When I sat down to prepare a few brief remarks for this evening's service, I found myself still depressed by the horror of the latest outbreak of anti-Jewish terrorism, this time in Istanbul. So I determined to speak to you about the revival of anti-Semitism in our time. But as I reflected on the beauty and holiness of our Shabbat Evening service and the lovely images it conjures up in our minds, I put aside the grisly business and determined instead to say a few words to you about the Jews of Turkey whose remarkable and inspiring history is largely unknown even to educated Ashkenazi Jews, which is what many of us are.
I imagine some of you wondered, as I did, why on earth are there Jews in Istanbul, indeed in all of Turkey. How did they get there. It's a fascinating story. You know, I suppose, that when the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 C.E. and enslaved and exiled many of Palestine's surviving Jews, there was already a thriving Diaspora, a host of Jewish communities sprinkled throughout the Levant, the portion of what was once called "Asia Minor" encircling the Eastern Mediterranean. Several of these communities were located in what is now Turkey. Many of these Jews continued to speak Greek for a millennium and a half, and are known in our history as "Romaniot." The earliest evidence we have of them in Istanbul dates back to the fourth century, C.E.
Muhammed II, the emperor of the Ottoman Turks, came roaring out of the mists of time and destroyed the Byzantine Empire and conquered its capitol, Istanbul in 1453. He therebyput an end to the Byzantine Empire which was Christian and which had oppressed Jews. Although Muhammed promptly massacred many of the inhabitants of the city, he left the Jews alone, probably because they were allied with him, as they came to be with his successors. To repopulate ad build up the city, which he made his capitol he transported Jews, especially craftsmen and merchants, living in other communities within his empire in Anatolia and the Balkans to Istanbul. Because some of these Jews knew a good deal about guns and gunpowder, and not a few of them were soldiers the Ottomans were glad to have Jews on their side and treated them well. So enthusiastic did the Istanbul Jews become about their new situation that they persuaded Ashkenazi Jews to emigrate volountarily and many did so.
The Romaniot and Ashkenazi Jews accommodated to the new regime just in time because in 1492 and 1497 the Jews of Spain and Portungal were put to the choice of conversion, flight, or death. They fled eastward, and many of them, at the invitation of the Sultan, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, settled in Istanbul and other communities in what is now Turkey. I believe they numbered about 100,000 and were thus more numerous than the original Jewish inhabitants.
The new crop of refugees spoke Spanish and Arabic, and some were highly literate and knew Hebrew. Among them were some of the great rabbis of the last years of the Golden Age in Spain. They brought their religious and cultural institutions with them, and they, along with the other Jews in the Ottoman Empire, flourished. In the succeeding years a goodly number of brilliant and resourceful Jews became rich merchants and served as important advisors and physicians to the Ottoman rulers, a pattern that may have become familiar to you in the past few weeks as we worked our way through the closing chapters of the Book of Genesis and from the Purim story. These extraordinary men women, some of whose names have come down to us, represented the other Jews to the Sultan's court.
Except for these highly cosmopolitan upper class Jews, however, most, even the goldsmiths, silversmiths, and other craftsmen were quite poor and very few had much contact with the Turks or even spoke Turkish. The Jews lived in geographically separate, self-governing communities grouped according to the lands from which they had come. This system, called the millet system, was characteristic of the Turkish Empire. Each community had its own schools, (including some very prominent yeshivot), its own courts, its own synagogues and its own tax system. All paid a special per capita tax to the Ottoman ruler. They even had their own printing presses. For a time the only Hebrew printing press in the world was in Salonika, and was owned by the Soncino family of which I am sure many of you have heared.
But the Turkish Jews were not entirely isolated from the Turkish society in which they lived. Many were fine musicians, and their music often paralleled Islamic poetic and epic forms, and they told each other many of the same folk tales as their Turkish neighbors. Even their synagogue liturgy borrowed music and poetic forms from their neighbors. The foods Jews ate were prepared much as was the food the Turks ate, perhaps with just a soupcon of Jewish cuisine added. Those who came from Sepharad, Spain and Portugal, preserved some of the literature and music they brought with them, and created their own in the new land, and they were joined by Jews escaping from Italy who added another layer of culture. In time, Ladino, a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish became the lingua franca of the Turkish Jews.
By and large, the Ottoman Turks treated the Jews quite well, especially in comparison with the Byzantine Christians who preceded them. The Ottoman rulers left the Jews pretty much alone, happy to have their taxes and the goods (including guns and gunpowder) their merchants supplied, the ministrations of their doctors, and the fine jewelry and other luxury items the Jews manufactured. The rulers continued to deal with the Jewish community largely through the leaders of the Jewish millets, as they dealt with other minority communities.
