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Abrevaya, Stein - 2016 - Creating A Ta
Abrevaya, Stein - 2016 - Creating A Ta
Abrevaya, Stein - 2016 - Creating A Ta
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Jewish History 14: 9-28, 2000.
^M 9
B ? 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
proper gender roles. By translating such articles into Judeo-Spanish, El Amigo de la Familiya
produced a cultural synthesis that was neither
French, Ottoman, nor (at least in so far as it has
traditionally been defined) Jewish. Thejournal reveals, instead, a cultural landscape that was
the unique product of late imperial Ottoman Jewry: the of a form of Jewishness
expression
and a form of acculturation unparalleled in Europe.
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10 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
aged women to wash "only with water," it implicitly criticized the common
Levantine practice of washing with rose water. Advise on the removal of
calluses, too, was not only aesthetic: it encouraged both male and female
readers to adhere to an ethnic hierarchy of labor, with Jews (in distinction to
their Muslim peers) dominating the "finer" professions. Finally, the practice
of gambling was discouraged partly because it was thought to facilitate other
dangerous practices: the speaking of Judeo-Spanish, gossiping, the expres
sion of passions, gathering in public, all habits that El Amigo de la Familiya
vociferously discouraged.5 Refracted in the pages of this journal of science,
I would argue, is the tremendous fragility of the late nineteenth century
Ottoman Jewish culture. This culture faced a very particular modernity at
the turn of the century; a modernity born of Ottoman debt and of French
(and Franco-Jewish) influence: amidst an Ottoman political climate in which
ethnic and religious difference, once juridically sustained, would increasingly
prove disadvantageous.6 These circumstances, which differentiated Ottoman
Jewry from Jews in Eastern and Western Europe, condition El Amigo de la
Familiya'^ every page.
I begin by unpacking the advice extended by El Amigo de la Familiya
in order to gesture towards the extraordinary richness of the Jewish popular
press; to illustrate how, even in corners of a newspaper considered tertiary by
its creators (or perhaps especially in such corners), one can begin to detect
the complexity of turn-of-the-century Jewish life, a complexity that is often
belied by other historical sources. From journals like El Amigo de la Familiya,
we can learn what Jews of unexceptional educational or class background
might have read about: we can encounter some of the pressures that may
have the way they lived their lives. Such journals allow us to reflect
influenced
upon the kind of information that circulated among Ottoman Jewish readers
of Judeo-Spanish, the kind of news they may have debated, laughed at, or
simply consumed with curiosity.
Popular Jewish newspapers are points of entry for the writing of social,
literary, and intellectual histories. They are far from self-contained texts;
one must, after all, turn to many kinds of sources to understand a news
- to measures of literacy and income, contemporary
paper memoirs, fiction,
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 11
philosophy, and politics, to rival journals, to the practice of censors and the
popular presses.7 a
This is reflection, no doubt, of the popularity of the sub
field of Jewish intellectual History and, perhaps, of the distrust that popular
sources seem to command. Regardless of the causes of this lacunae, the effect
is clear: we lack a sense of the impact popular newspapers had upon Jewish
readers.
El Amigo la Familiya
de was coedited by David Fresco, who, for over
fifty years, controlled the production of some of the most influential Judeo
Spanish newspapers of the Ottoman capital city. El Tiempo, periodiko
israelita politiko, literario, komersial ifinansario [Time, a Jewish period
ical of politics, literature, commerce, and finances] was one of the first
ously from 1872 until 1930, appearing first as a daily, soon after biweekly,
and, from July 1882 to 1930, three times a week. During these years, Fresco
was also responsible for editing three Judeo-Spanish weeklies which served
as informal supplements to El Tiempo, El Sol: revista sientifika y literaria
[The Sun: a scientific and literary journal] (1877-1878), El Amigo de la
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12 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 13
Roger Own, and Sevkut Pamuk have shown, that these affairs did not prevent
Ottoman industrial centers from remaining vibrant, local merchants from
prospering, or the Ottoman textile industry from surviving.12 Nonetheless,
the economic subordination of the Ottoman Empire had implications for the
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14 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
join the civil service, which few students seemed to do.18 (By 1935, only 23.5
percent of Turkish Jewish men and 22.5 percent of Turkish Jewish women
would claim the language as a mother tongue.19) Finally, though reading
ability in Hebrew was maintained by both men and women for religious and
literary use, the circulation of Hebrew-language journals remained low until
the early decades of the twentieth century.20
There is little doubt that these circumstances bolstered the popularity of
El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya. The only direct reference to the
their circulations is contained in a travel memoir, Constantinople aux derniers
jours d Abdul-Hamid, in which its author, Paul Fesch, records that El Tiempo
had a circulation of 900 in 1908.21 These readers were most likely members
of a burgeoning bourgeoisie, loyal to (and perhaps educated by) the AIU,
and concentrated in urban centers in the Ottoman interior. In absolute terms,
El Tiempo's circulation seems small: indeed, it pales next to circulations of
contemporary newspapers published in Constantinople in Turkish, Armenian,
and Greek.22 But when we consider that in 1887, 38 percent of the 47,000
Jews of Constantinople were under the age of 15, and if we assume that each
copy of a newspaper was shared by five readers (a conservative estimate), we
can conclude that one of every six Jewish men and women or 16 percent of
the Jewish population in turn-of-the-century Constantinople would have read
El Tiempo: an impressive figure indeed.23
The success of El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya can not, however,
be judged by circulation figures alone. These newspapers were created before
the ideologies and political movements that would characterize modern Jewry
(and, indeed, modern Turkey) had rigidified. They emerged as the Ottoman
Empire began its transition from the rule of multi-ethnic empire to the rule
of nation-states. And thus they were shaped at moments in which so much
-
that was central to Ottoman Jewry the language one spoke, the political or
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 15
professional status one could achieve, the way one looked, dressed, or self
identified, the class one might attain, the importance of traditional practices
- was in
and the strength of traditional loci of power flux. Reading these
newspapers, I would argue, allows us to reflect upon the way in which these
processes were confronted by and eventually transformed one of the least
understood pockets of European Jewry.
landscape but newly discovered by the French bourgeoisie, the other avoided
by Sephardic Jews but a pillar of French cooking, were the subject of much
counsel in the pages of El Amigo de la Familiya, commodities whose use,
the journal intimated, would help turn Ottoman Jewish bodies into proper
European subjects.
Roses and the scent of rose water
proved troublesome commodities for the
contributors to El Amigo de la Familiya, subjects of both scorn and praise.
While some articles condemned the use of scented waters as backward and
unsanitary, elsewhere, readers were offered tips about the production and
use of rose-scented goods. In one issue, readers could find a recipe for rose
water; elsewhere, they were encouraged to use rose pomade to dye graying
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16 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
This dying rose can serve as a metaphor for the fading integrity of traditional
customs. The pungency and brilliance of the rose, once irresistible, here
confronts its fate: to die so that newer (or perhaps reclaimed) rituals might
take its place. This poem reiterates how El Amigo de la Familiy?'s conflicting
advise about rose water reconfigured an indigenous and traditional practice as
foreign and modern. In so doing, the journal not only reimagined the cultural
resonance of rose water, but essentially claimed it as a European commodity.
This was not an abstract process: in his memoir of turn-of-the-century Jewish
life in Salonika, Leon Sciaky recalls that Ottoman Jews with an interest in
horticulture (such as his father) would import their prize roses from Paris.27
As Ottoman Jews were encouraged to reinvent the cultural meaning of
the scent of roses, so too were they encouraged by El Amigo de la Familiya
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THE OTTOMANEMPIRE 17
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18 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
literary journal] a weekly edited by David Fresco from 1888 to 1889. There,
Fresco published the first installment of a column entitled "la edukasion de la
justice. It heightens her love of work, make her prudent, sincere, courageous
and modest, while rendering her less false, hypocritical, intemperate and
egoistic. An educated woman gossips less and is more frank, sincere, cour
ageous, and resigned.36 Such lofty qualities were implicitly measured against
others: those assumed to be prevalent among 'uneducated' "Oriental Jews."
