Disaster and Change in an Ottoman Sephardic Community

I n August 1863, the Ottoman city of Monastir suffered a fire that destroyed its Jewish quarter, and this event has been mentioned in nearly all the works that treat the Monastir Jews. 2 But all the accounts overlook an important story that sheds light on what historian Aron Rodrigue has shown to be one of European Jewry's more important nineteenth-century endeavours: the 'regeneration' of the Ottoman Sephardim. 3 After the fire, Monastir's rabbinical leadership sought the help of London's Sir Moses Montefiore, who encouraged British Jewry to make donations on behalf of Monastir's 3,000 homeless Jews.More than £2,000 was raised.But London did not allow the money to be used to rebuild the traditional Talmud Torah school.It was a revealing if not surprising decision.By the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews of France and England were keen to overhaul the education of the Sephardic Jews in order to prepare them for life as citizens in a rapidly Westernising Ottoman society.The Talmud Torah schools, which focused exclusively on Hebrew and Talmud, were seen as hindering that goal.In Monastir, British Jewry's refusal to aid the Talmud Torah helped tip the balance of power away from traditionalist rabbis toward a small group of educational reformers.Within a year, these reformers founded one of the first committees in the Ottoman Empire to support the kind of schools favoured by Western Jews-those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.London's decision to financially starve a Jewish school it viewed as backward typified Western Jewry's mid-nineteenth-century dealings with the Ot-1 Mark Cohen is the author of Last Century of A Sephardic Community: The Jews of Monastir, 1839-1943, published by The Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture (New York

Ancient history · Archaeology · Geography · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia · History · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies