by Mark Mazower
What had started out as a drunken brawl thus quickly turned into a dispute between the two communities at the highest levels exacerbated by the pasha’s ineptitude and uncertainty, and fuelled by the actions of the Greek consul. The following month, the archbishop announced he would excommunicate any Christian who attended the annual soirée given by the Allatinis, the leading Jewish family in the city. Even the blood libel entered the scene when a respectable Greek surgeon saw a suspicious huddle of Jews around an Albanian man and reported to the police that some Jews were planning to seize a Christian to murder him for his blood. The police arrested all concerned and brought them before the pasha where it was discovered that the explanation was quite different. “What am I arrested for?” the Albanian exclaimed. “I have nothing to fear from the Jews, for I gain my bread by lighting the fires of these people on a Saturday!”14
Shortly after this, new communal leadership brought an improvement in relations. In the longer run, the rise of Bulgarian nationalism changed Greek attitudes towards the Porte, and as these became more friendly, so did feelings between Greeks and Jews. In the 1870s, Chief Rabbi Gattegno and Metropolitan Ioacheim patched things up, Greek and Jewish notables attended each other’s official functions and in 1880 the most powerful lay Jewish figure in the city, Moses Allatini, was decorated by the Greek government. Nevertheless a residue of suspicion remained and gangs of Greek and Jewish boys held weekly stone-throwing “battles” to the annoyance of respectable society. Everything depended on the city’s communal elite: when their inter-relations were good, harmony prevailed. For better or worse, the reforms had turned the city’s ecclesiastical leaders into political factors of considerable weight and by increasing their powers over their respective flocks had had the effect of turning street fights into contests of strength, prestige and political influence between the two religions.15
MISSIONARIES
OTTOMAN OPPONENTS OF REFORM saw the pernicious hand of Christian Europe everywhere, dethroning Islam, protecting Christians, forcing change upon the old order. European diplomats and travellers agreed but believed they were engaged not in Christianization but in the work of social and political improvement. For some Europeans, however, civilization did indeed require the spread of Christ’s message. The reform era was also the age of the missionaries, the “Bible-men,” who introduced a new and potentially destabilizing element into the balance of power between the faiths of the empire. Discouraged by the Porte from trying to convert Muslims, their energetic efforts among Christians and Jews, their distribution of thousands of Bibles translated into local languages from Bulgarian to Judeo-Spanish and their links with European diplomats all increased their impact far beyond the rather small numbers of converts they actually won over, and marked a new kind of European (and American) assault upon Ottoman religious practices and sensibilities.
It was their stridency and lack of tact—what one British ambassador denounced as their “violent and provocative methods”—that made the missionaries so controversial. The problem was not the Catholics who had maintained their small presence in Salonica since the late seventeenth century and formed a tiny and accepted part of its complex confessional mosaic, but rather those American and British Protestants who were energetically penetrating the eastern Mediterranean from the early 1800s on behalf of groups like the Church Missionary Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Board of Foreign Missions.16
Protestant missionaries seemed magnetically drawn to the numerous Jews of Salonica who offered them the chance to continue where Saint Paul had left off. There was “great eagerness for the Scriptures,” reported one missionary in 1826, after he had distributed several hundred copies of “the Word of God” printed in both Greek and Judeo-Spanish. “If anything is to be done for the Jews in this land of barbarism,” he declared, “Thessalonica offers a fine field … May it please the Disposer of all things to moderate his wrath and give them a helping hand to extricate them from their present errors and enable them to walk once more in the ways of the Lord.”17
Four years later, in the summer of 1830, the missionary Joseph Wolff arrived on behalf of the London Jews’ Society. Wolff was a former German Jew who had converted to Catholicism before becoming an Anglican curate. Married to a Walpole (a kinswoman of the prime minister), this extraordinary figure—later he would take to styling himself “the Apostle of Our Lord Jesus Christ for Palestine, Persia and Bokhara”—specialized in converting Jews, or trying to. He had been thrown out of Egypt after announcing that according to the Book of Daniel the Jews would be restored to power in Jerusalem and the Turkish empire would collapse. At sea he had been pursued by pirates, ending up on the Macedonian shore two days’ south of Salonica without shoes, coat or money. Undaunted, he began his holy work the day he arrived, preaching in the city and disputing with its rabbis. According to John Meshullam, a Salonica Jew who later converted to Protestantism, Wolff “came into their synagogue, on the Sabbath, and began to address the Jews, on the subject of Messiah and his kingdom.” He distributed his Bibles and put up posters predicting the Messiah’s arrival. Adolphus Slade, an English naval officer who was also present, recorded his impressions:
I have listened with delight to Mr. Wolff. He is eloquent and persuasive, with four languages—Hebrew, Italian, German and English—in which to clothe his thoughts gracefully; besides having a tolerable knowledge of Arabic and Persian. But on one subject his enthusiasm rather taxes his auditor’s patience, if not precisely of his opinion. He has published, and he believes, that in the year 1847 Christ will come in the clouds, surrounded by angels and commence his reign in Jerusalem for one thousand years.18
