Istanbul Still Counting Its Lamps

Istanbul is the sort of city that keeps changing empires without losing its Jewish address book. Greek-speaking Jews were here when it was Constantinople and the cross stood over it. They were here when the crescent replaced it in 1453. They were here when Spain's exiles arrived in their thousands and made the city, for a while, the largest Jewish settlement on earth. They are here still. The lamps are fewer than they were. They have not gone out.

The oldest layer is Romaniote - the indigenous Greek-speaking Jews of Byzantium, with their own rite and their own quarter across the Golden Horn. Official records refer to Jews in Constantinople as early as 390 CE, and when Benjamin of Tudela passed through in the twelfth century he counted some two thousand Rabbanite Jews and five hundred Karaites living in Pera. The community was old before the Ottomans ever saw the walls.

Two conquests, one welcome

When Mehmed II took the city in 1453 he wanted it populated, and he moved Jewish communities into his new capital by the imperial resettlement his officials called surgun. A census in 1478 already counted some seven or eight thousand Jews. Then came 1492. Spain expelled its Jews, and Sultan Bayezid II opened the empire to them. Tens of thousands of Sephardim arrived, bringing Castilian Spanish, the trades and learning of Iberia, and a confidence that reshaped the city's Jewish life from the ground up. Within a generation the Spanish language and the Spanish rite had become the community's own.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a golden age, and it was not a quiet one. Istanbul produced the first printing press in the entire Ottoman Empire - a Hebrew press, set up by the brothers David and Samuel ibn Nahmias, whose first book came off the forme in December 1493. The court drew on Jewish talent without embarrassment: Moses Hamon physician to Suleiman the Magnificent, Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi the formidable financier and rescuer of refugees, her nephew Joseph Nasi who became Duke of Naxos. Around 1600, by one estimate, Jews were a clear majority of the city's licensed doctors.

That golden age ran on a language. Ladino - Judeo-Spanish, the Castilian of 1492 carried east and kept alive in a new home - became the everyday speech of Ottoman Jewry, written in Hebrew letters, sung in ballads, printed in newspapers, prayed around. It is the great portable inheritance of this community: a fifteenth-century Spanish preserved in Istanbul long after Spain itself had moved on.

What the city still carries

The modern community is smaller and more careful. Numbers fell across the twentieth century - from perhaps a hundred thousand in the late Ottoman period to some fifteen thousand today, almost all in Istanbul and overwhelmingly Sephardi. There has been violence: the Neve Shalom synagogue was attacked in 1986, and bombed again in 2003. Discretion has its reasons. And yet the institutions stand and function. The Ahrida Synagogue in Balat, with its boat-shaped reading platform, has been in use since the fifteenth century. Neve Shalom, opened in 1951, is still the great Sephardi synagogue of the city. A weekly paper still carries a page of Ladino.

Count the lamps and the figure is down. Read what is printed in them and the light is the same light - a Spanish carried from Toledo, a rite carried from Byzantium, a community that has watched three empires come and go from the same hills above the same water. Istanbul never managed to be a city without Jews. After sixteen centuries, it has rather given up trying.