History of the Jews, Vol. 4 (of 6)

by Heinrich Graetz

The Holy City acquired still higher importance by the immigration of Isaac Shalal, with his riches, experience, and authority.

Safet in Galilee, the youngest town of Palestine, next to Jerusalem acquired the largest Jewish population and considerable importance, which increased to such a degree that Safet not only rivaled, but excelled the mother-city. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the next century it sheltered only some three hundred Jewish families, original inhabitants (Moriscos), Berbers, and Sephardim. It did not at first possess any eminent native expounder of the Talmud, who might have become a leader. It owed its importance and far-reaching influence to the arrival of a Spanish fugitive, under whose direction the community was strengthened. Joseph Saragossi became for Safet what Obadyah di Bertinoro had been for Jerusalem. Driven from Saragossa, he passed through Sicily, Beyrout and Sidon, in which latter place he resided for some time, and finally reached Safet, where he settled. Joseph Saragossi possessed a mild, fascinating character, and considered it the task of his life to preach peace and restore harmony in private and communal life. Even among Mahometans he worked in a conciliating and appeasing spirit, and on this account he was loved and revered as an angel of peace. At one time he wished to leave Safet. The inhabitants fairly clung to him, and promised him an annual salary of fifty ducats, two thirds of which the Mahometan governor of the town offered to furnish. Joseph Saragossi transplanted the study of the Talmud to Safet, and also that of the Kabbala, as he was an ultra-pious mystic. Through him the hitherto untainted community became a nest of Kabbalists.

In Damascus, the half-Palestinian capital of Syria, there also arose, by the side of the very ancient Mostarabian community, a Sephardic congregation, composed of fugitives, and numbering five hundred Jewish families. Within a short time after their arrival, the Spaniards built a splendid synagogue at Damascus, called Khataib. They speedily increased to such a degree as to separate into several congregations, according to the states from which they had originally come.

The main stream of the Jewish-Spanish emigration flowed towards Turkey in Europe; the greater part of the remnant of the three hundred thousand exiles found an asylum in that country, where the inhabitants did not take love as their watchword. The sultans Bajazet, Selim I and Solyman I, not only tolerated the fugitive Jews, but gave them a hearty welcome, and granted them the liberties enjoyed by Armenians and Greeks. A Jewish poet enthusiastically described the freedom of his co-religionists in Turkey. "Great Turkey, a wide and spreading sea, which our Lord opened with the wand of His mercy (as at the exodus from Egypt), that the tide of thy present disaster, Jacob, as happened with the multitude of the Egyptians, should therein lose and exhaust itself. There the gates of freedom and equal position for the unhindered practice of Jewish worship are ever open, they are never closed against thee. There thou canst renew thy inner life, change thy condition, strip off, and cast away false and erroneous doctrines, recover thy ancient truths, and abandon the practices which, by the violence of the nations among whom thou wast a pilgrim, thou wert compelled to imitate. In this realm thou art highly favored by the Lord, since therein He granteth thee boundless liberty to commence thy late repentance."

The immigrant Jews at first enjoyed very happy days in Turkey, because they were a godsend to this comparatively new state. The Turks were good soldiers, but bad citizens. The sultans, frequently on bad terms with Christian states, could place but indifferent trust in the Greeks, Armenians, and Christians of other national creeds; they looked upon them as born spies and traitors. But they could depend on the fidelity and usefulness of the Jews. Hence they were, on the one hand, the business people, and on the other, the citizen class of Turkey. They not only carried on the wholesale and retail commerce by land and sea, but were the handicraftsmen and the artists. The Marranos especially who had fled from Spain and Portugal manufactured for the warlike Turks new armor and firearms, cannons and gunpowder, and taught the Turks how to use them. Thus persecuting Christianity itself furnished its chief enemies, the Turks, with weapons which enabled them to overwhelm the former with defeat after defeat, humiliation on humiliation. Jewish physicians especially were held in high esteem in Turkey; they were for the most part clever disciples of the school of Salamanca, and, on account of their skill, higher education, secrecy and discretion, were preferred to Christian, and even to Mahometan doctors. These Jewish physicians, mostly of Spanish descent, acquired great influence with grand sultans, vizirs and pashas.

Sultan Selim had for his physician in ordinary Joseph Hamon, an immigrant probably from Granada. Hamon's son and nephew successively held the same office. The son, Moses Hamon (born 1490, died about 1565), physician to the wise sultan Solyman, on account of his skill and manly, determined character, enjoyed even higher reputation and influence than his father. He accompanied the sultan in his warlike expeditions, and brought back from Persia, whither he had followed Solyman on a triumphal progress, a learned man, Jacob Tus or Tavs (about 1535), who translated the Pentateuch into Persian. This version, accompanied by Chaldean and Arabic translations, was afterwards printed at the expense of Hamon, who was justly considered a protector of his brethren and a promoter of Judaism.

