silvio (Sylvain) Levy, the great-grandson of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi aLevi, had donated the sole copy of Sa’adi’s memoir to the National Library
of Israel, then known as the Jewish National and University Library.
Because Sephardic Jews tend to name children after living forebears, I
reasoned that names would persist in the Levy family, even in the émigré
outpost of Brazil. The hunch eventually led me to Silvio Vieira Ferreira Levy
—Sa’adi’s Rio-born great-great-grandson. In time, Silvio told me about the
Levy collection in its vault in Rio and, with the blessing of his three siblings,
shared his family’s papers with me. The discovery began a decade-long
historical journey.
The Levy family was known variously across the years. In nineteenth-
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century Ottoman Salonica, when the Levys were among the city’s cultural
elite, they were called a-Levi. (A contemporary Hebrew speaker might
render the name Ha-Levy, but this fails to reflect the pronunciation of
Hebrew among Ladino speakers of the era.) Certain family members who
went to France removed the prefix and added an accent, a stroke that would
testify to their Frenchness: Lévy. Those who moved through Germany
considered embracing Lewy, but, in the end, did not. The Brazilian branch
favored Levy, which would be more recognizable to Portuguese speakers.
Women in the family, meanwhile, adopted married names, all significant to
Sephardic history: Amariglio (Amarilio), Carmona, Errera, Florentin, Hasson,
Matalon, Molho, Salem, Sarfatti, and more.
In this family, as in every family, much remained unspoken, unwritten.
There were facts family members could not know, secrets they would not
tell. The most devastating drama of this book—the ghastly transgressions
and ultimate trial and execution of a Second World War criminal who was
also one of Sa’adi’s great-grandchildren—makes no explicit appearance in
family correspondence. Evidence of this person has also been left out of all
the family trees I have encountered. In the immediate aftermath of the
Holocaust, relatives hinted at the trauma in letters, alluding to conversations
they had had or would have about their disgraced kin. But never did they put
the offender’s name (let alone details of his crimes) in print. This was a
shared secret, not meant for the eyes of a historian.2
Of course, a historian is not charged with perpetuating or concealing her
subjects’ secrets. Still, the discovery of this dark chapter of Levy history has
weighed heavily on me, presenting ethical dilemmas I have struggled to
resolve. Few of Sa’adi’s living descendants could be familiar with this
tortured chapter prior to reading this book. For some, it may prove painful,
for others, a distant scandal. In the end, my decision to tell this anomalous
and disturbing story emerged out of a desire to write as complete and
nuanced a family history as sources permitted. To do less would allow a
sanitized version of the past to prevail over the messy, sometimes ugly,
unshakably human one that resonates with truth.
The Levys wrote each other to give and ask for money, to share
expressions of grief, to announce achievements, to conduct business, and to
reveal secrets. They wrote to maintain connection over time and distance, to
propose marriage, and to plan for divorce. They wrote because they had
regrets and were lonely, at times simply because they were family. Papers
held them together—until distance, time, and history finally tore them apart.
So it is that after a diasporic Sephardic family frays, what remains is the
fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but
paper.
DNA tests and genealogical websites have turned the search for ancestry
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into a booming industry, with spit and computers its essential tools. Yet in an
era of expanding family trees, digital relationships, and instantaneous
communication, writing or receiving letters is something few of us do—or
have ever done, depending on our age. It is uncommon, in today’s world, to
anticipate a letter, to relish its arrival, to stain it with tears, or to pass it to
children or grandchildren as an inheritence. We have infinite ways to
connect. But what have we relinquished, along with family papers?
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OTTOMANS
Those Levys were dangerous. All they needed was an idea to come
to them like a little birdie, and they’d start chasing after it. And
this idea never rested until it became a reality.
—The Memoirs of Doctor Meir Yoel, 19001
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SA’ADI
Does every generation believe it exists at a moment of transition? Looking
around him, Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi saw a world that scarcely
resembled the one into which he was born. Young women and men dressed
differently from their parents, maintained a looser relationship to religion.
New train tracks connected his city, Ottoman Salonica, to Belgrade, and
from there to all of Europe. His children, like so many Jewish youth, spoke
languages a previous generation did not know. They were moving far from
home, assuming new jobs, attempting to realize their own utopian dreams.
Sa’adi’s city, Ottoman Salonica, was among the few cities in the modern
world to have a Jewish plurality, if not a Jewish majority. Jews numbered
between 60,000 and 100,000 of Salonica’s residents in the nineteenth
century, when roughly 50 percent of the city’s residents were Jews.1 The
majority of Salonica’s Jews were Sephardic, descendants of Jews expelled
from medieval Iberia (“Sepharad” in Hebrew) in the late fifteenth century.
Pushed from their homes, these expelled women, men, and children
scattered northward to France and the Spanish Netherlands, and southward
to Morocco. The largest number, however, moved east to the Ottoman
Empire, an expanding state that would, at its height, reach across
southeastern Europe, through the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa,
and eastward to the border of what is today Iran. To the Ottoman lands the
Iberian Jewish exiles brought their religion, their memories, their cultural
practices, and their craft, including printing, which was the a-Levi family
trade. So, too, did the exiles transport their tongue—a Judeo-Spanish
language they sometimes called muestro espanyol, which today is known as
Ladino.2 Over the course of 450 years, Jews became an integral part of the
Ottoman imperial social mosaic. They were particularly influential in cities
like Salonica, where they constituted a large enough group to conduct affairs
in their own language.
When Sa’adi commissioned a scribe to transcribe his memoir, Salonica
was the third most important port in the Ottoman Empire and a link between
Europe and the Levant. The cosmopolitan city, home to Jews, Muslims,
Dönme (descendants of Jews who followed the self-proclaimed messiah
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Shabbetay Sevi into Islam after he converted in 1666), and Greek Orthodox
and other Christians, boasted more than fifty synagogues. The Sabbath was
celebrated on three different days by Salonica’s multisectarian residents.
Still, to its early-twentieth-century Jewish residents, the city was hailed as a
Jewish capital, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.”3 So at ease were Jews in the
city that they could be found praying on the quay, obstructing the path of
pedestrians.4
A Jewish industrial-class, working-class, and middle-class workforce
fueled Salonica’s economy. Jews were prominent among both the stevedores
who manned the port and the women and men, girls and boys who dried
tobacco and shaped bricks in the city’s factories. Jews owned many of the
shops, cafés, and bars that lined Salonica’s streets, and were teachers in the
city’s schools.5 The city’s most popular newspapers were also edited,
printed, and written by Jews, including Sa’adi and his sons. Indeed, the aLevi family introduced printing to Salonica, in much the same fashion as
Sephardic Jews introduced printing to the Ottoman Empire.6
Ottoman Salonica, c. 1860s
Like most of Salonica’s nineteenth-century Jews, Sa’adi counted Ladino
as his mother tongue. It was the language in which he spoke to his wife and
children, wrote his memoir, and published some of his newspapers and the
ephemera that earned him a living. Still, his family line was the product of
intersecting Jewish worlds that merged in Salonica, reaching back to Iberia as
well as to Amsterdam and Italy. As culturally Sephardic as the family came
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to be—and as influential to the shaping of modern Judeo-Spanish letters—
the a-Levi line braided Sephardic (Iberian Jewish) and Ashkenazic
(European Jewish) heritage. The family’s Ashkenazi lineage was for a time
preserved and even flaunted by the family through select customs and
through their use of the surname Ashkenazi, a name common among Jews in
the Balkans and Turkey, which in many cases signaled a non-Sephardic
inheritance. Sa’adi’s father, Besalel a-Levi Ashkenazi, his grandfather Rabbi
Yeuda a-Levi Ashkenazi, and his Amsterdam-born great-grandfather, Besalel
a-Levi Ashkenazi, went by this name, as did Sa’adi himself.7 The next
generation would not emulate this practice, probably out of a desire to
simplify and Westernize their family names.
Sa’adi was losing his vision in the early 1880s when he began composing
his memoir. The work suggests that he was sanguine about many of the
changes that were transforming Jewish Salonica. The city had only recently
spilled over its medieval walls, and its sea walls had been freshly demolished
in favor of a waterfront promenade. New, wealthy districts were being built
on Salonica’s eastern edge, and within the city, water, electricity, paved
streets, and tramlines were updating the urban landscape.8 Sa’adi didn’t
dwell on these developments in his memoir. Nor did he seem terribly
bothered that his children’s generation did not cling to the laws and mores of
the past, that they embraced new political movements and fashions, or that
women and men were both increasingly defiant about traditional gender
roles. None of this fundamentally seemed to disturb Sa’adi—or, at least, this
is not what comes through in his memoir. For Sa’adi was something of a
freethinker. What he could not abide was obstructionism on the part of the
city’s Jewish religious elite. Though religiously observant himself, Sa’adi
believed that Salonica’s rabbis were fearful leaders threatened by modernity.
Sa’adi battled with Salonica’s religious elite throughout his life. He
triggered their ire with words, both sung and written. By vocation Sa’adi was
a printer and editor, by avocation an accomplished composer and singer.
Like his grandfather Rabbi Yeuda a-Levi Ashkenazi, Sa’adi was a virtuoso
of Ottoman Jewish music. His training had come at the feet of two Ottoman
musical masters—one Muslim, the other Jewish—who taught him the full
Ottoman and Jewish repertoires. Sa’adi also practiced and performed with
the maftirim choirs of Salonica. Composed of Jewish, Sufi, and Muslim
musicians, the maftirim performed mystical texts from a variety of
traditions, blending their melodies and composition into a unique (and today
almost lost) art form. The kind of musical blending that Sa’adi excelled at
was quintessentially Ottoman, reflective of the cultural melding that was
inextricable from Salonica’s multiethnic, multisectarian, multilingual
environment.9 Music brought Jews and non-Jews together, allowing them to
share a cultural voice. No wonder it proved an irritant to a rabbinical
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leadership that wished to fortify the boundaries around Judaism.
