Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews

Marranos and Messiahs

On Sunday 2 January 1724, a Jewish doctor was chatting with one of his Christian patients and telling him his life story. He had grown up a Catholic in the Algarve where he had been baptized and went to church regularly. But his parents had also secretly instructed him in the tenets of Judaism as well and ‘inside he was a Jew’. At the age of thirty, after constant harassment and petty persecutions, he had left Portugal, and for the past fourteen years he had been settled in Salonica where he had returned to his family’s original faith. ‘So stubborn are heathens in their unbelief,’ his shocked patient confided to his diary.7

It was not only Jews who had remained true to their ancestral faith that took the path of exile from the Iberian lands to Salonica, but also large numbers of so-called Marranos and New Christians – in other words, those who had already converted to Catholicism, in some cases many generations before leaving. Some of them – like the doctor – had kept Jewish customs alive secretly for decades, and equipped their children with two names [‘If you ask one of their children: “What’s your name?’”, reported one observer, ‘they will respond: “At home they call me Abraham and in the street Francesco’”]. On the other hand, many others were fully observant Catholics who had been forced from Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition, essentially on the grounds of race rather than religion. In Salonica, this group had trouble adjusting to rabbinical Judaism, and the rabbis in turn found it hard to make their minds up about them. The question of whether or not they were ‘still’ Jews divided learned opinion. Many leading rabbis thought not, since many Marranos had only abandoned Iberia (and Catholicism) when forced out. The 1506 Lisbon massacre of Portuguese ‘New Christians’ induced a more sympathetic attitude, but many of Salonica’s Jews and their rabbis, even those descended from Marrano families themselves, remained highly suspicious of the latters’ motives and regarded them as apostates.8

For as they well knew, religion could often serve simply as a flag of convenience. Catholics returned to Judaism as they had left it, to protect their wealth or to inherit property from relatives; in Italy Jews allowed themselves to be baptized for similar reasons. Traders even switched between faiths as they sailed from the Ottoman lands to the Papal states. One seventeenth-century Marrano, Abraam Righetto, in his own words, ‘lived as a Jew but sometimes went to church and ate and drank often with Christians’. Another, Moise Israel, also known by his Christian name of Francesco Maria Leoncini, was baptized no less than three times as he shifted to and fro, and ‘was making merchandise of sacred religion’ in the graphic words of an outraged commentator. Such men were dismissed by contemporaries as ‘ships with two rudders’, but they were not particularly uncommon. A certain Samuel Levi went even further, converting to Islam as a boy in Salonica – mostly, according to him, to avoid punishment at school – then reverting to Judaism once safely across the Adriatic to marry an Ottoman Jewish woman – la Turchetta – in the Venice ghetto, before ending up baptized as a Catholic by the Bishop of Ferrara.9

Salonica offered the Marranos the possibility of a less concealed, perilous and ambiguous kind of life, and the activities of the Portuguese Inquisition after 1536 led many to make their home there. Yet even those who returned to Judaism for good preserved characteristic features of the old ways. Their past experience of the clandestine life, their inevitably suspicious attitude towards religious authority, as well as their exposure to Catholic illuminism, inclined them to esoteric beliefs and mysticism. Salonica became a renowned centre of Kabbalah where eminent rabbis were guided by heavenly voices and taught their pupils to comprehend the divine will through the use of secret forms of calculation known only to initiates.

And with Kabbalah came the taste for messianic speculation. Each bout of persecution since the end of the thirteenth century had generated prophecies of imminent redemption for the Jews. Their exodus from Spain, the Ottoman conquest of the biblical lands, and the onset of the titanic struggle between the Spanish crown and the Ottoman sultans, stoked up apocalyptic expectations to a new pitch. The learned Isaac Abravanel, whose library was one of the most important in Salonica, calculated that the process of redemption would begin in 1503 and be completed by 1531. Others saw in the conflict between Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent the biblical clash of Gog and Magog which according to the scholars would usher in the ‘kingmessiah’.10