Defraying such 'native' qualities was, indeed, a central goal of the AIU.
Consider the following selection from the AIU's "Instructions for teachers,"
cited by Aron Rodrigue in his study of the AIU teachers; "One of the prin
cipal tasks of the teachers will be to combat the bad habits which are more
or less prevalent among Eastern populations: selfishness, pride, exaggerated
egotism, lack of original thinking, blind respect for wealth and power, and
violent, petty passions."37 These qualities were considered to be particularly
acute in women and girls, who were thought to be sly, superstitious, cunning
and deceitful, more prone to distraction than men.38 The assumption of El
Amigo de la Familiya was that such instincts would fade once women remade
their homes, bodies, and minds in the fashions of theWest. The ordering of
their space and person, it was assumed, would affect their whole being: quell
their passion, disabuse their faith in folk remedies and ways, in short, remake
them into proper bourgeois subjects.
As this suggests, while El Amigo de la Familiya defended the education
of women in the abstract, it also supported women's education because of the
many concrete benefits husbands and children would accrue. One contributor
to Fresco'sjournal explained an ignorant woman was useless,
that while an
educated woman could help ensure the health, honor, and fortune of an entire
family: whence the proverb "lucky is the man with an educated woman in
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THE OTTOMANEMPIRE 19
good family. Teach them to be good to animals, for the child who is cruel to
animals is crueler to humans. Instill in your child kindness, a respect of God,
a love of their neighbors, and a sense of charity. The same article cautioned
parents (both mothers and fathers) to avoid immoral language and frivolous
books.42
Yet more details of child rearing were outlined in El Amigo de la Familiya
in the column consejos provecozos para la familiya [useful hints for the
family]. Here, a reader could discover how to prevent a child from sucking
her thumb, a habit that was thought to cause teeth to grow improperly.43
Consejos provecozos para la familiya also taught mothers how to cure a
child's constipation and dehydration and how to prevent chilblain.44 Worried
mothers were further advised that if they kept children from touching their
eyes, face, and mouth, it would help limit the spread of contagious diseases.45
Elsewhere, readers could learn how to staunch blood (by applying salt water
to the wound) and what to do if one lost a lot of blood.46 An article in El
Instruktor pointed out that if women can be taught simple rules of hygiene,
they would keep a clean home
thereby and prevent their children from
identify healthy water by noting if it was clear and without scent or tint.51
As El Amigo de la Familiya offered readers advice on how to regulate
their food and drink, so too did it advise them to the proper regulation of
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20 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
their space and time. More than once, the journal cautioned readers against
the playing of dominos and cards: which it called "a dangerous passion" and
a distraction from precious family time. (If you can not stop playing, one
article advised, don't let your children play, as it will cause young ladies to
make a bad impression upon their suitors).52 Gambling and the playing of
cards and dominos were also sources of vexations for the teachers of the
AIU.53 In the pages of El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya, card playing
came under particular suspicion, and attacks on the practice often pointed to
the public nature of the game. The implication of the advise proffered above,
after all, was that one of the dangers card playing was that one could be
passing, gather to discuss the lottery. "My dear friend," one says to another,
"what is this lottery you are following? I thought your dear husband has been
dead for two years?" "Yes, over two and a half years, but what does that have
to do with it?" the friend responds, "I can play the lottery without ever having
to leave my house!"56 As long as they were protected by the security of their
homes, this dialogue teaches us, even women could safely enjoy gambling:
a hobby once reserved for their husbands. This being said, El Amigo de la
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 21
use of public space for leisure); for a journal like El Amigo de la Familiya,
eager to promote change, this presented a quandary not neatly resolvable.58
Further advice about the proper use of public and private spaces appeared
in El Amigo de la Familiya's year-long feature "hygiene, la sciencia de
guardar la salud" [hygiene, the science of healthy living]. Here, readers
were offered information on the proper dimensions and lay-out of homes.
Ventilation was a subject of considerable reflection: good air circulation was
considered critical to good health while poor ventilation was viewed as a
potential cause of death for children. One article informed readers that the
average room has 80-90 meters of air, enough to last eight to nine hours.
