Ottoman Salonika
European and Ottoman tastes. The city’s schools incorporated the latest
in French pedagogy (critical thinking, lesson plans, strict disciplining of
students and faculty, education of the body as well as the mind) and Ot-
toman religious education, an Islam suitable for the age.
Merchant Dönme Families
§ It is a spring day in 1902. Nazmi Efendi, Sabiha Sertel’s father, puts on a
black suit jacket over his starched white shirt. His polka-dotted bow tie
matches his unruly salt-and-pepper mustache, and his tight red fez makes
his large ears stand out. Leaving his two-story timbered home on Pazar
Tekkesi street in the Kasımiye neighborhood—with its mosque that had
once been the Church of St. Demetrius, the city’s patron, whose tomb is
now tended by Mevlevi Sufis—he walks toward the harbor. Approaching
the quay, his penetrating eyes spy a kebab house, and he fills his empty
stomach. Then he settles into a chair at his favorite café at the quay.
Sipping his tiny cup of coffee, he watches the ships entering and exiting
the harbor: “Most were merchant vessels. Horse-drawn carts carrying
goods to the customs office rushed by him. This was his world. Since his
appointment as head of the Customs Office, he had become familiar with
the goods and people of this city. How lively Salonika’s harbor was!”^17
How much it had changed. How open to the world Salonika had become.The role the Dönme played in contributing to the development of Sa-
lonika into a cosmopolitan city in the nineteenth century had a precedent
in the role conversos played in the New World economy in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. As Nathan Wachtel explains, New Christian
merchants from Iberia contributed to the elaboration of new forms of
exchange and to the great commercial networks, previously unknown on
such a global scale, that were established in the context of the European
discovery of the New World and overseas expansion.^18 This process of
capitalist expansion and the conversos’ role in it was predicated upon the
understanding that if a Jew in Spain converted, he would be granted all
the rights and privileges (above all commercial privileges) as a Catho-
lic subject.^19 The forced migration of Jews from Spain and Portugal at
the end of the fifteenth century had disrupted and caused the decline
of the traditional commercial system.^20 The outlets for this forced mi-
gration were Portuguese colonial holdings, which helped produce new
markets, and new Ottoman lands in the Balkans. The networks that con-