Interventions by the Ottoman authorities in rabbinical affairs were rare. It is true that a kadi would be deeply displeased to learn that rabbis treated his court with disdain, or to be informed that Jews were being urged by their rabbis not to use them. But only rarely did he stir into action. In one case, a dispute between two contenders for the position of rabbi in the Aragon synagogue led to the kadi stepping in and making the appointment himself; but this rendered the victorious candidate so unpopular with his congregants, who were after all paying his salary, that he was forced soon after to move on. Another kadi dismissed a rabbi for instructing his congregants not to have recourse to the Ottoman courts. But in this case it was the congregants themselves who had shopped their rabbi by bringing his alleged remarks to the attention of the authorities so as to get rid of him, and in any case he was employed soon after by another congregation.31
In fact Jews did attend the Muslim courts, despite rabbinical injunctions against their doing so, usually to register commercial agreements, or divorce settlements in case of future legal disputes [for which the rabbinical courts were useless precisely because of their unofficial status]. Jewish workers ran to the courtroom to disclaim responsibility when a soldier’s gun accidentally went off in their yard and killed someone: only a judgement from the Ottoman judge could help them escape paying a blood price for a death which they had not caused. Otherwise, the Ottoman authorities seemed happy for the rabbis to run the legal affairs of their community, cooperating with them and giving them support, for instance, in enforcing sentences, an area where the rabbis often felt their weakness. Without this backing, the rabbinical courts could not have functioned.32
For the main point about this system was the enormous power it gave to the rabbis themselves. Although they were appointed and paid by the lay notables who ran the synagogues, Ottoman practice in effect turned them into something approximating Jewish kadis – religiously-trained lawyers. But this is not really so surprising when one bears in mind how, over time, Salonica’s Jews were beginning to adapt some Ottoman legal institutions to their own needs – for instance, the charitable foundation [vakf ] and inheritable usufruct [yediki] – and starting to follow Muslim custom by growing their beards longer, wearing turbans, robes and outer cloaks, and making their women cover themselves more than in the past. In the law, as in other areas of life, the Jews of Sefarad were becoming Ottoman.33
The range of issues rabbis pronounced on was vast: tenancy disputes, matrimonial, probate and commercial law made up the bread and butter business, but there were also medical matters – what kinds of venereal disease justified a woman in divorcing her husband; or when abortion was permissible. The traumatic rupture of family life experienced by the refugees was reflected in various dilemmas: Could the son of a Jewish man and a black slave inherit his father’s estate? What was the situation of women whose husbands had converted to Christianity and had remained in Spain? How many wives was a man allowed to take? To help decide, entire libraries were brought over from Spain and Italy, and merchants paid scribes and copyists to transcribe rare manuscripts and translate Hebrew texts into Ladino. In fact, rabbis felt at a disadvantage when forced to rule without the judgements of their predecessors to guide them. One, caught outside the city by a supplicant at a time when the plague was raging, apologizes in advance for offering an opinion without having his books at his elbow.34
Controlling power and resources unmatched by their peers elsewhere, Salonica’s rabbis possessed a degree of training and a breadth of outlook which made the city a centre of learning throughout the sixteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. A centre of print culture too: Jewish books were printed there centuries before any appeared in Greek, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish where religious objections to seeing the sacred texts in print held things back. Equipped with the wide-ranging interests of the Spanish rabbinate, exploiting the familiarity with the holy sources that their availability in translation offered, these scholars simultaneously kept in touch with the latest intellectual fashions in western Europe and pursued extensive programmes of study that took them far beyond the confines of scriptural commentary. They applied Aristotle and Aquinas to the tasks of Talmudic exegesis, engaged with Latin literature, Italian humanism and Arab science, and were not surprisingly intensely proud of the range of their expertise. Insulted by charges of parochialism, for instance, one young scholar challenged an older rabbi from Edirne to an intellectual duel:
Come out to the field and let us compete in our knowledge of the Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of rabbinic literature; in secular sciences – practical and theoretical fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine; in logic – the Organon, in geometry, astronomy Physics; … Generatio et Corruptio, De Anima and Meteora, De Animalia and Ethics. In your profession as well, that of medicine, if in your eyes it is a science, we consider it an occupation of no special distinction and all the more in practical matters. Try me, for you have opened your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner.35
All this was not love of learning for its own sake – though that there was too – so much as the fruits of the sophisticated curriculum required by the city’s scholar-judges, and their response to the opportunities created by Ottoman policy.
Nor did the rabbis, left to their own devices as they mostly were, ignore the fact that they lived in a state run on the basis of the shari’a: Jews might be represented by Muslims professionally if they lived in certain neighbourhoods or belonged to certain guilds; Jewish men [like Christians] converted to Islam for financial advantage or to marry – even on one occasion to get the help of the authorities in wresting another man’s wife away from him; some Jewish women married Muslim men, or converted to facilitate a divorce when their husband was reluctant to grant it. All these situations made a knowledge of the shari’a desirable on the part of the rabbi-judge. But if a degree of familiarity with secular Ottoman law, the Qur’an and the shari’a was common practice in many Ottoman Jewish communities, a few Salonican scholars took their interest in Arab thought even further. ‘I will only mention the name of Abuhamed and his book, because it is very widespread among us,’ notes rabbi Isaac ibn Aroyo, referring to the philosopher al-Ghazali. Rabbi David ibn Shoshan, blind and wealthy, was said to have been not only ‘a master of all wisdom, both Talmud and secular studies, astronomy and philosophy’, but also ‘very familiar with books on the Moslem religion to such an extent that Moslem scholars and judges used to visit him to learn their own religious tomes from him.’ When he moved to Istanbul, ‘the greatest Arab scholars used to honour him there greatly because of his great wisdom.’ One of his students, Jacob HaLevi, translated the Qur’an, a book which we know other Jewish scholars too kept in their libraries.36
Where Salonica was concerned, the Ottoman strategy proved highly effective, and by attracting a large number of Jews and Marranos, the sultans succeeded in revitalizing the city. By the mid-sixteenth century its population had grown to 30,000 and it generated the highest per capita yield of taxes in the Balkans and the largest revenue of any urban settlement to the west of Istanbul. It would not be going too far to say that this economic success provided much of the fiscal sinew for the sultan’s military triumphs. The Jewish immigrants embraced the opportunity Bayezid II had given them and brought an entrepreneurial and productive energy which astonished the city’s existing residents. The resulting Hispanization of its culture was long-lasting: although there were ups and downs in the state of the economy, and in standards of rabbinical learning, the cultural imprint of Judeo-Spanish was felt right up to the end of the empire. In 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the edict of expulsion, Spanish journalists and politicians visited the Macedonian port. There they found a continuing link to their own past, an outpost of Iberian life which had been forgotten in the home-country for centuries. In the words of the Spanish senator Dr Angel Pulido Fernandez, they were Spaniards without a Homeland; but this was not quite true. Their homeland