Wolff’s activities soon attracted a huge crowd and he had to pay a Turkish guard to watch over his poster in order to prevent it being torn down. As he reported proudly back to London: “In a few hours 2000 Jews were assembled around it, who read it. A Turkish soldier stood near it, in order that no one might tear it up. The chief of the soldiers, who placed a man there, desired an Arabic Bible as a reward.” This was exactly the kind of action that was likely to cause trouble. “The whole city was upside down,” reported Slade. According to Meshullam, some Jews were so “enraged” that they asked the pasha to execute him. Others reacted cautiously, waiting to see what their elders would decree, or opining that as there were still seventeen years to wait, they would make up their minds in good time since “few men are so old as not to hope for as many as seventeen years more life.” Slanderous rumours started to circulate—hotly denied by Wolff—that he had been offering four thousand piastres to anyone who converted. Very soon, the chief rabbi ordered all Jews who had received Bibles from Wolff to burn them, and the unfortunate missionary was ordered to cease disturbing the peace by the pasha himself who told him that he considered it “highly improper” to invite people to change their religion. The final ignominy was when his own superiors in London publicly disowned his tactics. After a fortnight, in which he failed to make any conversions, he set sail for Smyrna.19
More discreet than Wolff, others continued to distribute their Bibles: over the coming decades, the offices of the American Bible Society in the Levant sent out copies in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, modern Greek and Turkish. Twenty years after him, these labourers for “the Book of Life” still found Salonica’s Jews “shrewd disputants and bitter opponents … bigoted and self-righteous, and priding themselves especially on the long renown their city has had in the Jewish World for learning and Rabbinical Lore.” Although they held theological discussions together in private, in public missionaries were fiercely opposed by the religious leaders of the community: Chief Rabbi Saul Molho established Bible-reading groups to refute passages cited by the missionaries in favour of Christianity, published pamphlets against the New Testament, and issued excommunications against anyone found dealing with the missionaries themselves. The return on investment in missionary activities was a poor one. “The utter unprofitableness of these gentlemen cannot be sufficiently p
ointed out,” wrote Slade. One tireless Scottish missionary, Mr. Crosbie, settled in Salonica in 1860 and opened a small school. When he died in 1904, it was doubted that he had made a single convert.20
CONVERSION: THE 1876 MURDERS
WITHIN THE EMPIRE CONVERSION was never a straightforward matter; it aroused strong feelings and needed to be handled with care. But it was not uncommon: Christian and Jewish girls often converted to Islam on marrying and entering a Muslim man’s haremlik, not for theological reasons but to escape the disapproval of relatives. “The temptations of money, family dissensions, menaces, or it may be an amorous temperament are the principal motives which place Christian women and girls within the power of Mohamedans,” noted an observer in 1858. Once apostasy from Islam no longer incurred the death penalty, Protestant missions again sought to target Muslims, and the authorities feared that some Muslim men would convert as a way of avoiding military service. In fact their fears were not groundless.21
But the climate of opinion was changing: a Christian woman who first embraced and then abandoned Islam was protected by the pasha from her vengeful Muslim husband who was wandering the city threatening to shoot her. Two young Jews—one a child of ten, the other sixteen—were also allowed to return to their original faith. Even Papa Isaiah, a would-be Christian Orthodox neo-martyr, turned out to be too late for martyrdom and despite his deliberate insults to the ruling faith was sentenced only to hard labour cutting stones.22
Since their primary purpose was to preserve the peace and ensure that the customary proprieties were observed, Salonica’s pashas tried to ascertain that the half a dozen or so converts who came before them annually had good reasons for their decision. Those whose conversion to Islam was suspected to have been coerced—forced conversions in the villages at the hands of local Muslim land-owners were still a source of bitter feeling in the countryside—were sometimes sent to Constantinople to be examined at the Porte. Complainants also took cases there themselves. In June 1844, an Armenian couple officially lodged a complaint that their daughter, whom they had allowed to go to the local bath-house in Salonica with a Muslim woman, had not been returned to them on the grounds—which they angrily disputed—that she had converted of her own free will. The Porte dealt with the case and emphasized in its instructions to the authorities in Salonica that “if the illegal use of force has occurred, this is very damaging for the confidence of the population and can cause disruption of the order of the state.”23
Other cases were scrutinized carefully on the spot. After a poor Jewish girl left her parents’ house and took shelter in the home of Muslim friends, the pasha ordered her to discuss the matter with her parents in the konak. She told him that she had fled to escape the beatings her father gave her, but Rifaat Pasha responded that this was not a good enough reason to disown her parents and her religion, and ordered her to return. At the same time, however, he summoned the girl’s father and told him to treat her kindly, pledging to protect her should he ill-treat her again. It was a model of how to defuse a potentially explosive situation.24
A few years earlier, things had not been handled so well, and the result had been catastrophe. On the morning of 7 May 1876, a brief but alarming telegram from the British consul reached the embassy in Constantinople: “Both the Consuls killed, the Europeans much alarmed—struck with horror. The Greeks are arming, fearing general massacre.” This was the first indication to reach the outside world of one of the most notorious—and misunderstood—episodes in the city’s history, a conversion crisis which escalated rapidly into a double killing that made the headlines around the world.
