Abrevaya, Stein - 2016 - Creating A Ta

Creating a Taste for News: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish Periodicals of the Ottoman Empire
Author(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Source: Jewish History, Vol. 14, No. 1, The Press and the Jewish Public Sphere (2000), pp. 9-28
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20101391
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Jewish History 14: 9-28, 2000.
^M 9
B ? 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Creating a taste for news: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish

periodicals of the Ottoman Empire
SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Department of History, The Jackson School of International Studies, University of
Washington, Seattle WA, U.S.A.
Abstract. This essay explores the cultural of Judeo-Spanish

impact periodicals published
in the Ottoman capital in the late nineteenth century and situates this literary milieu within
the political landscape of late imperial Ottoman Jewish culture. In particular, it examines
El Amigo de la Familiya, an instructional journal published from 1881 to 1886 by David
Fresco, editor of the Judeo-Spanish daily El Tiempo (1872-1933). El Amigo de la Familiya,
likeEl Tiempo, supported theAlliance Isra?liteUniverselle and, in the spirit of this educational
organization, encouraged readers to adopt the language and habits of the French bourgeoisie.
To this end, El Amigo de la Familiya translated instructional literature from contemporary
French periodicals: advice on the grooming of the body, on child rearing and nutrition, on
proper gender roles. By translating such articles into Judeo-Spanish, El Amigo de la Familiya
produced a cultural synthesis that was neither
French, Ottoman, nor (at least in so far as it has
traditionally been defined) Jewish. Thejournal reveals, instead, a cultural landscape that was
the unique product of late imperial Ottoman Jewry: the of a form of Jewishness
expression
and a form of acculturation unparalleled in Europe.
The Judeo-Spanish weekly El Amigo de la Familiya, published in

Constantinople from 1881-1886, regular offered its readers advice in a
column entitled consejos provecozos para la familiya [useful tips for the
family]. When it is hot and humid, the paper warned, "the most beautiful
women protect the color of their face when outdoors."1 "An honest woman,"
the paper confided on another occasion, "washes only with water and wears
her face in its natural color."2 These bits of advice were joined by others.
Female readers were offered counsel on the proper washing of the body, the
untangling of matted hair, and the proper use of scented water.3 Men were
advised on the most efficient method of removing calluses (soak your hands
in water and abstain from heavy labor), and young women were told that to
attract the interest of single gentleman they should avoid gambling in public.4
The majority of El Amigo de la Familiya's counsel was informed by
contemporary French journals, an act of cultural mimicry that illustrated the
subordinate position of the Ottoman economy relative to that of France (and
of Ottoman Jewry relative to that of the Franco-Jewish elite): a relationship
that could be called semi-colonial. Indeed, the publication of this journal
was both conceptually and financially enabled by the Alliance Isra?lite
10 SARAHABREVAYASTEIN
Universelle (AIU), an organization founded by French Jews in 1860 designed

