46 · Julia Phillips Cohen
Notes
The material presented in this chapter is drawn from my larger book project,
entitled Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Belonging.
- The Jewish communities of Izmir and Salonica were both part of a
larger Judeo-Spanish culture sphere that spanned the Balkans and the eastern
Mediterranean littoral. Sephardic customs and culture prevailed among Jews
in these regions for centuries, beginning with the arrival of large numbers
of Jewish refugees expelled from Spain in 1492. The Judeo-Spanish vernacular
that developed in this context (here called Ladino) was still the common lan-
guage of Jews of the “core” Ottoman lands, including Salonica and Izmir, during
the period under study. For the most comprehensive study on the subject, see
Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Span-
ish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000). - According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Salonica, the Jewish popu-
lation of the city stood at 80,000, out of a total population of 173,000 in the 1890s.
One source from 1897 put the number of Salonica’s Jews at anywhere between
70,000 and 80,000: Pierre Mille, “En Thessalie: Journal de Campagne. Première
Partie,” Revue des Deux Mondes 67, no. 4 (October 1897): 610. Another contem-
porary offered the figure of 70,000: Il Vessillo Israelitico 45, no. 4 (April 1897): 120.
The numbers offered by the Ottoman census begun in the early 1880s are sig-
nificantly lower, suggesting a Jewish population of approximately 34,500 Jews
out of 103,500 total residents. Such census data is known to have undercounted,
however, and also did not include foreign Jews residing in the city as Jews. Ke-
mal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), 135. - The number of 22,516 Jewish residents in Izmir is offered by contemporary
population data cited in El Meseret, 2 April 1897 (and also published in the Sa-
lonican paper La Epoka around the same time). A figure of approximately 25,000
is offered for 1905 (out of a total urban population of 201,000) by the Encyclopae-
dia Judaica entry on Izmir, which notes that the population had declined signifi-
cantly since 1868, when it estimates that there were some 40,000 Jews residing
in the city. In this case as well, Ottoman census records from the late nineteenth
century give a lower figure of 15,000. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 123. - As with the case of the Jews in Salonica, some sources suggest that the
Greek Orthodox population constituted the single largest religious group in
Izmir. See, for example, Charles Dudley Warner, In the Levant (Boston: Hough-
ton, Mifflin, 1876), 256, which claimed that of just over 200,000 inhabitants of
Izmir, 90,000 were Greek Orthodox and 80,000 were Muslim. Other sources sug-
gest lower numbers for the Greek Orthodox population, indicating that in 1890
“there were 52,000 Ottoman Greeks and 25,000 Hellenic subjects in a city of
200,000.” Vangelis Kechriotis, “The Greeks of Izmir at the End of the Empire: A
Non-Muslim Ottoman Community between Autonomy and Patriotism” (Ph.D.