As a result, the author warned, it is important to replenish a room with air
on a daily basis. This is particularly true if a room houses a sick person, El
Amigo de la Familiya cautioned, where dangerous gases can circulate and
cause contagion (one article even warned of the combustible properties of
stagnant air).59 To avoid such dangers, the piece concluded, one must open
- not -
doors and windows only interior ones, but exterior ones as well for
several minutes a day. To maintain the purity of interior air, readers were
advised to smoke only in the out of doors and to avoid flowers and fruit
with strong or unpleasant odors.60 To guarantee that children had enough
good air, readers were told to ensure that each resident of a home had four
teen square meters of space.61 This space, advised another installment of the
series, should be kept neat and well ordered so that a "husband and wife"
can "rest in comfort."62 Other articles discussed the quality of air in various
locations. The dangers of urban air were expounded in one issue; in another,
the journal advised that ocean air was healthier than air in land, and that the
thin air of high altitudes should be avoided.63 Jaffa was recommended as a
particularly good destination for the sick (here, the paper explained, northern
ocean winds mixed with cool southern winds, producing a mild and pleasant
climate).64 Yet other articles encouraged readers to engage in regular exercise
such as gymnastics or equestrian sports, both of which would increase the
flow of oxygen to the brain.65
Anxieties about air purity and the threat of contagion from stagnant air
were fueled by French journals such as Revue d'Hygiene, where healthy
air was a subject of much reflection. This and other contemporary journals
elaborated upon the dangers of stagnant air and disease-infused interiors, and
offered suggestions about the size and shape of rooms, the placement of beds,
the dangers of cellars, vaults, and antechambers.66 As Ann-Louise Shapiro
has argued, the extensive debate over hygiene and the sanitation of public
and private spaces in nineteenth century Paris
by social reformers allowed
the bourgeois to define the terms of class and intra-class relationships.67
Similarly, El Amigo de la Familiya offered readers amodel of how they could
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22 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 23
a single, reducible phenomena; but late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Ottoman Jewish culture was far from single in inspiration or nature.
This is not to suggest that Ottoman Jewish identity was "hybrid" or
irreducibly multiple in nature, at least not in the sense implied by many
contemporary theorists of identity, who often see in this multiplicity a resis
tance to colonialism (or neo-colonialism).71 Such an understanding of the
"hybrid" fails to accommodate the history of Ottoman Jewry in two signifi
cant regards. First, Ottoman Jews' ability to marvel at French culture cannot
be aptly labeled resistance; not only does this term fail to describe the eager
ness with which Ottoman
Jewry turned to the West, it overlooks the many
nuances in the relationship between Ottoman Jewry, France, and French
Jewry and between the Ottoman Empire and France. Further, though Ottoman
Jews embraced a myriad of affiliations, I suspect that they viewed them
selves in an essentialist
as Jewish way. Even Fresco, editor of El Amigo
de la Familiya and El Tiempo, was quick to recognize that his Westernizing
journals, regardless of their content, were Jewish because they were written
for Jews in a Jewish language.72 To put this another way, at its core, Ottoman
Jewish identity was not plural but self-consciously "Jewish," a category that
held tremendous meaning, particularly in so far as it differentiated Ottoman
Jews from their Christian and Muslim neighbors. This Jewishness, to be
sure, was articulated through and alongside the articulation of other allegi
ances: with Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the modern. But no one of
these allegiances, nor their force as a whole, served to undermine or displace
the importance of the "Jewish" as a mode of self-identification, even as (or
century Jewish life, not only because they captivate the historian, but because
they captivated their readers. As
this suggests, historicizing Jewish news
papers demands not only a study of the texts in their pages, but attention to
the way in which they were consumed. El Amigo de la Familiya and journals
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24 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
like it offer us the rare opportunity to track cultural change as it was written,
read, and experienced on a daily or weekly basis. Like the capricious scent
of roses and taste of butter, much of this change has eluded other historical
documents, hiding, as it does, in obscure corners of popular newspapers, and
awaiting our discovery.
