Letters, Journals, and Personal Encounters: The Affinity of the Ottoman-Jewish Maskilim to the European Centers

• In Event: Locale, Empire and Nation: Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Jewish Spatial Identifications

Abstract

During the Tanzimat era (1839-1876) and the following Hamidian era (1876-1908), some 90 Sephardi maskilim were active in Southeastern Europe and Western Anatolia, publishing their works mainly in Hebrew and Ladino. The three most prolific and influential figures of Ottoman-Jewish Haskalah were: Judah Nehama (1826-1899) from Salonica; Barukh Mitrani (1857-1919), who wandered across Europe and Asia; and Abraham Danon (1857-1925), who was active in his hometown of Edirne, as well as in Istanbul and Paris.
As I have shown in my dissertation, Sephardi-Ottoman maskilim maintained contacts with their Jewish peers throughout Europe: particularly across the Austro-Hungarian Empire (such as Vienna, Budapest, and the cities of Galicia), but also in the Russian Empire, Germany, and Italy. Judah Nehama, for example, exchanged correspondence with Leopold Zunz, Shdadal, Abraham Berliner, Meyer Kayserling, and Moses Gaster, among others.
I will begin the lecture by describing and analyzing the map of contracts between the Sephardi maskilim and their European peers. I will then discuss the three main means of communication that provided the platform for these contacts, which were conducted primarily in Hebrew: (1) exchanges of correspondence – some 300 letters have been preserved; (2) contacts that developed through and following the shared reading of the Hebrew press; (3) and personal encounters between Ottoman and European maskilim, some of which were preserved in various types of egodocuments.
Lastly, I will discuss the character of these contacts, focusing my discussion on the following questions: In what ways did these contacts reflect “Jewish Orientalism,” or more precisely “Jewish Balkanism” (adopting Maria Todorova’s term “Balkanism”) toward the Ottoman maskilim? How do these contacts represent a Jewish “trans-enlightenment” that generated processes of “transnationalism” in the Jewish world over a period of just a few decades? And what was the role of Hebrew as the lingua franca of the Haskalah in this “trans-enlightenment”?

Author

• Tamir Karkason, Indiana University