Making a Revolution, 1908 in the boomtown of Izmir. As brokers and agents for English merchants,
Mordecai and his two eldest sons made enough of a fortune to allow
Shabbatai to study Jewish law instead with famous rabbis, also drawn to
Izmir by its wealth.^15 As fortunes were being made and heresies hatched
in Izmir, Salonika’s woolen manufacture declined and became merely a
military supply industry, continuing only due to the need to supply the
Janissaries. By the eighteenth century, trade between Salonika and western
Europe increased greatly, but Salonikan Jewish merchants and manufac-
turers had been largely replaced by other groups, including Italian Jews,
protected by foreign consuls.^16 As Suraiya Faroqhi notes, the abolition of
the Janissaries in 1826 “led to the final eclipse of woolen cloth manufac-
ture by Jewish artisans.”^17
The decline of most Salonikan Jews afforded an opportunity to a mi-
nority of Jews and many Dönme, who stepped into their former role and
became the leading textile merchants. Although we see the reemergence
of wealthy Sephardic Jewish families such as the Allatini in Salonika by
the end of the nineteenth century, new economic possibilities were also
seized upon by Dönme, who soon became quite wealthy and significant
economic players. This wealth, combined with being ostensibly Muslim,
speaking both Turkish and French, and externally adopting Ottoman cul-
ture, allowed them to take advantage of their legal position and easily rise
in a city in which Jews predominated, most of whom were still in many
senses of the word part of the subordinate class. The Tanzimat reforms in-
troduced new political positions, which Dönme could fill, thus expanding
their power, wealth, and influence further in the city and its hinterland.
By the mid- 1880 s, Dönme served in many new governmental positions
introduced by the Tanzimat. These included the mutasarrıf (governor of
a subdivision of a province) of Üsküp, the commercial courts of Salonika
and Serres, the director of finance of the province of Monastir, the imperial
Ministry of Education, the new gendarme corps, the provincial education
administration of Salonika, as well as Salonika’s Chamber of Commerce,
Industry, and Agriculture, and the Assembly for the Administration of
the Province of Salonika. In a sense then, their prominent position in the
late nineteenth century was owing in part to urban reform. The Greek
newspaper Faros tēs Makedonias reported that the municipal elections of
1886 returned Duhani Hasan Akif Efendi (Kapancı) and Karakaş Efendi
(Karakaş) to the council.^18 Mufti İbrahim Bey was the mayor, however,
showing that the ancien régime had not yet been dislodged. Although