What had happened was this. The previous afternoon a Christian girl called Stefana, from a village outside the city, had travelled into Salonica by train, already veiled, to register her conversion on entering the household of a Muslim land-owner. It was not an uncommon step, and as always, it left a trail of unhappy relatives in its wake. Her mother had followed her to the city to try to stop her—her father was dead—and at the train station she shouted out to some passing Christians for help. One of them seized the girl and tore off her veil—a most serious breach of Ottoman custom—before commandeering a carriage which belonged to the American vice-consul, the member of a well-known local Greek family, and spiriting the girl, and her mother, off into hiding. Police ran after the carriage as far as the town gate and then lost it.
The next morning, some Muslims called on the pasha to tell him the girl must be brought to his palace so that she could be properly examined, as convention demanded. But the American consul happened to be away, and his brother said the girl had left the consulate and he did not know her whereabouts; in fact she had been sent secretly to the house of another Greek notable. An angry crowd began to gather opposite the pasha’s palace and warned him that if he did not act, they would attack the consulate themselves. “I went out of the pasha’s room and told the chiefs or leaders they were wrong in collecting such a crowd, and asked them what they wanted,” recalled Selim Bey, the chief of police, afterwards. “They said, ‘The Girl.’ I told them to wait a few hours and the girl would be surrendered, but they would not listen.” Asked why he did not disperse the crowd, Selim Bey replied: “I had not sufficient force—only 20 men—and the crowd was composed of 100 men at least.”25
News of the affair spread to the bazaar and armed Albanians joined the other protestors at the nearby Saatli mosque. Tempers soon began to fray and when told to disperse, the mob threatened members of the pasha’s advisory council. Then the French and German consuls happened by ill luck to walk past the mosque on their way to try to see the governor. They were seized by the crowd and held in a small room. As they talked the matter over with the mufti and other members of the advisory council, it became clear that they were being detained as hostages for the girl’s surrender. The pasha arrived on the scene but panicked as angry demonstrators forced their way into the room, despite the efforts of several policemen, and attacked the two men with chairs and iron bars. By the time the girl was found and handed over, they were dead. After her arrival at the konak the crowd dispersed, shouting in triumph and firing pistols and rifles into the air.26
Blunt, the British consul, was with the pasha barely one hundred yards from the mosque. “I was horrified and could not believe that the Consuls had been murdered.” Hearing the sound of firing, he became alarmed and feared either that the police were shooting into the crowd, or that the latter had descended into the lower town and begun a general massacre. As he moved towards the window, the pasha cried after him: “Do not expose yourself. For God’s sake don’t let them see you: they are like mad wolves.” So dangerous did the situation appear that the pasha let Blunt make his escape through his haremlik, from where “some members of his family, screaming and shrieking, attempted to rush out.” Fearing a “great catastrophe,” he went off to telegraph Athens to send a British man-of-war from Piraeus. Shortly after, he realized the girl had been handed over, and the mob had broken up.27
THE MURDER OF TWO EUROPEAN CONSULS was a tremendous blow to the prestige of the Great Powers and they quickly responded by sending warships to the city. There was talk of occupation, but in fact the ships simply trained their guns on the Upper Town and remained there in a show of force. While Europe buzzed with concern at what it regarded as another manifestation of Turkish religious fanaticism, urgent instructions came from Constantinople to punish those responsible. The pasha took his time making any arrests, since most of the troops available to him were sympathetic to the perpetrators. Nevertheless, more than thirty men were eventually held and on 17 May, six of the supposed ring-leaders were hanged in public on open ground by the quay walls.
Christians in mid-century Salonica remembered the events of 1821 and lived with the fear of massacre. Often the talk was nothing more than exaggeration, alarmist fantasy spread by those who should have known better. But at times, it was something more: in 1860, for instance, when “the fearful Syrian massacres were still thrilling men’s m
inds,” a traveller in the city noticed the spread of a vague sense of disquiet: “There was trouble of some sort, no one could define it—but there was alarm, and people hinted at Russian agency at work, to excite suspicions on the one side, and fanaticism on the other.” For a few days, people slept uneasily at night and kept weapons to hand, and means of quick escape. But in the end “we all stayed quietly, nothing happened and the panic passed away.”28
But 1876, when an angry, armed rabble was already descending on the Frank quarter to burn it, before they were told of the girl’s delivery and dispersed, was the closest the city came to such a catastrophe. Aware of the need to reaffirm the values of communal harmony, notables from all sides made an effort in the days and weeks after the crime to show their solidarity. Less than a month later, in May, there was “indescribable” rejoicing for the accession of Sultan Murad and the return of the reformers to the capital. As one observer noted, the joy was not interrupted “by any act of disorder or ill-feeling; the quay, the principal streets, the Bazaars and the Coffee houses were crowded with Turks, Greeks, Jews, Levantines and Europeans all mingled together, men, women and children, as if their national and religious feelings had not been wounded and irritated by the latest horrid occurrences. Antipathy of race to race appeared to have been forgotten and forgiven.”