While still in his teenage years, Sa’adi was commissioned by the head of
one of Salonica’s greatest yeshivas to sing at the wedding of his son. For the
occasion, Sa’adi composed a melody based on a secular Turkish song, to
which he set the kaddish, a traditional Jewish hymn of prayer to God. The
day of the nuptials, the grand synagogue was packed—filled, in Sa’adi’s
words, with “the entire aristocracy of Salonica.” Enter the groom, enveloped
in turban and robes. Sa’adi intoned the words of the kaddish, sending his
newly composed secular melody echoing throughout the sacred building. His
voice had “the purity of crystal, a nuanced and captivating sweetness.”10
The crowd was overwhelmed. All except one. “When [Rabbi Shaul] went
home accompanied by eight to ten of his friends, he removed his cape and
sat on his elevated cushion for some rest.” Asked if he had enjoyed Sa’adi’s
performance, “the sinyor rav hit the roof … saying ‘What a wicked person
to sing a Turkish melody in the synagogue!’”11 To this antimodernist fearful
of losing influence and control, the blurring of musical boundaries, a
celebrated tradition in the Ottoman world, seemed threatening. In Rabbi
Shaul’s eyes, Sa’adi was less a budding maestro than a firebrand. It was not
the only time Sa’adi was threatened with excommunication (or even corporal
punishment) for singing “à la turka.”
Sa’adi’s work as a publisher placed him in a still more combative
relationship with Salonica’s religious elite. He entered the publishing world at
the young age of thirteen, when he inherited a ramshackle printing press
from his father, Besalel a-Levi Ashkenazi. Sa’adi’s father, thirty-six at the
time of his death, had inherited the press from his own grandfather, the first
in Sa’adi’s paternal line to migrate to Salonica, from Amsterdam, in 1731.
Already the family line was being preserved in print: some of the titles
Sa’adi’s father published, presumably with his brothers, bore the Hebrew
imprint “Sons of Besalel,” or “Orphans of Besalel,” in recognition of the
Amsterdam-born patriarch who brought the family to publishing.12
Sa’adi’s father died when Sa’adi was still an infant. The family printing
house was run by employees—but barely. Revenues were low, the staff not
very competent. With family finances shaky, Sa’adi’s mother entered the
workforce. The a-Levi matriarch is never named by her son in his memoir,
despite the outsized role she played for her family. Born in the eighteenth
century, she was a seamstress and early aficionado of clothing in the
“European style,” though she and her husband wore traditional dress.
Sa’adi’s memoir offers detailed depictions of men’s and women’s clothing.
Traditional clothing in the Salonican Jewish context, his memoir teaches,
entailed, for women, a kofya, head covering, and a devantal, a long silk
shirt, tight at the bodice, covered by an antari, a close-fitting kaftan with
wide sleeves or, for men, a turban, round cap, or fez, and a belted antari
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with a long fur boa. European clothing such as Sa’adi’s mother produced
placed men in long trousers, a shirt with a high, stiff collar, and a frock coat.
Women’s clothing favored floor-length skirts, small tight waists, and highnecked blouses.
Sa’adi’s mother had been taught to sew in the European style by her
mother, who had in turn learned from her mother, an immigrant to Salonica
from Italy. Sa’adi describes watching his mother conduct business out of the
home, whisking her young daughters away from the peering eyes of male
clients when necessary. Word of her skill spread rapidly through Salonica.
“In an age when there were no sewing machines, all the work was done by
hand,” Sa’adi recalled. “All the consulates in Salonica and other high-placed
personalities, as well as all the business people, wore her shirts, the outcome
of her handiwork.”13 At the height of her business, Sa’adi’s mother was
employing three of her own daughters and three additional helpers. In four
weeks’ time, the seven could hand-sew eight dozen shirts.
Sa’adi may not have seen fit to record in his memoir his mother’s name,
or that of his maternal grandmother, who provided his mother with an
informal education in the needle trade. Still, the impact of these women on
the course of the family’s history was deep. Sa’adi’s mother’s business
acumen and skill as a seamstress saved Sa’adi and her other children from
poverty in the early nineteenth century. Her talent then passed to her
daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters, one of whom would
rescue her own family from financial ruin in the mid-twentieth century by
using these same skills.
It is sometimes assumed that Mediterranean Jewish families were
essentially patriarchal and hierarchal, with the father’s word akin to law, and
family honor sacred.14 While there is some truth to this generality, the image
painted by the Levys is more intimate and complex. As early as the
eighteenth century, women took an active role in providing for the present
and in charting a future course for this family. They continued to command
authority in the centuries that followed, leaving a documentary trail that was
unusually robust for women of their day.
Despite her pioneering ways, Sa’adi’s mother was a creature of her times,
prone to its ravages as well as its opportunities. Early mortality was the norm
rather than the exception; Sa’adi’s mother died before his teenage years were
over. Barely educated, Sa’adi poured himself into that quintessentially
Ottoman Jewish trade, printing, filling the hole in the family business his
father had vacated years earlier, upon his death. Sa’adi learned to cast font
and claimed to have produced personally 30,000 to 40,000 letters in Rashi
script—the letters used in printed Ladino until the language was informally
and inconsistently Romanized in the 1920s.15 In time, Sa’adi acquired the
press of a competitor, along with two handpresses, twenty molds with
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matrices, and hundreds of sheets for casting. Over the course of sixty-five
years the family press would produce a staggering quantity and range of
printed works in Ladino, Hebrew, and French: everything from gilded
wedding invitations to rabbinical commentary, the Zohar (a compendium of
Jewish mystical writing), and Salonica’s most popular fin-de-siècle
newspapers, the Ladino-language La Epoka and the French-language Le
Journal de Salonique. Much of this work Sa’adi did with his four sons,
David, Besalel, Shemuel Sa’adi, and Hayyim—Kitapçı Hayyim, as he was
known by the Ottoman Turkish nickname that associated him with his job:
Hayyim the bookseller.
There were fourteen children in all, five with the unidentified first wife of
Sa’adi’s who died young, and nine with his second wife, Esther. Sa’adi’s
memoir offers shockingly little description of his wives, lavishing far more
attention on the rabbis he enraged than on the women with whom he built a
family. His memoir touches with an equally light hand on his children, who
were adolescents, young adults, and adults at the time of his writing.
Studio portrait of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi and his unidentified
second wife, c. 1890s
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The fourteen children were born over roughly twenty-five years. The
dating is imprecise because, as Sa’adi warns, like most Jews of his era, he
“neglected” chronology. “That is why I failed to keep track of my children’s
birth dates,” he confesses. Three of Sa’adi’s children would not reach
adulthood. Two boys succumbed to cholera at a very young age, the first
passing while his father was sweating off the fever. By the time the disease
reached the second son, it took only two hours to run its course. A third son
died in his teenage years, after a botched surgery.
Sa’adi’s children who came to maturity, like the children of Sholem
Aleichem’s fictional Tevye, walked down all the paths modernity offered
Jews, for the centrifugal force was no less strong in turn-of-the-century
Salonica than in Boiberik. If Tevye’s six fictional daughters are caricatures of
the possibilities that branched out before Russian Jews of the turn of the
twentieth century, Sa’adi’s children walked the byways favored by modern
Sephardic Jews. One daughter, Rachel, worked as a teacher for the Alliance
Israélite Universelle, a Franco-Jewish philanthropic organization that
provided hundreds of young Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish
women with a secular education and an entrée into the formal workforce.
One son, Shemuel Sa’adi, became an impassioned political commentator,
throwing himself into his father’s business, publishing, and using the family’s
(and, later, his own) newspapers as a mouthpiece for his eclectic opinions.
Fortunée, another daughter, moved to Manchester, one of several Sephardic
émigré centers abroad. Three more of Sa’adi’s children would emigrate in
turn. Another son, David, stayed behind, weathering the transition from
Ottoman to Greek rule and serving first as an Ottoman bureaucrat and
subsequently as a high-ranking official for the Jewish Community of
Salonica. Not one of Sa’adi’s children married a non-Jew, as did Tevye’s
Chava—yet the children gradually assimilated into various adopted milieus,
such that their own children would grow up worlds apart even if still, for the
most part, Jewish.
Loyalty to French culture; the embrace of innovative politics; emigration;
an investment in Ottoman and post-Ottoman society; measured assimilation
—these were the boulevards that beckoned Sephardic youth at the fin de
siècle. There is, too, the undocumented path taken by Hayyim, Fakima,
Doudoun, and Djentil, children of Sa’adi about whom I found very little.
Like so many Sephardic lives, theirs remain obscure—though their
descendants found a way into this book. Finally, two of Sa’adi’s children—
both in their advanced years—died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In
this, too, they were typical of their community.
As Sa’adi and Esther’s children came of age in mid-nineteenth-century
Salonica, the parents made a crucial decision. Conformists offered daughters
scant formal education and sent sons to receive religious training at a meldar
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or Talmud Torah, schools for Jewish learning. “A meldar was a room with a
couch in a neighbor’s courtyard,” noted a Ladino memoirist of the period.
“On the couch, some benches, and the floor, sixty or seventy children sat or
crouched … pushing, pulling, pinching, or biting each other, until the teacher
would see them and yell, ‘Scoundrels! Bastards! Rascals!’”16 In Sa’adi’s
memoir, he condemned the Talmud Torah for cultivating self-indulgent
young men committed to nothing but “months of merrymaking.” The
school’s graduates, Sa’adi complained, awoke each day late in the afternoon
and passed their time hunting and “going from coffeehouse to coffeehouse
and from picnic to picnic on allowances they received from their parents.”17
Sa’adi, culturally progressive, if traditional from a religious point of view,
charted his own path. The a-Levis were not wealthy, even if the family was
a visible part of Salonica’s non-rabbinical Jewish cultural elite. Sa’adi
leveraged this status to secure a bourgeois existence for his offspring. With
his friend Moise Allantini, a wealthy philanthropist and freethinker, Sa’adi
helped establish the first school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in
Salonica in 1873. The brainchild of the Franco-Jewish elite, the Alliance
offered Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish children rigorous
instruction in French, according to the educational norms of the FrancoJewish bourgeoisie. In hundreds of classrooms and schools segregated by
gender, Alliance students, both female and male, studied secular subjects,
including French and Hebrew, literature and math, as well as religion and
Jewish history. They were also offered moral instruction—advised not to
smoke or drink, and not to play backgammon or converse in Ladino, their
native tongue, which the Alliance hoped they would abandon in favor of
French.18 Sa’adi enrolled at least four of his children—two daughters,
Fortunée and Rachel, and two sons, David and Shemuel Sa’adi—in
Salonica’s new school. The siblings were among Salonica’s first Alliance
graduates.
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Alliance Israélite Universelle boys’ school, Salonica, 1912
The imprint an Alliance education had upon the children is depicted
vividly in their handwriting: or, at least, in the pen of three of the four—
Shemuel Sa’adi, always in a hurry, had the most inelegant penmanship of his
siblings. Their French is virtually native, the writing a touch formal. Each
letter is dated in the upper right corner, with the place of writing named.
Numbers appear in the French style, margins are even, punctuation is
perfect, accents are precise. Were it not for the addition of Ladino phrases
here and there—and, of course, the content—one could assume the
correspondents had come of age in the French Republic. The a-Levi children
were distinguished students, marked by drive and passion. At least three
were invited, upon graduation from high school, to enroll in the Alliance’s
elite teacher-training college in Paris, the École Normale Israelite Orientale.
The choice each made (or that was made for them) proved a tributary of
sorts, carrying them on an ever-swifter current, toward different seas.
As his children came of age, Sa’adi sharpened his public persona, using
the printing press he operated with his sons to denounce the rabbinical
establishment of Salonica as abusive, fanatical, and exploitative of the poor.
A frequent target was the rabbinical tax on kosher meat—the very same
charge that the breakaway Hasidic movement of eighteenth-century Eastern
Europe launched against the reigning religious establishment there.
Threatened by Sa’adi’s accusations, Salonica’s religious elite, Chief Rabbi
Asher Kovo at its head, fought with what remaining weapon it had, a writ of
herem or excommunication. The writ was issued against both Sa’adi and his
eldest son, Hayyim, in the child’s case on trumped-up charges of smoking on
the Sabbath in violation of Jewish law. On a climactic day in 1874, the
22
rabbi’s henchmen dragged and chased Sa’adi and Hayyim through the streets
of Salonica, a mob of five hundred at their heels. The city’s streets were
then narrow and labyrinthine, lined with buildings in the Ottoman style. One
can imagine their wooden balconies alive with onlookers, witnesses to
Sa’adi’s humiliation. The a-Levi home was ransacked in the melee. Father
and son were spared physical harm only after the intervention of a wealthy
friend who succeeded in reasoning with the mob.
Children in Salonica’s Upper Town, 1907
Though the throng dispersed, the herem remained in place. Technically a
writ of excommunication was meant to cut off the accused from the Jewish
community, preventing him from joining a minyan (Jewish prayer quorum)
or engaging in commercial or social transactions with other Jews. In Sa’adi’s
case, members of the community were warned against patronizing the family
press, employees left the family firm, and Sa’adi himself stopped attending
synagogue for a time. And yet, the impact of the herem seems only to have
23
galvanized Sa’adi’s supporters—and his own radicalism. Shortly after his
excommunication, Sa’adi traveled to Vienna to obtain new letter blocks in
Rashi and Latin fonts. It was the farthest he would travel in his lifetime.
Upon his return to Salonica, Sa’adi inaugurated the city’s first Ladinolanguage newspaper, La Epoka. With his sons at his side, he would publish
the newspaper for sixteen years, using it to give voice to his progressive
sensibilities and myriad grievances. “They fired a cannonball at me,” he later
wrote, “I fired back in kind.”
If, in practical terms, the blow wrought by the herem was slight,
psychologically its impact was heavy. Though a critic of rabbinical excess,
Sa’adi observed Jewish law, and his excommunication disturbed him deeply.
In fact, it was a trauma that stayed with him all his life. Out of anger and a
desire to clear his name, Sa’adi began to compose his memoir. He could not
have imagined how far the document would travel, let alone that it would
inspire this history.
24
RACHEL
Sa’adi’s daughter Rachel (1862–1948) favored violet ink. Her letters are
lined with the vibrant color, their rhythms charted with a steady hand. I turn
to her next not because she was Sa’adi’s eldest—this honor went to Hayyim,
who earlier had the alleged sins of his excommunicated father visited upon
him—but because her writing is the oldest of the family’s to have been
preserved, save Sa’adi’s own.
If Sa’adi’s publishing legacy passed from father to son, the family’s
indomitable and sometimes headstrong spirit passed equally from mother to
daughter. For decades, Rachel served as a teacher for the Alliance Israélite
Universelle, compelled by terms of employment to narrate her career
through letters. The Alliance meticulously preserved every letter it received
from its students, principals, and teachers, storing them in folders neatly
classified by person and place in its Paris archive. Rachel and her husband,
Elie, wrote hundreds of letters back to the Alliance over their decades of
service, their missives mailed from professional posts across the
Mediterranean. The letters strike a surprisingly intimate tone. Rachel left
home at an early age and the Alliance became a surrogate family, with which
she was obliged to correspond.
Rachel was a dutiful daughter of the Alliance, and she traveled the
farthest of any of her siblings—distances unimaginable to most Ottoman
women of the time. Yet her professional life was marked by struggles with
her employers, and though the Alliance awarded her a medal for her service,
Rachel retired dissatisfied. Personality played a role in Rachel’s ups and
downs, to be sure: then again, her work placed her in a series of untenable
situations. Rachel taught through epidemics and political turmoil and in the
face of community upheaval. Her finances and marriage were both tested
because of her service to the Alliance, and despite their advanced degrees
the couple lived close to poverty. Rachel boldly embraced a modernist
project, but the embrace proved chilly and unyielding.
Rachel was fifteen or sixteen years old when she graduated from
Salonica’s Alliance school. An excellent student, she was invited by the
organization to pursue teacher training in Paris, at the École Normale
25
Israélite Orientale. Rachel’s training there would have been expensive,
putting a financial strain upon the family. To shoulder the burden, Sa’adi and
his wife had to have believed strongly in the advantages of graduate
education for their eldest daughter.
One might imagine that a late-nineteenth-century Jewish family would be
loath to let a daughter travel so far. The a-Levis, however, were unusually
open-minded. Like other progressive Jewish families of the era (including
those in the Ashkenazi sphere), they were often more willing to expose
daughters than sons to novel ideas, readings, and environments.1 Ironically,
this reflected their conviction that girls did not have the drive, ambition, or
intelligence to stray. It also suggests how fully the a-Levi family had
embraced the message of the Alliance, which promised education and social
mobility. Paris, though geographically distant, had been offered up to
Sa’adi’s children as an intimate place—a cultural nursery.2 When another
Alliance student of the period learned that she had been selected to study at
the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris, she wrote that while she
would miss her childhood home, she would “jump for joy” upon seeing
Paris, a “dear city” she had loved since childhood, despite never having
visited it.3 For this girl, as for Rachel, pursuing an education at the École
Normale Israélite Orientale was at once bold and the natural result of choices
she and her family had made years earlier.
It would take another decade before train tracks allowed a rapid, threeday journey from Salonica to Paris.4 Rachel must have traveled by
steamship when she arrived there in 1877, not yet married and prepared for
two years of training. At the time, the French Third Republic was in its
infancy: the city was preparing for the 1878 World’s Fair, where Alexander
Graham Bell’s telephone, the head of the Statue of Liberty, and a human
zoo of four hundred “indigenous people” were all on display. Rachel, who
was in Paris to study, had modest funds, scant free time, and even less
independence. There would be no World’s Fair for her. The Alliance kept its
protégés under strict supervision.
A photograph of Rachel at eighteen years of age, taken upon her
graduation, pictures her holding what appears to be her diploma and
betraying the sober, practical look of a teacher.5 The studio portrait presents
a one-dimensional story of an educated young woman. It does not tell of the
strains of modernity, which both availed opportunities to Sephardic women
and simultaneously imposed novel constraints upon them. Rachel’s
education liberated her from restrictions that had bound her mother’s
generation, releasing her, also, from the rabbis who had challenged her
father. Nevertheless, the eighteen-year-old was now under a new, equally
patriarchal authority: the Alliance, and with it, the ideals of the Western
European Jewish bourgeoisie.6 Despite the distance Sa’adi’s daughter would
26
travel, her path was determined by her superiors, and she often chafed at
this. Her dilemma was the need to struggle with the force that purported to
free her.
Rachel a-Levi Carmona, 1880
Rachel’s path took her to settings her father couldn’t have imagined. Her
first post was at a girls’ school in Ortaköy, a poor Jewish neighborhood of
Istanbul. Rachel’s colleague Gabriel Arié, director of the neighboring Alliance
boys’ school, described Rachel as “very pleasant.” The couple became
close, yet Arié, by his own admission, was too young for marriage. He also
found Rachel’s ways “a bit too free.” Nevertheless (or, perhaps, all the
more) Arié considered the two years he spent in Ortaköy with Rachel as
among the happiest of his life.7 The very idea of premarital socializing
between women and men was new to Rachel’s generation. Sa’adi, by
contrast, met his wife for the first time upon the marital altar, her face red
and swollen from prenuptial waxing.8
Rachel’s friendship with Arié sheds light on her independent spirit. Still,
27
much of her life followed a script set by her family and the Alliance. Before
assuming her second post, Rachel married Elie Carmona, another graduate
of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, a child of Istanbul who was a few
years Rachel’s senior. The pair had much in common, in addition to their
educational background. Both came from publishing and writing families,
with the Carmonas building a small empire of newspapers in Istanbul, much
as the a-Levis did in Salonica.9 With Rachel and Elie’s union, a significant
publishing alliance between the families emerged. Through marriage, Rachel
found a way to honor the house of the a-Levis and the Alliance at the same
time.
