The Divergence of Judaism and Islam. Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil

(Joyce) #1

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.



  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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