A 19th-Century Ladino Memoir Paints a New Picture of the Vanished Jewish Community in Salonica

The preface page of Sa'adi’s soletreo manuscript.(Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Israel)

In the 19th century, Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi was an esteemed (if controversial) journalist, publisher, singer, and composer in Salonica, a Mediterranean port city whose 2,000-year-old Jewish community was later decimated in the Holocaust. He also wrote the earliest known Ladino-language memoir, which was all but lost until Stanford University history professor Aron Rodrigue found a forgotten copy at Jerusalem’s Jewish National and University Library. Now the memoir is available to all, in an edition introduced and edited by Rodrigue and fellow historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and translated by Isaac Jerusalmi: A Jewish Voice From Ottoman Salonica has been published in English in tandem with a digital version of the original soletreo, or Ladino cursive. Rodrigue and Stein join Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about Sa’adi’s life, his obsession with the arbitrary rabbinic authority that led to his excommunication, and the surprising details about Jewish Salonica that find their way to us through his account. [Running time: 24:34.]

Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aron Rodrigue will discuss the memoir with Sara Ivry in New York City on March 29. Click here for more information.

Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine's weekly podcast, hosted by Sara Ivry and produced by Julie Subrin. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes.

EMAIL PRINT COMMENT

Click here for access to comments

COMMENTING CHARGES
Daily rate: $2
Monthly rate: $18
Yearly rate: $180

WAIT, WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY TO COMMENT?
Tablet is committed to bringing you the best, smartest, most enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, allowing vocal—and, often, anonymous—minorities to drag it down with invective (and worse). Starting today, then, we are asking people who'd like to post comments on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place.

I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY.
Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we’ll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.

We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.

Access6comments

Marian says:

February 27, 2012 - 12:40 pm

Please review the use of the word “decimate” in this piece. Unfortunately, a much higher proportion than 10% of the Jewish community of Salonika was murdered by the Nazis. Most were deported and very survived the death camps. I hope you will edit the article to correct this error in the wording.

Mathilde B. says:

February 27, 2012 - 12:49 pm

The statement “2,000-year-old, largely Sephardi Jewish community” is inaccurate. The Jewish community of Salonica is indeed 2,000 years old. However, the Sephardim did not arrive until the 15-16th centuries to dominate its character. Prior to that, the Jews of Salonica were Romaniote initially, and then Eshkenazi.

Julie says:

February 27, 2012 - 2:07 pm

Mathilde B., thank you for the correction. The text has been amended accordingly. Marian, we use the term “decimated” as it is commonly understood, to convey that the size of the community was drastically reduced.

Thanks for your interest.

-Julie Subrin

apikoyros says:

February 27, 2012 - 3:21 pm

Julie,
Just as for so many Jewish communities destroyed in the Shoah, one can not speak about the Jewish community of Salonica without also accurately remembering its fate. Certainly, the intent was to say that the community was “drastically reduced,” but even that belittles the annihilation — how about that better chosen word? — that more accurately describes what happened.

The USHMM estimated that that Jewish community went from around 50,000 to less than 2,000. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005422

DK says:

February 28, 2012 - 2:11 pm

I would like to read this, but why on earth is it $50?! A professor is already paid to research and produce content. The printing costs shouldn’t be THAT high, even anticipating limited sales–much longer hardbound books sell for $30 or
so, and they could come out with a trade paper version, or sell the ebook for much, much less, rather than a mere $10 discount. It’s true I can probably eventually get this from a library, but even libraries have limited budgets, not everybody lives in a big city with broad libraries, and even school libraries probably won’t have enough copies for all the students of teachers who want to assign this book. I also can’t annotate or keep a library book as a reference.

A publisher associated with an ostensibly not-for-profit institution dedicated to the creation and propogation of knowledge ought to make that knowledge available as cheaply and as widely as possible, and not artificially inflate costs.

(This is obviously a broader problem with academic literature and not limited to this work).

Joachim Martillo says:

March 4, 2012 - 1:22 am

Usually I use the word Ladino to refer to word-by-word grammatically artificial translations of the Hebrew-bible into Judeo-Spanish. Such texts were used as teaching materials in Judeo-Spanish speaking communities.

A-Levi (probably al-Levi) appears not to have spent much time in discussion of the Zionist-alleged Ottoman-Islamic anti-Jewish oppression that is a mainstay of modern Jewish (ethnic Ashkenazi) anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia incitement.