Over the decades that followed, Rachel and Elie would travel across the
Levant in the employ of the Alliance, working as a teacher and school
director (in Elie’s case) and as a teacher (in Rachel’s), in Tétouan (in
Morocco); in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem (in Ottoman Syria); in
Shumen, Ruschuk, Plovdiv, and Tatar-Pazarjik (in Ottoman Bulgaria); in
Izmir (in Ottoman Anatolia); and in Serres, Kavála, and Yanya (Ioannina) (in
Ottoman Macedonia). In their first three years of marriage, they moved at
least three times.
The couple’s first joint appointment placed them in the Ottoman port of
Ruschuk. This was the city of Elias Canetti, future winner of the Nobel
Prize in Literature, whose family was among the founders of Ruschuk’s
Jewish community. Canetti offers this description of the town: “Ruschuk, on
the lower Danube, where I came into the world, was a marvelous city for a
child, and if I say that Ruschuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate
picture of it. For people of the most varied backgrounds lived there, on any
one day you could hear seven or eight languages.”10 The cultural variety
Canetti describes did not ease Rachel’s arrival. Brought to Ruschuk to
assume a position in the Alliance girls’ school, Rachel found the school
shuttered and Jewish families hesitant to enroll their daughters. Even as
enrollment climbed (there were one hundred twenty girls studying in the
Alliance school two years after Rachel’s arrival), the majority of families
proved unable to pay their fees and the majority of students were too young
to study. Rachel persevered. She proposed that some of her pupils enter
Bulgarian public school, so that they could learn the Bulgarian language and
occupational skills. At the same time, Rachel wed her mother’s ability with
sewing to her own professional expertise, opening a vocational class in
dressmaking for girls. The class turned a profit, but failed to find favor with
parents. Alliance parents, it seems, hoped education would produce loftier
options for their daughters. To her employers in Paris, Rachel complained
that she was faced daily with threats and insults, and that all she was granted
in return for her labor was disdain and ingratitude. Strained finances
compounded the problem: both she and Elie received low and intermittent
28
wages.11
By the early 1880s, Rachel had given birth to a daughter. Whether due to
the stress of her employment or undernourishment, she found herself unable
to produce the requisite milk to nurse. Beside herself, Rachel demanded to
be relocated. “I am a mother,” she wrote her employers, “and though
privation has become a habit for me, I do not want my infant to suffer.”12
When the Alliance acquiesced, moving the Carmonas to Tatar-Pazarjik (a
backwater compared to the thriving Danube port of Ruschuk), Rachel called
it a “miserable little place.” The post extended to three difficult years, the
time marked by Rachel with a flow of increasingly distraught letters.
Typhoid racked the town, and the whole family became sick in turn. Matters
reached a crisis point when Elie was accused of attempting to rape the
daughter-in-law of the rabbi, a young woman who had become close to
Rachel. Rachel declared the situation “totally insupportable.”13 The
Carmonas had lost their professional credibility; their marriage, too, must
have suffered. Elie and Rachel were relocated to the small Bulgarian town of
Shumla. Rachel may have been relieved to distance herself from TatarPazarjik. Still, she fretted that in Shumla, she was sure to perish from
boredom alone.14
At least in southeastern Europe, Rachel’s students were Judeo-Spanish
speakers, and of a cultural milieu reasonably similar to her own. At her next
post, in Morocco, Rachel shared no language with the bulk of her Arabicspeaking pupils, though she could communicate with some in Haketia, the
particular form of Judeo-Spanish preserved in northern Morocco. Further,
the family’s arrival in December 1900 coincided with a famine and the
outbreak of a civil war. In the spring of 1903, as violence raged in Tétouan,
Morocco, Elie wrote his superiors a series of despairing letters and
telegrams. Schools were deserted as families fled the city for the relative
peace of the countryside. Tétouan’s European population was being
evacuated, panic was everywhere, violence raged just outside the Carmonas’
Alliance residence. Ignoring the Alliance’s rigid directive that they stay and
render themselves useful to the Jewish poor of Tétouan, Elie, Rachel, and
their young daughter fled to the port, only to be denied the chance to leave.
“Our existence has become intolerable,” wrote Elie.15
No sooner had tensions subsided in Tétouan than the Alliance central
office fielded a letter of complaint against the Carmonas. The disgruntled
writer claimed that the pair were eating non-kosher meat in their home and
beating their students in school. Rachel, the letter confided, had applied
pepper oil to the mouths of those who misbehaved.16 The letter reeked of
paranoia and its lurid accusations undermined its own credibility. Still, the
Alliance could ill afford a whiff of scandal, and Rachel, at least, sensed that
her employers were not on her side. Within the year, the Carmonas were
29
reassigned to Yanya (Ioannina), in Ottoman Macedonia, and, some years
later, to Beirut, where Rachel facilitated a visit of the chief rabbi of the
Ottoman Empire.17
Trials were a through line of Rachel’s many decades with the Alliance.
When the Carmonas arrived in Damascus with their young children in 1891,
it was in the midst of a cholera epidemic like the one that had killed Rachel’s
half brothers some decades earlier. Decades later, they were in the Ottoman
town of Kavala through the violent Bulgarian occupation that attended the
Balkan Wars.18 Rachel and Elie were trapped in conflict-ridden Tétouan
when Rachel would have received the news that her father, Sa’adi, had died.
Given the distance and slow pace of communications, she must have missed
his burial in Salonica and the shiva that followed. Across their varied posts,
Rachel and her husband lived a spare existence, particularly after Elie’s
father’s death left him to serve as father to his seven younger siblings.19
Rachel and Elie survived from paycheck to paycheck—and at times even
this was not enough. When Elie temporarily lost his job with the Alliance,
the meager monthly stipend the organization paid Rachel did not cover the
couple’s rent. When Elie died in 1932, he apologized to Rachel for
abandoning her without resources. “At least I leave you with two children,”
he wrote in a final letter, “and [our son-in-law] Ralph is so good and so
solicitous that he will take care of you.”
At the time Rachel retired, she lamented that she had never received the
full respect of her superiors in Paris. Even when the secretary of the Alliance
Israélite Universelle attempted to soften his tone, his words to Rachel were
sharp, as in this crudely edited letter of 1906: “Whether out of negligence or
ineptitude/For one reason or another, the schools where you practiced have
almost always collapsed under your direction and never progressed.”20 The
secretary’s choice not to retype the handwritten missive was unkind. The
organization preferred to pin its failures on individual teachers rather than
concede the burden it placed upon them. Though Rachel did eventually
receive a medal of recognition from the Alliance, she found this recognition
slight, given her lifetime of service.21
Yet Rachel was treasured by her family for some of the very same
reasons she seemed to irk her employers. She was direct to a fault, her
criticisms unvarnished. In family letters, Rachel could skillfully encapsulate a
character in a line or two, with a preference for the unflattering. “Suzanne is
louche,” “Besalel is always suffering.” Rachel’s supervisors bristled at her
tone: her professional letters are dotted with the marginal comments of her
superiors noting occasional pique at her suggestions, complaints, and
demands. But family members admired Rachel’s straightforward nature.
Rachel’s brother Shemuel Sa’adi described his and his siblings’ affection for
her as exceptionally deep, conveying that he viewed her as a maternal figure.
30
Her sister-in-law Renée spoke of her as a “true mother.”22 Rachel’s nephew
Leon celebrated her vibrant spirit. Rachel’s daughter Carola was extremely
close to her mother, faithfully nursing her through various bouts of illness. In
his will, Rachel’s husband, Elie, addressed her as “My much loved wife.”
Rachel was distinguished by her plainspokenness and candor. She was
inclined to articulate what no one else could perceive, or was willing to say.
31
SHEMUEL SA’ADI / SAM
Rachel and Fortunée’s brother Shemuel Sa’adi (1870–1959) was the Zelig of
the a-Levi family, capable of adjusting to a staggering array of historical
events in the course of his long life. Fittingly, he was the first a-Levi to
modify the prefix of his father, adopting the surname Lévy in place of the
more traditional formulation, and later going by Sam in place of his given
first names. Though he altered the family name, Shemuel clearly inherited
his father’s hot blood. Fearless, politically passionate, frequently outraged by
perceived slights, the self-proclaimed hero of all his own stories, Shemuel
could ruffle feathers. But his relentlessness was also a force in the life of the
family.
His education began conservatively, in a Jewish middle school where he
studied the Bible and Jewish liturgy. This was followed by a six-year stint at
Salonica’s Alliance school, where Shemuel delved into the study of French,
Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Hebrew. Shemuel was invited by the Alliance to
continue his education in Paris. This was an honor for boys as well as for
girls and Shemuel’s path could have followed that of his sister Rachel, who
spent so many decades working for the institution. Family finances were
tight, however, and Sa’adi strove to keep his sons in the family business.
With the help of his elder brother David, Shemuel obtained entry as a
boarder in the newly opened Ottoman imperial lycée of Salonica.
This was an usual choice for a Jew of his generation. Fluency in Ottoman
Turkish (let alone in the Ottoman literary canon) was rare among Jews at
this time. At the Lycée, Shemuel was one of five Jewish students out of a
total of three hundred. And none of the Jewish students boarded at the
lycée, as opposed to the Muslim students, who did live there.1 Shemuel was
given the Ottoman Turkish nickname Kemal, and “learned classical Turkish
literature better than my Muslim peers,” so much so that he was mistaken
for a Muslim Turk by a delegate of the minister of education.2 Had his
temperament been more mellow, Shemuel would surely have graduated with
high honors. But disagreements with classmates and teachers interrupted his
studies, and Shemuel was forced to finish his education elsewhere.
Upon graduation from high school, Shemuel balanced work for the family
32
firm with a job at the state-financed Anatolian Railway Company, a position
he bitterly disliked. He would have dressed for work each day like a family
friend, who wore “a starched collar, a melon hat, peg-leg trousers and a
fitted jacket buttoned up to the neck, as was the fashion.”3 Certainly his
clothing would have been quite unlike that of his more traditional father—or,
for that matter, his brother David, whose service to the empire required a
fez. At the Railroad Office, Shemuel’s company sought to link Salonica to
other regional centers, including Edirne, Istanbul, and Sofia—but his eyes
were on Paris, a city he visited for the first time in 1893.
Shemuel’s second visit coincided with one of the most important episodes
of turn-of-the-century European Jewish history, the Dreyfus Affair. The
cause célèbre arose after Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young Alsatian officer of
Jewish descent, was falsely accused in 1894 of passing secrets to the
German Embassy in Paris. At the time of Shemuel’s arrival, Dreyfus had
been tried and convicted and was languishing in prison on a sweltering island
in French Guiana. France roiled in his absence, dividing in two over the
question of his guilt or innocence. Dreyfus supporters argued the captain had
been framed, while his critics fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. Shemuel,
who was studying law at the Sorbonne, lived with a friend in a cheap
storeroom, subsisting on crusts of bread and pommes frites.
“We entered the fray head-on, especially Shemuel,” remembered his
roommate. “He couldn’t sleep at night if he hadn’t come to blows that day
with some anti-Dreyfusard. There were many times when we returned to
our twelve-francs-a-month storeroom with blackened eyes, bloody noses,
and impressive bumps on our foreheads.”4 Shemuel left Paris with a
renewed passion for French Republicanism, and an embrace of that which
his Alliance teachers (and father) held dear: the redemptive value of the
liberal ideal, the practical advantage of a French education, the sense that
Jews should support other Jews even as they aspired to be model citizens of
modern nations.
Throughout the Paris period, Shemuel continued his collaboration with
his father and brothers, though his diary suggests that distance and
experience left him judgmental of his brothers’ intellect and the informal
style of Ladino journalism.5 But on the occasion of his father’s retirement in
1898, Sam allowed himself to be pulled home (he had not been back for two
years at this point) to take a more active role in the family business. Once
more in Salonica, he assumed editorial direction of the family’s flagging
Ladino-language newspaper La Epoka and, a few months later, the Frenchlanguage Le Journal de Salonique. On the masthead of La Epoka, he
introduced himself as Sam Lévy—the name by which he would be known
for the rest of his life.
The Salonica to which Sam returned was increasingly prosperous and
33
modern. The stores were well stocked, the quay crowded with pedestrians.
Carriages rolled by, the streetcar’s call was loud and frequent. Outdoor
tables were crowded at the many cafés where one could order a raki, nibble
meze, debate politics—and riffle through a well-thumbed French- or Ladinolanguage newspaper for news of the world.6
Sabri Pasha Street, 1910
Ladino-language journalism was a relatively young institution at the turn
of the century, and Sa’adi and his sons were among its pioneers. The
Ladino- and French-language newspapers they edited were improvisational
in style. Until the early twentieth century, editors frequently composed letters
to the editor under pseudonyms. Contributions by “correspondents” from
distant cities and countries were often written by the editors themselves.
Exclamation points abounded. Yet the notion that ordinary readers could
acquire the day’s news in a language they understood was still radical. And
newspapers provided more than news. Full of advertisements for the latest
fashions, scientific and health exposés, serialized fiction translated from
numerous world languages—newspapers were, then as now, an education.7
34
Ladino and French newspapers were, additionally, among the most
important places for Ottoman Jews to debate the welter of political
considerations that confronted them at the turn of the century. In the pages
of La Epoka and Le Journal de Salonique, as in the pages of rival
newspapers, editors and letters to the editors defended and decried a
staggering number of political alternatives, particularly after the lifting of
censorship that followed the Young Turk revolution of 1908. Would Jews’
security and future be best served by socialism, Zionism, the bourgeois and
reform-minded goals of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, or regional
nationalism of one form or another? Ought they to cast their lot in with
Ottomanism and affiliate with their multireligious empire?
Nowhere did these debates rage as boisterously as in Salonica, where,
under Sam’s watch, Le Journal de Salonique and La Epoka emerged as
voices of progress. The newspapers’ broad agendas embraced the idea that
Ottoman Jews ought to modernize themselves and their culture and emulate
Western educational norms, the French language, and a secular worldview—
all the while remaining Ottomanists, faithful citizens of their multiethnic
empire. Sam’s temporary penchant for socialism left its fingerprints on the
family newspapers, too. His affiliation with the Worker’s Federation of
Salonica and his labor organizing for Salonica’s enormous tobacco industry
translated into a flurry of articles on the needs and rights of the working
class. Sam would soon abandon this position, defending employers’ rights
and lambasting the Federation.8
Brief as Sam’s socialist period was, it led him to a position he would
maintain all his life—his defense of Ladino, the language of Salonica’s
Jewish masses. In the Ottoman Balkans, as in Eastern Europe and the
United States, Jewish socialists learned to appreciate the power of the Jewish
mother tongue for organizing and activism.9 Sam’s respect for the Ladino
language rendered him unique among Ladino editors of the day, as the
Judeo-Spanish language was an object of ridicule for many other Ottoman
Jewish newspapers. In the pages of La Epoka, by contrast, the Sephardic
language was celebrated and championed as a modern language on par with
any other.
Sam’s most effective means of communication was the editorial. He
always had a point to make, and his editorials, like his letters, are emphatic if
repetitive and unruly. He once described himself as having “an impulsive and
argumentative character,” which strikes me as a just self-assessment.10 I
imagine him writing feverishly in a bar or café, his pages stained with traces
of coffee, his fingers spotted with ink.
Publishing in the Ottoman Empire was often a family affair, and the
Levys (like other publishing families) were susceptible to the business’s
strains. Income from paying subscribers always lagged behind what was
35
needed to keep a newspaper afloat. And the Ottoman censor’s hand was
always felt, even if a bit more lightly in the world of Ladino letters than in
Ottoman Turkish, French, or Greek. Nevertheless, in 1905, two years after
the death of his father and shortly before the birth of his daughter, Sam
temporarily relocated his young family to the small Austro-Hungarian town
of Zemun (Semlin, now a suburb of Belgrade), in order to evade the
censor’s reach.11 There Sam founded two new newspapers, the Ladinolanguage El Luzero and the French-language Le Rayon, both intended
primarily for readers in Salonica.
Sam Lévy, from El djiro del mundo kon sinko metalikes (Salonica, 1905)
At the time of his move to Zemun, Sam was newly married to his niece
Anna Barouch, daughter of his father’s sister Sol. Marriage among close
relations was common at the time for Sephardic Jews. Sam, seventeen years
older than his wife, had been called upon to serve as Anna’s escort on
various trips across Europe (some of which included extended stays in
foreign capitals) when she was still a teenager. Anna’s mobility is a sign that
her parents were broad-minded and reasonably well-off. Anna’s own mother
had “traveled the world, from Istanbul to Alexandria, and from Cairo to
Jerusalem.” Sam and Anna’s daughter Suzanne later remembered her
grandmother as a magnetic raconteur who favored Stendhal’s The Red and
the Black, half singing, half telling the story of love and betrayal over the
course of many nights in order to make her way to the end.12 Anna, one can
infer, was every bit her husband’s equal.
Though Sam had moved to Zemun to avoid the Ottoman censor, he
36
would find the Austrian one still more meddlesome. His new newspapers
were shut down soon after they opened, and this propelled Sam, Anna, and
their first and only child back home to Salonica just months after they had
left. This meant they were in the city to celebrate the Young Turk revolution
of 1908, with whose reformist leaders, the Committee of Union and
Progress, Sam allied himself. Once it had assumed power, the Committee of
Union and Progress reinstated the thwarted Ottoman constitution of 1876
and legislated new freedoms for Ottoman citizens, including a lifting of
censorship. Celebrants flooded Salonica’s streets after the pronouncement,
with Jews, Armenians, and Greek Orthodox citizens all parading in turn.
Sam’s brother-in-law Ascher Salem was among them, speaking before the
chamber of commerce and the multiethnic Club Commercial. Le Journal de
Salonique, which Salem served as a commercial editor, declared his speech
“superb,” without offering further details.13
Using his newspapers as a platform, Sam expressed his patriotism for the
Ottoman state. The empire’s new leadership, Sam believed, would benefit
Jews and other minorities. “There are no more Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs,
Romanians, Jews, Muslims,” ran one of his editorials, repurposing the words
of Committee of Union and Progress leader Ismail Enver Pasha: “We are all
equal, and can boast of being Ottomans!”14 Sam’s fervor for the Ottoman
state drove his opposition to Zionism, a movement that had little support
among Ottoman Jews prior to 1908, but that gained popularity after the
lifting of censorship laws. Jewish nationalism, in Sam’s view, ran counter to
Ottoman patriotism, while Zionists’ interest in Jewish settlement in Ottoman
Palestine directly threatened the empire’s sovereignty. “I am an anti-Zionist,”
Sam declared in La Epoka in 1908. “I was always one under the previous
regime and there is even more reason for this now.”15
Like every patriot, Sam loved a parade. In 1911, Sultan Mehmed V
visited Salonica as part of a summer tour of Ottoman Macedonia. The
occasion was an opportunity for various political factions of Jewish Salonica
to compete for the attentions of the ruler, as well as everyday Salonicans.
When Sultan Mehmed arrived in the port, he was met by rows of local
dignitaries. Chief Rabbi Jacob Meir was present, as was Sam’s brother
David “Daout Effendi,” now an Ottoman representative and president of the
Grand Cercle Israélite, an organization of prominent Jewish merchants.16
Upon leaving the port, the sultan was led on horseback through a series of
decorative arches erected specifically for the occasion.17
The pageantry was splendid, and who better to memorialize it than the
city’s most tireless editor, Sam Lévy. Over the twenty-four hours of the
sultan’s stay, Sam prepared on behalf of Le Journal de Salonique a lavish
commemorative album of the sultan’s visit illustrated with photographs of
the celebratory arches erected by the citizens of Salonica. The morning after
37
the sultan’s tour, Sam presented the album to Sultan Mehmed V. The gesture
sprang from Sam’s own Ottomanist sentiments—and paid tribute to his
father, who, half a century earlier, composed Hebrew and Ladino songs in
honor of Sultan Abdul Medjid’s visit to Salonica.18 The sultan, for his part,
awarded a pair of diamond cuff links to Sam’s brother Daout Effendi, a
partner in the newspaper that produced the album, and an Ottoman official.
