A Sephardi Encounter with the Modern Age: The Cry of the Poor of Ottoman Izmir

• In Event: Seductive Modernity?: Intimacy and Culture in the 19th Century

Abstract

In 1847, an anonymous booklet titled “SHAVAT ANIIM,” or “The Cry of the Poor,” surfaced in the Jewish community of Ottoman Izmir. Written in Ladino and speaking in the collective voice of the city’s Jewish poor, the booklet chronicles long-standing injustices in communal administration, most notably with regard to taxation. Particularly at issue were traditional taxes on kosher goods such as meat, wine, and cheese, known in the Sephardi world as GABELA taxes, the revenues of which were used to finance the numerous institutions of the KEHILLAH. Functioning as sales taxes on goods that were not adjusted for income, GABELA taxes were deeply regressive and thus heavily and disproportionately burdened the impoverished. SHAVAT ANIIM describes the havoc wrought by such taxes and the numerous strategies the poor mobilized to combat it, among them boycott of kosher meat, the formation of separate communities, and even apostasy.

Yet more significant than the episode this booklet recounts is its reflection, both in form and content, of a distinctive Sephardi encounter with the modern age. As this paper demonstrates, SHAVAT ANIIM marks the emergence of a vibrant Ladino public sphere in the Ottoman Jewish world—a space where people discussed, debated, protested, mobilized, and even organized politically with recourse to an expanding vocabulary of “rights.” These new discourses and their inflection in the language of the TANZIMAT, or Ottoman reform period, in turn point to a mutually reinforcing relationship between Jewish communal autonomy and the state that would last through the Empire’s dissolution. Moreover, this paper argues that SHAVAT ANIIM, and the Ladino-speaking diaspora by extension, invite new perspectives on Jewish modernity as a whole. Through the collective voice of Izmir’s Jewish poor, we are confronted with a community in transition and even crisis. Yet in a manner distinct from many other Jewries, SHAVAT ANIIM reveals a primary catalyst of modern transformation in the Sephardi world to be a reckoning with social and economic questions, rather than the anxieties of Jewish belonging, cultural distinctiveness, or religious tradition faced by so many European Jewish communities.

Author

• Dina Danon, Binghamton University