The Jews were also in great request in Turkey as linguists and interpreters, they having acquired knowledge of many languages through their wanderings among foreign nations.

The capital, Constantinople, held within its walls a very numerous Jewish community, which was daily increased by new fugitives from the Peninsula, so that it became the largest in Europe, numbering probably thirty thousand souls. It had forty-four synagogues, consequently as many separate congregations. For the Jewish community in the Turkish capital and other towns did not form a close corporation, but was divided into groups and sections, according to their native places, each of which was anxious to retain its own customs, rites and liturgy, and to possess its own synagogue and rabbinical college. Hence there were not only Castilian, Aragonese and Portuguese congregations, but still more restricted associations, Cordovan, Toledan, Barcelonian, Lisbon groups (Kahals), besides German, Apulian, Messinian and Greek. Every petty congregation apportioned among its members the contributions, not only for its worship, officials, the maintenance of the poor, its hospitals and schools, but also for the taxes payable to the state. These latter at first were trifling: a poll-tax on every one subject to taxation (charaj), and a kind of rabbinical tax levied on the congregation, according to the three different classes of property, of 200, 100 and 20 aspers. The family of the physician Hamon alone was exempt from taxes.

At first the native Jews, who formed the majority, had complete preponderance over the immigrants. The office of chief rabbi, after the death of the meritorious but unappreciated Moses Kapsali, was held by Elias Mizrachi, probably descended from an immigrant Greek family, who under the sultans Bajazet, Selim I, and perhaps also under Solyman, had a seat in the divan like his predecessor, and was the official representative of the whole body of Turkish Jews. He deservedly held this post on account of his rabbinical and secular knowledge, and upright, impartially just character. Elias Mizrachi (born about 1455, died between 1525 and 1527), a disciple of the German school, and a profound Talmudist and strictly pious man, was no enemy to science. He not only understood, but taught mathematics and astronomy, gave public lectures thereon, as also on the Talmud, and compiled handbooks on these subjects, some of which became such favorites as to be translated into Latin. In his youth he was a Hotspur, and had a feud with the Karaites in Turkey. But in his old age he felt more kindly towards them, and employed his weighty influence to avert a wrong which the ultra-pious were about to inflict on them. A few obscurantists, chiefly members of the Apulian congregation at Constantinople, attempted to interrupt, in a violent manner, the neighborly intercourse which for half a century had existed between Rabbanites and Karaites. They assembled the members of the congregation, and, with the Sefer Torah in their hand, excommunicated all who should henceforth instruct Karaites, whether children or adults, in the Bible or the Talmud, or even in secular sciences, such as mathematics, natural history, logic, music, or even the alphabet. Nor were Rabbanite servants any longer to take service with Karaite families. These fanatics intended to raise an insuperable barrier between the followers of the Talmud and those of the Bible. But the majority of the Constantinople community were dissatisfied with this bigoted measure. The tolerant Rabbanites of the capital held a meeting to frustrate the plan of the zealots. But the latter behaved so outrageously and with such violence, bringing a fierce rabble provided with cudgels into the synagogue where the consultation was to be held, that the conveners of the meeting had no chance of being heard, and the act of excommunication was carried by an insolent minority, in defiance of the sound arguments and opposition of the majority. Then Rabbi Elias Mizrachi openly and vigorously opposed this unreasonable, illegal and violent proceeding, showing in a learned discourse how unjust and opposed to the Talmud was the rejection of the Karaites. He impressed on the zealots the fact that by their intolerant severity they would bring about the decay of the instruction of the young, since hitherto emulation to surpass their Karaite companions had been a great incentive to Rabbanite scholars.

The Turkish Jews in those days had a kind of political representative, an advocate (Kahiya), or chamberlain, who had access to the sultan and his great dignitaries, and was appointed by the court. Shaltiel, otherwise an unknown personage, but said to have been of noble character, held the office under Solyman. With a population looking contemptuously on unbelievers, with provincial pashas ruling arbitrarily, and with fanatical Greek and Bulgarian Christians, instances of injustice and violent proceedings against the Jews in the Turkish empire were not of rare occurrence; on all such occasions the Kahiya Shaltiel interposed on behalf of his co-religionists, and, by means of money liberally spent at court, obtained redress.