No one could have imagined that in less than three years Salonica would be
lost to the Ottomans, and that in less than two decades, Jews would cease to
be the dominant thread in the city’s fabric.
Soon after the sultan departed Salonica, Sam, too, took leave of the city.
By the end of 1911, Sam, Anna, and Suzanne were living in Belgrade
because, according to one account, Sam’s incendiary writing had earned him
enemies at home. Prior to his departure from Salonica, Sam had folded both
La Epoka and Le Journal de Salonique, which his father, Sa’adi, had
created decades earlier, and which Sam had edited since 1898. A new
newspaper, El Liberal, was created in the void, its masthead announcing
that it was the result of the editorial collaboration of the “ijos de Sa’adi
Levi” (sons of Sa’adi Levi), the Ladino phrasing echoing the Hebrew (sons
of Besalel) used by Sa’adi’s father’s press a century and a half earlier.19 This
new newspaper would run for a decade—yet, despite its success, with the
closure of the family’s original papers, a chapter in the history of Jewish
Salonica closed, as did a chapter in the history of the Levy family. In the
Kingdom of Serbia, Sam wove his political views into an elegy called The
Decline of the Crescent. He dedicated the volume to Sa’adi.
38
DAVID / DAOUT EFFENDI
A skilled linguist and a gifted mathematician, David (1863–1943) was, from
a young age, charged with creating and printing calendars on his father’s
press. This task demanded the complex synthesis of lunar and solar, as well
as Jewish, Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and Roman, time. It required one to be
punctilious, numerate, and highly organized—skills that would serve David
well once he left the family business to become a student of law, a highranking official in the Ottoman bureaucracy, and, in time, interwar head of
Salonica’s Jewish Community.
Like his siblings Rachel and Shemuel, David was invited to enroll in the
teaching college of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris upon his
graduation from high school. But Sa’adi was unwilling to sacrifice his able
junior partner, and compelled David to dedicate himself to the family
business. Among his tasks, at fifteen years of age, was to translate into
Ladino Italian, French, Greek, and Hebrew writings for publication in La
Epoka. Working alongside his brothers Besalel and Shemuel, and in
collaboration with his brother Hayyim, a bookseller who brought a-Levi
products to a wider market, David helped Sa’adi shape an autonomous
family business. Members of the a-Levi family controlled all aspects of
production, from the creation of movable type to the writing of copy to
printing and sales.
39
David a-Levi (Daout Effendi), 1880
David, however, had grander ambitions. In 1881, at eighteen years of
age, he began to study law with two other young Jewish intellectuals.
Scarcely had he begun his legal studies when his mentor, a distinguished
jurist, recommended him as director of the Ottoman Passport Office. He
assumed the post in 1882 under his new name, Daout Effendi, Daout being
a Turkified version of his given name, David, and Effendi being an Ottoman
honorific for a distinguished, well-educated man. David would be known by
this august title for the rest of his life.
Daout Effendi’s post with the Ottoman administration, like his brother
Sam’s first desk job, carried considerable symbolic significance. Working for
the Anatolian Railway Company, Sam helped link Salonica to the wider
region—and the world. In his professional capacity, Daout Effendi oversaw
the legal transformation of the Ottoman population as Sultan Abdülhamid II
reimagined the empire as a modern state. Salonica, like the empire as a
whole, was rapidly changing, to the roar of trains and the rustling of legal
documents.
In the nineteenth century, few residents of the Ottoman Empire—whether
Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—carried legal papers of any kind. Birth
certificates were rare and, when they existed, were acquired by women and
men only when absolutely necessary, such as in the case of foreign travel.
Most Jewish women and men were more inclined to register newborns with
the Jewish Community than with the state—however, many, including Daout
Effendi’s father, Sa’adi, had no record of their children’s births whatsoever.
Those Jews who did travel abroad often carried a single legal document—a
40
temporary travel or residency permit. It was not unusual for a man of Daout
Effendi’s generation to carry, fold, and unfold a sheet like this for years, or
an entire lifetime.1
Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman bureaucracy,
like those of the European states, was increasingly interested in identifying
who belonged and who did not—who was officially Ottoman, and who was
a visitor, foreign resident, migrant, or refugee. Meanwhile, individuals like
Daout Effendi and his children were coming to appreciate that legal papers—
and especially the right kind of legal papers—were a crucial asset. They
facilitated travel and trade, dictated whether a son was eligible for military
service, and, more abstractly, came to seem like a form of insurance
required by the modern world. “You must know that the question of a
passport is very serious. With what passport are you traveling? What is your
nationality?” Daout Effendi addressed these questions to his daughter-in-law
Estherina in the frantic lead-up to the Second World War. Though the
circumstances of their exchange were unique, Daout Effendi’s sentiments
were honed through service to the empire. He knew firsthand that lifechanging opportunity could hinge on the possession of a passport. For years,
he was the Ottoman official empowered to grant or deny the possession of
this document to others.
As head of a passport office and personal secretary to the provincial
governor, Daout Effendi was no ordinary bureaucrat. He was required to
maintain contact with his superiors in Istanbul and to meet frequently with
the many consular officials in Salonica. He needed to constantly test, and
anticipate, the prevailing political winds. He possessed the right to judge the
legal identity of women, men, and children. When Theodor Herzl wanted an
audience with the Ottoman sultan to discuss the future of Ottoman Palestine,
it was on Daout Effendi’s door that he knocked.
Jews of more modest stature also valued Daout Effendi’s wisdom and
power. When a close friend of his siblings wished to attend Istanbul
University at age sixteen, he knew how to circumvent the university’s
required age of twenty. In the young man’s telling: “That’s what we had
Daout for.” A stickler for rules, Daout Effendi at first refused the would-be
student’s request. But because the legal maneuver would facilitate his
education, Daout Effendi relented. “So when I went to him for a travel
permit, without looking at my face and acting like he didn’t know me,
[Daout Effendi] asked me: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Nineteen going on twenty,’ I
answered as advised. ‘Good.’ And so Daout wrote ‘20 years of age’ in his
beautiful script on the tezkere [Ottoman travel papers].”2
In whatever language Daout Effendi wrote, he wrote elegantly. When he
signed his name on official documents, in French, he added an elongated
flourish beneath: a paraph (perhaps intended to thwart forgery) that could
41
command as many as five looping curves.3
Fittingly, given his position, Daout Effendi tended toward greater political
circumspection than his brother Sam. While Sam trumpeted the Young Turk
revolution and flirted with socialism, Daout Effendi was hopeful that a
robust Jewish working class, if properly integrated into the larger Jewish
community, would be able to compete with a growing body of Greek
Christian competitors. He was, additionally, among a small group of
powerful Jewish leaders who, in response to the revolution, created a mutual
aid society that offered self-help to Salonica’s Jewish working poor.4 The
Young Turk revolution—and with it the rise of mass politics—had brought
the brothers’ divergent personalities into sharp relief. Sam, impulsive, one
might even say a firebrand, while Daout Effendi was measured and in full
command of himself at all times. Happily, each found a professional niche to
match his nature.
In 1910, Daout Effendi assumed a new position as the Jewish
Community of Salonica’s director of communal real estate. An official body
created by the Ottoman state in 1870 and granted a degree of legal, social,
and economic authority, the Jewish Community governed all aspects of
Jewish religious and secular life, managing the dispersal of charity, the care
of orphans, widows, and the poor, and the control of extensive property. It
collected taxes, oversaw the designation of kashrut, the accordance with
Jewish dietary laws, and employed the chief rabbi.5
Daout Effendi’s new position was not necessarily a step up for an
Ottoman bureaucrat, but it was nonetheless imposing. In his new post,
Daout Effendi oversaw a formidable economic portfolio—a measure of the
power and influence of the Jewish Community of Salonica, and of the Levy
family within it. It is no surprise that 1910 also brought Daout Effendi’s
election to the council of the Grand Cercle Israélite, a prestigious association
of Salonica’s Jewish upper class.6 Though the Levys were not wealthy,
Daout Effendi acquired a level of recognition that far exceeded what
previous generations of the family had attained. Soon he would become the
most influential official of the Jewish Community aside from the chief rabbi.
Beginning in 1910, Daout Effendi’s private life and the life of Salonica’s
Jewish Community bled into one another, so much so that many of his
personal letters were written on the Community’s bilingual French-andLadino-language letterhead.
Daout Effendi was by this point married to Vida and father to three
children, Eleanor, Emmanuel, and Leon, now in their early twenties. The
family must have been very proud when Daout Effendi stood, among all the
dignitaries of Salonica, to welcome the Ottoman sultan Mehmed V to their
city: how thrilled to hold in their hands the diamond cuff links with which the
sultan honored their husband and father. In the face of so much pomp, it
42
was unthinkable that war would soon fray the ties that bound the family and
the city to the empire.