In 1524, a mysterious Jewish adventurer called David Ruebeni arrived in Venice and presented himself as prince of one of the lost tribes of Israel. He gained an audience with the Pope and told the Holy Roman Emperor to arm the Jews so that they might regain Palestine. Crossing his path was an even less modest figure – a Portuguese New Christian called Diego Pires. After rediscovering his Jewish roots and changing his name to Solomon Molcho, he studied the Kaballah in Salonica with some of the city’s most eminent rabbis and gradually made the transition to messianic prophet. He predicted the sack of Rome – which occurred at the hands of imperial troops in 1527 – and then declared himself to be the Messiah, and went to Rome itself, in accordance with the apocalyptic programme, where he sat for thirty days in rags by the city gates praying for its destruction. Before being burned at the stake, Molcho saw the future: the Tiber was flooding over, and Turkish troops were bursting into the seat of the Papacy. The truly striking thing about Molcho is how many people believed in him and preserved and reinterpreted his messianic timetables. Relics of the martyr were carried across Europe and a century after his death, they were still being displayed in the Pinkas Shul in Prague.11

By the mid-seventeenth century, millenarian fever had grown, if anything, more intense. In the centres of Jewish mysticism, Salonica and Safed in particular, scholars prepared for the coming of the Messiah. The apocalyptically-minded saw positive signs in the murderous wars of religion in central Europe, the Turkish campaigns in Poland and the Mediterranean, the admission of Jews into the Protestant lands, and the persecution of east European Jewry by the Cossacks. Expectations – both Jewish and Christian – focused on the year 1666. ‘According to the Predictions of several Christian writers, especially of such who Comment on the Apocalyps, or Revelations,’ wrote one commentator, ‘this year of 1666 was to prove a Year of Wonders, and Strange Revolutions in the World.’ Protestants looked forward to the Jews’ conversion, Jews themselves to their imminent return to Zion. Rumours ran across Europe, and it was reported ‘that a Ship was arrived in the Northern parts of Scotland with her Sails and Cordage of Silk, Navigated by Mariners who spake nothing but Hebrew; with this Motto on their Sails, The Twelve Tribes of Israel.’12

That winter a forty-year-old Jewish scholar from Izmir headed for Istanbul with the declared intention of toppling the sultan and ushering in the day of redemption. Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaiming himself the Messiah on and off for some years while he wandered through the rabbinical academies of the eastern Mediterranean. Helped by wealthy Jewish backers in Egypt, and by a promotional campaign launched on his behalf by a young Gaza rabbi, he was mobbed by supporters when he returned to his home-town. According to one account ‘he immediately started to appear as a Monarch, dressed in golden and silken clothes, most beautiful and rich. He used to carry a sort of Sceptre in his hand and to go about Town always escorted by a great number of Jews, some of whome, to honour him, would spread carpets on the streets for him to step on.’13

It was only, however, once he headed for the capital, announcing he was planning to depose the sultan himself, that the Ottoman authorities became alarmed. By this point, he had thrown the entire Jewish world into turmoil. From Buda to Aleppo and Cairo, thousands declared their allegiance and shouted down the doubters. ‘It was strange to see how the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabatai and his Doctrine flew through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited’, noted an English observer. ‘I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to prepare themselves and Families for a Journey to Jerusalem: All their Discourses, their Dreams and disposal of their Affairs tended to no other Design but a re-establishment in the Land of Promise, to Greatness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah.”14

Nowhere was the frenzy greater than in Salonica, where Zevi was a well-known figure. He had spent some years studying there with local scholars, and preached regularly in the synagogue of the Marranos. In 1659 he had outraged his audience by pronouncing the divine name and was excommunicated and forced to leave. Now, however, the city was gripped by millenarian hysteria. Anticipating the Messiah’s arrival, rabbis ordered acts of penance and fasting; in their enthusiasm some acolytes starved themselves to death, or whipped themselves till their backs were bleeding. ‘Others buryed themselves in their Gardens, covering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads onely excepted remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the cold and moisture: others would indure to have melted Wax dropt upon their Shoulders, others to rowl themselves in Snow, and throw their Bodies in the Coldest season of Winter into the Sea, or Frozen Waters.’ Preparing to go and meet him, shopkeepers sold off their stock at bargain prices, parents married off their children and all sought ‘to purge their Consciences of Sin.’ Christians and Muslims looked on in bemusement and scorn. When a French onlooker smiled at the wild abandon of the crowds, a young Jewish boy told him ‘that I had nothing to smile about since shortly we would all become their slaves by the virtue of their Messiah.”15