Notes
(Paris, 1993); David Bunis, Voices From Jewish Salonika, Selections from the Sudizmo
Satirical Series Tio Ezra i su mujer Benuta and Tio Bohor i su Mujer Djamila (Jerusalem,
1999); RuthWisse, "Not the 'PinteleYid' but the Full-Fledged Jew", Prooftexts 15 (1995),
33-61; Yehuda Slutzky, Haltonut HaYehudit-Rusit BeMeah HaEsrim (1900-1918) (Tel
Aviv, 1978); Yakov Shatzky, "Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Prese", inRaphael Abramovitch
et al. (eds.), Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (New York, 1942), 199-285; Dovid Druk, Tsu der
geshikhte fun der Yidisher Prese inRusland un Poylen (Warsaw, 1920);Marc Angel, La
America: the Sephardic experience in the United States (Philadelphia, 1982).
8. This was not, of course, the case. Readers of Yiddish who lived in Congress
always
Poland, for example, were often to their in the Russian
encouraged improve fluency
language and culture rather than in Polish:
surely this is one example among many. A
more detailed of turn-of-the-century Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and
comparison presses,
their positions on acculturation, can be found in my dissertation, The Creation of Yiddish
and Judeo-Spanish Newspaper Cultures in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, written for
Stanford University's Department of History, June, 1999.
9. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder", Politics, and the Jews in 1840
(Cambridge, 1997).
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THE OTTOMANEMPIRE 25
10. Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle and the
Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington, 1990), p. xii.
11. This focus was reiterated in the paper's advertisements, which promoted and stores
goods
based in these European cities.
12. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy (London/New York, 1981); Sevket
Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913: Trade, Invest
ment, and Production (Cambridge, 1987); Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in
the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1993); See also; Beshara Doumani,
Rediscovering Palestine (Berkeley, 1995).
13. Early editorials in El Tiempo
juxtaposed the economic state of Ottoman Jewry with that
of other Ottoman millets,
suggesting that the lack of Judeo-Spanish newspapers reflected
and perpetuated the devolution of the Ottoman Jewish economy. Though the successes of
"rival" millets were alluded to only vaguely, they are quantifiable. By 1885, there were far
fewer Jews than Greeks
and Armenians in Constantinople, and the latter millets dominated
the key positions in the city's economy; Greeks and Armenians represented 22.53 percent
and 20.58 percent of the active population of Istanbul and 25.41 percent and 26.99 percent
of the population working in trade craft and industry, while Jews represented 5.59 percent
of the active population and 5.24 percent of the population working in trade, craft, and
industry. One
of the earliest expressions of the Greek and Armenian millets' newfound
economic security was their production of newspapers in Greek, Armenian, and Turkish
transliterated into the Greek and Armenian alphabets, all of which quickly gained in
popularity. Stanford Shaw, "The Population of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century", Turk
TarihDergisis 32 (1979), p. 412. Cited by Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, The Jews
of the Balkans: the Judeo-Spanish community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford, 1995),
p. 82.
14. Among those studies of emerging newspaper cultures that I have found the most useful
are: Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, 1985); Natalie Zemon
Davis, "Printing and the People", Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stan
ford, 1975); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, 1996); Carla Hesse,
Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Berkeley, 1991);
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in theModern World (New York, 1971); Thomas Richards,
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914
(Stanford, 1990); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News, a Social History of Amer
ican Newspapers (New York, 1967); Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse,
the Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca,
1985).
15. Walter F. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity (New York/London, 1992).
16. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity.
17. Sam Levy, son of the editor of La Epoka Sa'adi Bezalel recalled that in the 1880s,
HaLevy,
though Salonika was home to 20,000 Jewish families, the paper had only 50 subscribers,
a circulation that paled in comparison to the circulation of French-language such
journals
as the Salonika-based Journal de Salonique, which reached 1,000 subscribers. Sam Levy,
"Mes M?moires: Salonique a la fin du XIXe si?cle", Tesoro de los Jud?os Sefard?es:
Estudios Sobre la Historia de los Jud?os Sefard?es y su Cultura (Paris: Archives of
the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle, 1961), Volume VII, pp. LXI-LXII. See also: Esther
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26 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
18. Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle and the
Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 116-120,
86.
