Jewish Imperial Allegiance and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 · 39have fun and forget that they are not at home—that they are in a public
place... a place which is open to all eyes.”^39
The article further detailed how “alcohol, a poor counselor,” was
leading Jews of both sexes to get drunk, sing, prance around, and shout,
which in turn spawned the laughter and ridicule of non-Jewish passers-
by. Consequently, brawls would break out, the women tried to interfere,
and in the end, the article explained, “Jewish men and women get en-
tangled with non-Jews, the public tries to intervene, and the blame is
laid upon the Jew or, better put, upon ‘the Jews.’“ The paper admonished
its readership, noting that as Jews they occupied a precarious position
and that they must maintain “serious caution in their actions and move-
ments.” In light of these comments, the paper’s earlier insistence on the
invisibility of communal boundaries can be seen more clearly for what it
was—the excessive protestations of a journal intent upon shaping both
its readers’ behavior and the way they interpreted their reality.
While the context of interethnic violence was notably different here,
the immediate solution proposed by the Ladino press of Izmir coincided
with the approach advocated within the pages of Salonica’s Jewish pa-
pers in response to the mischief of the stone-throwing Jewish and Greek
youths in that city. Noting that for years the veteran Ladino newspaper
of Izmir, La Buena Esperansa, had dedicated editorials to the unsettling
subject of the outings (and the brawls that often resulted from them), El
Meseret called upon the chief rabbi to ensure that rabbis across the city
denounce these activities once and for all by giving sermons on the mat-
ter in their synagogues. The piece further suggested that their spiritual
leader enlist the force of the police, since “it is within their power to pre-
vent these people from getting drunk in public.”^40
The moral that El Meseret’s author drew from these “scandalous ac-
tivities,” however, represents a drastic departure from the conclusions
drawn by Jewish elites in Salonica in response to the rock fights. In that
case, journalists and representatives of the Alliance alike concluded that
such exchanges were a sign of essentially “premodern,” unenlightened
behavior that could be rectified through “modern,” western-style educa-
tion. Not so here. The piece from Izmir did not treat such clashes as ves-
tiges of a disagreeable past, but rather as the result of embarrassing and
mistaken attempts among local Jews to be “modern” by aping the man-
ners of westerners. “Rather than imitate the Europeans, many of whose