3 - The Permeable Boundaries of Ottoman Jewry

Summary

At the turn of the twentieth century, over a quarter of a million Jews lived in the European regions of the Ottoman Empire. Most were Sephardim, Jews who came to the region after being expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century and who retained a Judeo-Spanish language known as Ladino or Judezmo. For the next five centuries, Ottoman Jews would constitute a critical role in the Ottoman economy and political system, developing, in the meanwhile, a rich and unique culture that differentiated this population from Jews elsewhere in Europe.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a modern, secular culture in Ladino (still the mother tongue of the vast majority of the empire's Jews) began to emerge in the Ottoman Balkans and European Turkey. By the late nineteenth century, Ladino was being used to produce new genres of Jewish culture: original works of poetry, drama, fiction, scholarly essays, dictionaries and encyclopedias, translations of world literature, and a dazzling array of daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals. In these media, readers and writers of Ladino debated and displayed what it meant to be modern and Jewish. Without a doubt, the single most prolific genre of Ladino print culture was the popular press. The first Ladino periodical, La buena esperansa, was published in 1842, and, over the course of the next century, Jewish periodicals blossomed in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states; by 1913, there were no fewer than 389 Jewish periodicals published in Turkey and the Balkans.