But the Ottoman Empire began to decline in the seventeenth century, slowly at first and then more rapidly, and the Jews declined with them, for as in many places, the central government tended to protect the Jews from the ordinary people who often were infected with all kinds of superstitions and hatreds. In the eighteenth century, units of the Turkish Army and other bands of thieves began to steal from the Jews, and finally set fire to two of the Jewish quarters of Istranbul so the brigands could loot them in the guise of putting out the fires. The Jews were not allowed to rebuild after that, and the reulst was that many Jews were forced to move. In addition, to slake the thirst of Moslem religious fanatics (and over the centuries there had been very few of them), Jews were forbidden to wear fine clothing and jewelry, confined to certain areas, forced to swear special hat and otherwise restricted. Even the old Christian blood libel found its way into Turkey
Eventually, the Ottoman Empire shrank. Its denouement came when Turkey fought on the German side in World War I. At Versaille, the Turkish empire was dismembered, which was how the British came to occupy Palestine and to begin the process of building the Jewish National Home there with the sanction of the League of Nations. Then, in 1923, in a revolution a group of secularists known was the Young Turks, some of them Jews, overthrew the Ottoman Empire altogether and established a modern state. One of its features was universal, compulsory education in state sponsored schools. This accelerated the process, begun in the previous century by the Alliance Universelle Israelite, a French organization dedicated to bringing the Jews of the Muslim lands into modernity through education, of breaking down the barriers to Turkey's Jews economic and social advancement. Seizing the opportunity, Turkish Jews learned Turkish, a process that is dramatically illustrated by the language difference between one of our members, who was born in Istanbul in 1950 and his grandfather. The grandfather spoke only Ladino. The grandson speaks only Turkish and English, which is why he now resides in our midst.
One result of this change has been to diminish the attachment of Turkish Jews to the Jewish religion. Though they remain ethnically Jews, many modern Turks are secularists, though, under special Turkish legislation, Jewish subjects were allowed to be taught in state sponsored schools. With the establishment of the State of Israel, a large number of Jews emigrated from Turkey so that now only 25,000 Jews remain. Though there, as here, the Jews are not as observant as they once were they have retained their Jewish identity. A recent study reports an intermarriage rate of 10-15%, much lower than ours.
As you can see the Turkish Jewish community has a long history, stretching back at least fourteen hundred years. But I have left out a very important element of the story with which I want to close. You can see that the Jews of Turkey grew in part by taking in other Jews fleeing from persecution. Perhaps it was natural that on occasions too numerous to mention, this community fulfilled the mitzvah of rescuing other Jews from slavery, persecution, and death.
We have already mentioned that when Jews fled from the Inquisition in 1492-93 many came to Turkey, where they were taken in by their fellow Jews. In 1648-49 Russian Cossacks attacked the Jewish community in Poland, murdering many and enslaving many more. Those Jewish slaves were sent to the slave market in Istanbul where they were sold—to their fellow Jews, who purchased them in order to free them. Similarly, in 1556, the pope began to persecute the Jews who resided in the papal states, cities in Italy that were then ruled by the popes. Among other things, the popes prohibited the Jews from engaging in trade, one of the few occupations permitted to them in Christian Europe. The Turkish Jewish community thereupon resolved to join Jews elsewhere in boycotting good shipped from papal ports. The threat, together with other factors, forced the papacy to relax its harsh decrees. In the seventeenth century Turkish Jews undertook to relieve the dire poverty of Jews living in Jerusalem (then part of the Turkish Empire) by assuming their communal debts. To accomplish that, the Turkish Jews imposed a tax on themselves. Spicial societies were formed amoang the Turkish Jews to undertake the relief of the Jews living in specific cities in Palestine, including Hebron, and Tiberias. The Turks also supported yeshivot in Palestine. And, in the nineteenth century, the Jewish community prevailed upon the Sultan to interevene to put an end to the killing of Jews in Romania who were being attacked by rioters unrestrained, in fact to some extent goaded, by the government. Other governments followed the Sultan's lead and this led to the relief of the Romanian Jews.
These and other actions by the Jews of Turkey deserve our admiration. They responded with fidelity to the rabbinic principle kol yisrael aravin ilin b'ilin (Shir Ha Shirim Rabbah), all Israelites are responsible for one another. Today the Turkish community, for the second time in recent years, has been the victim of a vicious terrorist attack that has taken many lives. It behooves us to follow the example of the Turkish Jews. We should, I believe, extend the hand of friendship to them, perhaps by sending special greetings, and certainly by sending donations to help them rebuild the ancient synagogues that have been damaged once again. In coming weeks I will endeavor to get information to you about how to accomplish that.
We are saddened, of course, by the suffering of the Turkish Jewish community—and of the Turks and the Brits as well. We take comfort from our observance of Shabbat. The descent of the Shabbat Queen amongst us reminds us of the promise that one day mankind will be redeemed. I do not think it is too much to say that the practice of Jews performing the mitzvah of reaching out to help one another in times of trouble is one of the pillars of our faith that the dream of the prophets is not impossible. Indeed, we are taught that Shabbat was given to us to afford us a taste of the world to come. At the end of Shabbat when we sing of Eliyahu, the herald of the Messiah, we chant yavo eleynu bimheyrah b'yamenu—May he come speedily to us, and in our day. I am reminded of those words now when I close my remarks with our usual greeting, vorach— may it descend one day for all of us and for all mankind.