Young Turk Revolt in 1908. Even then, the circulation of Hebrew periodicals remained
low. Benbassa, Une diaspora s?pharad en transition, p. 92.
21. Paul Fesch, "La presse et la censure", Constantinople aux derniers jours d'Abdul-Hamid
23. The number of Jews living in Constantinople is cited by Riva Kastoryano, Ottoman and
Turkish Jewry, Community and Leadership, Ilhan Basgoz (ed.), vol. 12, Indiana University
Turkish Studies Series (Bloomington, 1992). See also Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the
Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991), p. 11. The percentage of
children under the age of 15 is derived from Justin McCarthy's age pyramids, based upon
the Ottoman census of 1912. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: the Population of
Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York, 1983), Appendix 4, pp. 193-226.
24. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 20 Shevat,
27. Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Sal?nica, Portrait of an Era (New York, 1946), p. 11.
Adar, 5645.
Sephardic diet, I am
referring to the cooking habits of the Iberian Jews of the Balkans.
-
This is meant to distinguish them from the Sephardim of the Maghreb Morocco, Tunisia,
-
Algeria, and Libya and from the Mizrahim, the Jews of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and
36. Unsigned. "La edukasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
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JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THE OTTOMANEMPIRE 27
37. "Instructions pour los professeurs", Archives of the AIU, France XI.E.l. Cited by; Aron
Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition, the Teachers of the
Alliance Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle, 1993), p. 72.
38. Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries, see especially Chapter Five, "The
Rodrigue,
Emancipation and Reformation of Women." See also "El habito de la lektura", El Amigo
de laFamiliya #1, 1 Iyar 5648.
39. Unsigned. "La educasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
40. "La mujer", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 23 Kislev, 5642.
41. "La edukasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
42. del padre imadre con sus kreaturas", El Amigo de la Familiya #61, 12
"Komportiendo
Tamuz, 5642 (1881).
43. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, #61, 12 Tamuz, 5642
(1881).
44. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya #61, 12
Shevat, 5646.
47. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 23 Kislev,
5642.
48. Unsigned. "La educasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
49. Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water (Oxford, 1986). See especially "The Power
of the Press", pp. 117-128.
50. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 25 Adar,
5642.
51. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 28
century, El Tiempo was full of advertisements for clothing that pictured women strolling
through public spaces (either alone or with their families). The notion of the public stroll,
indeed, was now tied to numerous sartorial accouterments: the parasol, the cane, gloves,
the elegant hat.
59. On traditional uses of public and private space in the Ottoman Jewish world, see Jacob
Barnai, "On the History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire", in Esther Juhasz (ed.),
Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects of Material Culture (Jerusalem, 1990),
p. 31. Of the many works on the transformation of women's space inWestern the
Europe,
following two have been most useful: Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, Imagery of
the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914 (London, 1987); JudithWalkowitz, City of Dreadful
Delight (Chicago, 1992).
60. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 6
Tishrei 5645.
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28 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
given the scarcity of Sephardi autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Partly as a result of lacunae, there has been little exploration of Ottoman
Jewish material culture of the period. On the rarity of the autobiographical form, see Aron
Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe: The Autobiog
raphy and Journal of Gabriel Ari?, 1863-1939 (Seattle, 1998). For a study of Sephardi
material culture, see Juhasz, Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire.
72. I refer here, in particular, to Homi Bhabha's opaque definition of hybridity: is
"Hybridity
the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name
for the strategic reversal of the process of domination disavowal ...
through [Hybridity]
unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identi
fications in strategic subversion that turn the gaze of upon the discriminated
the back
eye of power." Homi Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817", The Location of Culture (New York,
1994), p. 113. Other theories of hybridity I have found useful have been generated by:
Gloria Andaluza, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestize (San Francisco, 1987);
Homi Babha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", October:
Anthology (1987), pp. 125-133; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Boston, 1993).
73. David Fresco commented thusly in the opening editorial of his journal El Instruktor. El
Instruktor #1, 1 Iyar 5648.
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