Even Zevi’s arrest en route to the capital, and his subsequent detention, did not diminish his influence. To the Grand Vizier he denied ever having claimed he was the Messiah; but at the same time, he addressed the Jews of the capital as ‘The Only Son and Firstborn of God, Messiah and Saviour of the World.’ Delegations visited him from as far afield as Holland, Poland, Germany and Persia, and hundreds of pilgrims made their way to see him. A light – so bright as to blind those who looked upon it – was said to have shone from his face and a crown of fire was seen above his head. He was dressed in expensive garments paid for by his admirers; in return, he sent out instructions for new festivals to be celebrated in his honour. Only in Istanbul did doubters publicly resist his claims. In the Balkans his supporters held sway; women dressed themselves in white and prepared to ‘go and slay demons’. His fame even prompted another Kabbalist, a Polish Jew named Nehemiah, to make his way to Gallipoli, where Zevi was being held, to tell him that the books foretold the arrival of a second, subordinate Messiah, which unsurprisingly he proclaimed himself to be.16

Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi suspected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct – and his well-known views that ‘God permittest that which is forbidden’ – made highly plausible. Although Mehmed IV’s first impulse seems to have been to have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give him the chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interrogated in the sultan’s presence where one of the royal physicians, Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi – a convert whose original name was Moshe Abravanel – translated for him from Turkish into Judeo-Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte, receiving instruction in Islam from – and offering insights into Judaism to – the Grand Vizier’s personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others, he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later. Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse, the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out.17

The Messiah’s conversion was not the end of the matter, however. After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers remained undeflected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves onto the right path – for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all kinds – Jews, Christians and Muslims. Zevi’s apostasy was recast in Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the rabbis managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi’s followers – like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan – never did convert and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.18

The Ma’min

Hundreds more, however, did actually follow Zevi into Islam – some at the time, and others a few years later – and by doing so they gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious communities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Dönmehs [turn-coats], a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Ma’min – the Faithful – a term commonly used by all Muslims.* There were small groups of them elsewhere, but Zevi’s last wife, Ayse, and her father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Salonica, and after Zevi’s death, they returned there and helped to establish the new sect which he had created. By 1900, the city’s ten-thousand-strong community of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims was one of the most extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional mosaic of the late Ottoman empire.

Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the Sunni-Shia split in mainstream Islam, the internal divisions of the Ma’min stemmed from disagreement over the line of succession which followed their Prophet’s death. In 1683 his widow Ayse hailed her brother Jacob – Zevi’s brother-in-law – as the Querido [Beloved] who had received Zevi’s spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions. Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi’s birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and left Salonica to make the haj in the early 1690s but died during his return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out, both the Izmirlis and the Yakublar [the followers of Jacob Querido] saw themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had ‘withdrawn’ himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology.19 A few years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and artisanal classes, broke off from the Izmirlis to follow another charismatic leader, the youthful Barouch Russo [known to his followers as Osman Baba], who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi’s spirit but his very reincarnation.20

Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.21

Gradually they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. [Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?] They prayed to their Messiah, ‘our King, our Redeemer’ in ‘the name of God, the God of Israel’, but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city – certainly well into the nineteenth century – was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.

The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma’min girl who had fallen in love with her tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma’min spearheaded the expansion of Muslim – including women’s – schooling in the city, and were prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated huge fortunes, built villas in the European style by the sea and entered the municipal administration. Others were in humbler trades – barbers, coppersmiths, town-criers and butchers.22