Daout Effendi had only been in his new position with the Jewish
Community for two years when the First Balkan War (1912–1913) filled the
streets of Salonica with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim refugees, as well as
tens of thousands of Turkish, Bulgarian, and Greek soldiers. The conflict
pitted the Balkan League—Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia—
against the Ottoman Empire, with each of the Balkan states intent on
wresting territory from the Ottomans and claiming control over ethnic
subjects they felt belonged within their national boundaries. For Salonica’s
residents, the wars ground daily life to a halt. The port was obstructed,
shops were forced to close, traffic ceased, and trains stopped running.7 The
first of the Balkan Wars resulted in the Ottomans’ loss of the bulk of their
European holdings, including the city of Salonica—territory the empire had
held for centuries. In June 1913, the Second Balkan War, which lasted only
a month, dramatically altered the fate of Salonica. The once Jewish city
came under Greek control.8
The Balkan Wars brought changes on the grandest and also the most
intimate scales. The new Greek administration was eager to banish all
evidence of Ottoman society and to efface the city’s Jewish and Muslim
characteristics. Suddenly, Greek signs replaced those in other languages and
Greek flags outnumbered other nations’. Streets were renamed to reflect the
city’s Hellenistic past. Sabri Pacha Street, where Daout Effendi’s brother-inlaw Ascher Salem’s store was located, now honored Eleftherios Venizelos,
the prime minister who negotiated Greece’s entry into the Balkan League
and secured its triumphal expansion in the Balkan Wars. Of course,
Salonica’s Ottoman sensibility did not disappear overnight—minarets,
mosques, and multilingual street signs remained in place until the 1920s, if
not later—but a process of Hellenization had begun that would never be
reversed.
Daout Effendi and the Levy family were longtime Ottoman patriots who
experienced the end of Ottoman rule as a calamity—at least initially. In this,
they were not alone. Many young Jewish men and women in Salonica were
fearful about the onset of Greek rule. Much of their anxiety sprang from the
fact that, relative to the Ottoman Empire, Greece, a Christian Orthodox
nation, would give preference to the Greek Christian mercantile rivals of the
Jews.9
For centuries Salonica had been the hub of a large trading network
radiating outward from the city in all directions—to Europe, to the regional
countryside and the Ottoman interior, to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire and the wider Middle East. Now, as Jewish businessmen were
acutely aware, Salonica (renamed Thessaloniki only in 1937) was to become
43
the second city—next to Athens—of a small country. The city remade by
the Balkan Wars was, in the eyes of many Jews, doomed to financial
strangulation by Orthodox Christian and Greek rule. “The prosperity of
Jewish Salonicans is greatly compromised,” wrote one Jewish intellectual in
the course of the conflict.10 And who would have understood the stakes
better than Daout Effendi, who had the finances of the entire Jewish
Community at his fingertips?
As their empire and economy frayed, the Levys, like all the city’s Jews,
were destined to become nationals. What kind of nationals they became was
a matter of choice. They could accept the state that formed around them;
they could emigrate; or they could seek the protection of a foreign power.
Daout Effendi pursued the first course. With his wife and daughter, he
remained in Salonica, helping the city’s Jews meet the new demands of
community and state. The job wasn’t easy. Under Greek rule, the official
Jewish Community of Salonica continued to function like an Ottoman millet
(a non-Muslim, self-governing religious community with a degree of
autonomy), but it now existed within a modern nation-state that ostensibly
elevated the rights of citizens over those of any given religious group.
Inevitably, there were points of friction, as when the state introduced the
Sunday-closing law of 1924, which ended the long-standing custom by
which all of Salonica rested on the Jewish Sabbath.11
While Daout Effendi, his wife, and daughter remained in Salonica, his
sons, Leon and Emmanuel, chose departure. Both young men left for
France, with Leon subsequently following his brother-in-law to Brazil. In
moving abroad, Daout Effendi’s sons were a bellwether of change for the
community as a whole. Jewish emigration from Salonica began to increase
with the Balkan Wars and would continue to mount with the outbreak of the
First World War, and in the aftermath of a terrible fire that swept through the
city in 1917. During this relatively brief five-year period, many Jewish
citizens left. In addition to Daout Effendi’s sons, three of his siblings were
among the émigrés: Sam, Fortunée, and Besalel, each with their own
families.12 Rachel and Elie Carmona were the rare few to undertake a brief
reverse migration, returning to Salonica temporarily in 1914, after their thirty
years’ service to the Alliance Israélite Universelle.13
While some Levys remained in Salonica and others left, a third group
pursued the legal protection of a foreign power. Hundreds of Jewish families
in Salonica embraced this option, among them Daout Effendi’s son Leon,
Leon’s new bride, Estherina, and Daout Effendi’s nephew Ino (the youngest
son of Besalel). These Levys became citizens of nations they had never
lived in, without ever leaving their homes. A foreign passport cost little yet
enabled travel, the evasion of military service, the shirking of taxes, and, in
general, insulation from the Greek authorities. Then, as now, the right
44
foreign passport also seemed a hedge against an uncertain future.14 Leon,
Estherina, and Ino would use their new documents to travel and emigrate,
renewing their passports in consulates across Europe and as far away as Rio
de Janeiro. In time, this documentation would spare Ino deportation from
occupied Paris at the hands of the Nazis and the French police.
Travel papers issued to Leon and Estherina Levy by the Portuguese
consul in Salonica, 1917
Between Jewish emigration and acquisition of foreign papers, the Levy
family, like Salonica as a whole, was rapidly losing a vital population. As the
Salonican Jewish intellectual Joseph Nehama put it, the city was being
decapitated, and the Jewish community was being starved of its collective
voice.15 In the face of this dire challenge (and many more to come), Daout
Effendi worked ceaselessly to keep Salonica’s Jewish Community financially
stable. This endeavor, combined with personal hardships, would demand a
great deal of Sa’adi’s gifted son.
45
FORTUNÉE
In 1899, Sa’adi’s second daughter, Fortunée (1877–1936), was twenty-two
years old, married, a mother, and firmly middle class. A photograph shows
her in front of her house in Salonica, her husband, Ascher Jacob Salem, by
her side. Three children, immaculately dressed, are posed with the emblems
of middle-class leisure—a hoop to roll, barbells to lift, a tall tricycle to ride.
Fortunée sits in an elegant rocking chair. Behind the group, face blurred,
stands a domestic, posed as if to lend credence to the family’s bourgeois
existence.1
Fortunée’s story must be told in the absence of her words, for if she
wrote letters or a diary, none have been preserved. Her character assumes
shape through various traces: the photographs and portraits for which she
posed, the homes and gardens she maintained, the manner in which she
raised her children, the routes she traveled, the memories of her
descendants, the grave that would, in time, mark her death.
When she married Ascher Jacob Salem, son of a successful local
merchant, Fortunée was only eighteen years old, a recent graduate of
Salonica’s Alliance school. The Salem family grew rapidly. Fortunée had six
children over eleven years, five of them (Jacques, Esther, Karsa, Michael,
and Adolphe) living to adulthood. One could easily mistake Fortunée’s path
for a traditional one: she wed young, married a Jewish merchant from
Salonica, created a family. Yet like her sister Rachel, Fortunée embraced a
distinctly modern lifestyle. She and her husband moved within a new circle
of elite, forward-looking Salonicans, rejecting the traditions of their parents.
For example, Fortunée and Ascher gave their children non-Jewish names,
enrolled them in Christian schools, and left Salonica’s historic Jewish
neighborhood for a posh new suburb. Le Journal de Salonique noted the
Salems’ comings and goings in its column “Arrivées et départs [Arrivals and
departures].” This was a family to watch.
46
Salem family at home, 1899
Fortunée’s husband, Ascher, thrived as an importer-exporter. He
partnered with his brothers David and Elie and traveled to Manchester,
England, for weeks at a time to buy and sell goods, mostly textiles. At the
time, Manchester was a great industrial city and, like Salonica, a center for
textile manufacturing. For this, and because the city boasted England’s
second largest Sephardic community, the British port was a powerful magnet
for Ottoman Jewish émigrés. Salonica afforded an entrepreneurial exporter
access to partners in Vienna, Paris, or Alexandria, while Manchester
unlocked trade with Britain—and the Atlantic world. So Manchester was
home, by the early twentieth century, to a thriving Sephardic community,
second only to London as a British center for Ottoman Jewish émigrés.
Ascher’s brother Elie was the first Salem to move to northern England,
establishing a branch of the family firm in Didsbury, just outside Manchester.
Elie, it was said, knew “the taste of Salonicans by experience” and adeptly
supplied his brothers in Salonica with “English articles … of the latest style,
which the tailors and above all the elegant socialists tear from the shelves …
fabrics for suits, overcoats, etc., of an elegance without compare.”2
In addition to collaborating with his brothers, Ascher worked with both
Jewish and Muslim merchants and firms in Salonica.3 It was rare for a
Jewish merchant of the time to partner with a Muslim, yet Ascher’s relations
with his non-Jewish business partners were close, so much so that he and
Fortunée gave their second son the name Karsa. The choice broke with
47
Sephardic naming practices, which dictated that a boy carry the name of a
living relative—and a Jew. Charting their own course, Fortunée and Ascher
named their son for Ascher’s business partner Karsa Frères, an Ottoman
Muslim family import operation with bases in Manchester, Izmir, Alexandria,
and Beirut, and with which Salem & Co. had collaborated since at least the
late nineteenth century. The young Karsa’s particular namesake may have
been Mustafa Karsa, who served as Ottoman consul general in Manchester,
as well as representing the family firm in that city, and was hosted by the
Salems in Salonica in 1907.4 Fortunée and Ascher’s homage holds a clue to
the young couple’s way of thinking about life: they honored loyalty in
business—at least in this particular relationship—over fidelity to Jewish
tradition. Their son Karsa would do the same in adulthood. The Salems
wholeheartedly embraced secular, middle-class culture, at least as practiced
in their Ottoman city.
As Ascher’s business expanded, he negotiated a deal for Adolphe Nolté, a
prominent photographer from Belgium. In appreciation, Nolté gave the
Salems exquisite, hand-tinted portraits of Fortunée and Ascher. Today the
portraits hang in the home of the couple’s grandson Alan Salem in a posh
village south of Manchester. The likenesses show Fortunée in an elaborately
brocaded dress, her hair swept up, and pearls in her ears. Ascher sports a
tuxedo jacket, his mustache waxed into a handlebar. They are elegant,
refined, Salonica’s quintessential bourgeoisie.
Fortunée and Ascher Salem, 1900
To clinch their lofty social status, the Salems moved to a house by the sea
on the spacious outskirts of Salonica—the home, at 64 rue Reine Olga, that
is shown in the 1899 family photograph. The various neighborhoods in
Salonica’s center were made up of narrow, meandering, partially paved
streets, typically lined with open sewers. Fortunée and Ascher rejected them
48
in favor of a verdant neighborhood known as Las Kampanyas (the
Countryside), located east of the city, near the bay.
Postcard featuring view of Salonica from La Kampanyas, 1900
Newly connected to Salonica by tram, the suburb was a magnet for the
city’s Europeanized bourgeoisie, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or
Dönme. Those who settled in Las Kampanyas invested in large estates with
extensive gardens that would convey their bourgeois sensibilities. This is the
neighborhood where the Jewish Allatini family, with whose patriarch Sa’adi
had allied to create Salonica’s first Alliance school years earlier, built their
grand villa, surrounded by pine trees, at the end of the tramline. It was to
this palatial estate that Sultan Abdülhamid would be exiled after the Young
Turk revolution of 1908.5
The Salems’ house was in the style of an Italian villa: stone, its modest
balconies lined with iron fretwork, its windows framed with heavy wooden
shutters. The family inhabited a flat on the building’s lower level, while a
sweeping, interior marble staircase led to a second flat upstairs. The garden,
with its meandering path of crushed stone, was planted with lavender,
rosebushes, pine and citrus trees, with a fig and mulberry tree adjacent to the
front courtyard. “The front garden was very large with several trees,”
Fortunée’s son Adolphe remembered, “and to my young eyes it was like a
forest.”6 Behind the house, a hill sloped down to the Gulf of Salonica,
bordered by a low wall from which the children could fish. The garden was
where the children could be found during the summer months. Family
parties happened here, weather permitting, and sometimes culminated in an
unusual party trick—Ascher throwing his son Michael into the water fully
clothed, and the boy gleefully soaring through the air and into the gulf below.
49
The joyous, showy act captures something of the Salems’ ease in their home
life in Las Kampanyas.
The same bold impulses that drew Fortunée and Ascher to Las
Kampanyas drew them to enroll their children in neighborhood Catholic
schools in which French was the sole language of instruction. Here, the
children knelt “on the form in front of our desk [as] we recited in chorus the
Lord’s prayer.” Ladino remained the language of the home, however—a sign
that modernity in Salonica and its environs was still expressed in a distinctly
Jewish tongue.7
In 1912, Fortunée’s eldest, Jacques, moved to Manchester to create a
British base of operations for the family business, becoming the first of
Sa’adi a-Levi’s grandchildren to emigrate overseas. In Manchester, eighteenyear-old Jacques began working for another Salonican-born Jew, a shipping
merchant, as well as for his father’s brother Elie, with whom he collaborated
in shipping goods to his father in Salonica for resale to a Mediterranean
market.8 That Jacques would have no head for business was as yet
unknown.9 The family, eager to reap the economic opportunities a move to
Britain could bring, hoped to follow him to Manchester two years later.
50
Studio portrait of Esther and Jacques (back), Karsa, Michael, and
Adolphe Salem (front), 1909
But the outbreak of World War I so soon after the conclusion of a violent
regional conflict thwarted the Salems’ plans for departure. The First World
War racked Salonica, filling it with hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers,
riddling it with German bombardments, and shredding its economy for all
but a few wartime profiteers, a member of the Levy family among them.10
Fortunée’s son later recalled that wartime food rations forced the normally
prosperous Salem children to eat “some stodgy concoction” in place of
bread. The children, picky rather than starving, made sport of haunting the
perimeter of a hospital for Allied soldiers with whom they could swap
cigarettes for bread.11
While Fortunée coped with the indignities of war at home, Jacques, the
child who was meant to facilitate his family’s move, faced a different sort of
insult abroad. Jacques had left Salonica before it became Greek, and had
entered Britain with an Ottoman passport. With the Ottoman Empire and
51
Britain at war, Jacques—along with thousands of Ottoman-born, Germanborn, and Austrian-born Jewish men—became, overnight, a foreign national
of an enemy nation.12 As a Jew from Salonica, Jacques was particularly
vulnerable, for British authorities were aware that Salonica’s Jews had
resisted the transfer of their city from Ottoman to Greek rule during the
Balkan Wars. This history led Anglo officials to conclude that Salonican
Jewish émigrés in Britain were Ottoman loyalists who posed a high risk to
the state: a threat higher, in their view, than that of British-dwelling
Sephardic émigrés from other Ottoman hubs such as Istanbul or Izmir.
Jacques’s political leanings only confirmed the officials’ fears. The eldest
Salem child was ardent in his Ottoman nationalism, and was known for his
impassioned speeches in support of the cause.13 In 1915, the British
authorities took Jacques from his newly adopted Manchester home and
imprisoned him in Douglas Alien Detention Camp, an internment camp on
the Isle of Man.14
In Douglas Camp, Jacques was probably housed within a Jewish camp.
From here, he would have been allowed to receive and send mail (though
not easily to his family in Salonica), join a makeshift minyan, request kosher
food, and possibly even leave camp periodically for work. Still, it was said
that “nobody gets anything at Douglas that he does not pay for, either in
money or work.”15 Fortunée’s brother Sam, the fiery editorialist who always
responded to an insult with a protest, wrote British officials from Paris
pleading for his nephew’s release. Jacques, too, lobbied on his own behalf,
marshaling testimonies in favor of his honorable character from the grand
rabbi of Salonica Jacob Meir and chief rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese
Congregation in London Moses Gaster. But the British administration was
unmoved. Jacques would remain at Douglas Camp for three and a half long
years.16
52
Portrait of Esther, Asher, and Fortunée Salem, sent as a postcard to
Jacques Salem while he was interned in an enemy aliens camp on
Britain’s Isle of Man, 1916
For Fortunée the First World War surely represented a dreadful limbo.
Her city had been transformed into a military camp teeming with soldiers.
Her son was imprisoned far from home, her dreams of emigration thwarted.
Now, even as the war raged, another tragedy rocked the family, a horrific
fire that engulfed their city. This third trauma solidified the Salems’ desire to
emigrate—but also compelled them to leave from a position of weakness
rather than strength. This story of destruction, departure, and rebuilding is
the next generation’s to tell.
53
NATIONALS
Today, my dear son … has returned to the barracks to continue his
military service. We hope that the time will pass quickly. It’s been
eight months since he began and we do not know how much longer
it will be. With the changes of government all the laws have
changed, in time it may be twelve months, now they say eighteen,
[but there is] nothing official for the moment. Whoever hopes,
despairs. The thing is, this military service takes its toll on the rest
of us.
—Eleanor Matalon to Leon Levy, 1936
54
ESTHER
One month after Greece entered the First World War on the side of the
Allies, on a hot, windy August afternoon in 1917, the Salem family was
enjoying a restful Sabbath in the delightful suburb of Salonica where
Fortunée and Ascher, the parents of Esther (1895–1998), had settled some
decades earlier. Las Kampanyas was known for its grand vista, and the
Salem home offered a generous view of Salonica’s red tile roofs, the bay,
and Mount Olympus beyond. On this particular August day, Esther’s
father’s enjoyment of the view was marred by the sight of flames in the
distance. He called to the family to come quickly. “I went to look,” wrote
Esther in a letter to her brother Jacques, “and indeed a large part of the city
appeared to have fallen prey to the flames. After this we couldn’t stop
watching the fire. We wanted to pull ourselves away but as if magnetized,
we were drawn to the small corner of the terrace on the water, where we
saw the whole city.”1
Esther’s brother Karsa arrived from town, frantic. Newly renamed
Venizelos Street, where the family business was located, had burned to the
ground. “Oh, the images that I have seen!” Karsa sobbed. “Children,
women, all fleeing, and despite the horror, the city is calm; the exodus is
happening in a mournful, heavy silence. A woman gave birth on the
pavement! People surrounded her as she shrieked!… Oh, I am broken!
Papa, go and see what must be done!” In a panic, Ascher rushed out, taking
the keys to his store and leaving his wife, Fortunée, and the children at
home.
55
Spectators watch the port of Salonica engulfed in flames, 1917
As the hours passed, Esther and her family watched Red Cross and
British trucks race by. Among the fleeing masses, the “parade of ghosts” that
Esther saw stumble by the home was a number of family members,
including her cousin Eleanor (Daout Effendi’s daughter) and her husband
and children.2 Eleanor’s family, and a good number of strangers, took shelter
with the Salems. The garden, courtyard, and house were quickly
transformed into a makeshift refuge as closets were emptied to provide clean
clothes and sheets for the victims.
At last Esther’s father returned, “his eyes swollen in his sockets and very
red, his face pale as candle wax.” Unable to save the family store, Ascher
managed to rescue only a handful of account books before fleeing to the
smoky streets. Despite the chaos, he had located his father- and mother-inlaw, Daout Effendi and Vida, and their son Emmanuel. As the night wore on,
the flames spread. Even the sea was burning, dotted with blazing sailboats.
“In vain did I close my eyes in the dark,” Esther wrote later, “for my
imprinted retinas still saw the burning ships on the trembling sea.”
Emanating from a neighborhood adjacent to the crowded port known to
Salonica’s Jews as Agua Nueva (New Water), the fire wrought catastrophic
damage in the city’s historic Jewish quarter, in the commercial district, and in
the port, where most of the city’s Jews lived and worked. When the fire
began, the movie theaters were packed, and an Italian marching band was
performing in Liberty Square. As the flames spread, the French military
strategically bombed a number of buildings (including Salonica’s new
Talmud Torah), hoping to arrest the fire’s course.3 These efforts were futile.
The fire only grew in intensity, ultimately raging for thirty hours, and
covering a square kilometer thick with urban life. Thirty-two synagogues
burned, along with nine rabbinical libraries, six hundred Torah scrolls, and
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eight Jewish schools. Though no deaths were recorded, fifty thousand Jews
were left homeless, along with ten thousand Muslim residents of the city and
somewhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousa...
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