to educate and "regenerate" Oriental Jews in the trends, languages, and spirit
of the West. As this might suggest, though the content of El Amigo de
la Familiya was borrowed from French journals, it had its own layers of
meaning. For example, if protecting the light tone of one's skin could make
one look French, it had the added "advantage" of distinguishing an Ottoman
Jewish woman from her non-Jewish peers, most of whom were likely to be
darker in tone than she. Similarly, when El Amigo de la Familiya encour
aged women to wash "only with water," it implicitly criticized the common
Levantine practice of washing with rose water. Advise on the removal of
calluses, too, was not only aesthetic: it encouraged both male and female
readers to adhere to an ethnic hierarchy of labor, with Jews (in distinction to
their Muslim peers) dominating the "finer" professions. Finally, the practice
of gambling was discouraged partly because it was thought to facilitate other
dangerous practices: the speaking of Judeo-Spanish, gossiping, the expres
sion of passions, gathering in public, all habits that El Amigo de la Familiya
vociferously discouraged.5 Refracted in the pages of this journal of science,
I would argue, is the tremendous fragility of the late nineteenth century
Ottoman Jewish culture. This culture faced a very particular modernity at
the turn of the century; a modernity born of Ottoman debt and of French
(and Franco-Jewish) influence: amidst an Ottoman political climate in which
ethnic and religious difference, once juridically sustained, would increasingly
prove disadvantageous.6 These circumstances, which differentiated Ottoman
Jewry from Jews in Eastern and Western Europe, condition El Amigo de la
Familiya'^ every page.
I begin by unpacking the advice extended by El Amigo de la Familiya
in order to gesture towards the extraordinary richness of the Jewish popular
press; to illustrate how, even in corners of a newspaper considered tertiary by
its creators (or perhaps especially in such corners), one can begin to detect
the complexity of turn-of-the-century Jewish life, a complexity that is often
belied by other historical sources. From journals like El Amigo de la Familiya,
we can learn what Jews of unexceptional educational or class background
might have read about: we can encounter some of the pressures that may
have the way they lived their lives. Such journals allow us to reflect
influenced
upon the kind of information that circulated among Ottoman Jewish readers
of Judeo-Spanish, the kind of news they may have debated, laughed at, or
simply consumed with curiosity.
Popular Jewish newspapers are points of entry for the writing of social,
literary, and intellectual histories. They are far from self-contained texts;
one must, after all, turn to many kinds of sources to understand a news
- to measures of literacy and income, contemporary
paper memoirs, fiction,
JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THEOTTOMANEMPIRE 11
philosophy, and politics, to rival journals, to the practice of censors and the
policies of governments. In this sense, newspapers can be thought of as port

able archives; and, like any archive, they both contain and omit tremendous
amounts of information. In the field of Jewish History, these archives have
been by historians
little-visited of modern Jewry. While Jewish newspapers
are often consulted as secondary sources, they have by and large not been
historicized in and of themselves. And while there exist a number of very
fine studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth century journals designed
for highly educated Jews, there has been little scholarship devoted to Jewish
popular presses.7 a
This is reflection, no doubt, of the popularity of the sub
field of Jewish intellectual History and, perhaps, of the distrust that popular
sources seem to command. Regardless of the causes of this lacunae, the effect
is clear: we lack a sense of the impact popular newspapers had upon Jewish
readers.
In order to support the use of popular Jewish presses as historical sources,

this article turns to a number of Judeo-Spanish presses published in the
Ottoman interior on the eve of the twentieth century, paying particular atten
tion to El Amigo de la Familiya. This newspaper, I will argue, can serve as a
unique barometer of Jewish cultural change in the Ottoman Empire. To under

stand it, this article explores the social context of Ottoman Judeo-Spanish
publishing of the late nineteenth century: the economic and political climate
that enabled these newspapers' publication and the kinds of information and
advise that readers of these presses were likely to encounter. These documents
contain a struggle to articulate a modern sense of Ottoman Jewishness that
was at once multiple and essentialist, a Jewishness whose contours we have
not yet begun to grasp.
Judeo-Spanish publishing in the Ottoman Empire
El Amigo la Familiya
de was coedited by David Fresco, who, for over
fifty years, controlled the production of some of the most influential Judeo
Spanish newspapers of the Ottoman capital city. El Tiempo, periodiko
israelita politiko, literario, komersial ifinansario [Time, a Jewish period
ical of politics, literature, commerce, and finances] was one of the first
newspapers founded by Fresco and would become one of the longest-lived
Judeo-Spanish newspapers of the Ottoman Balkans. It would run continu
ously from 1872 until 1930, appearing first as a daily, soon after biweekly,
and, from July 1882 to 1930, three times a week. During these years, Fresco
was also responsible for editing three Judeo-Spanish weeklies which served
as informal supplements to El Tiempo, El Sol: revista sientifika y literaria
[The Sun: a scientific and literary journal] (1877-1878), El Amigo de la
familiya: revista periodika ilustrada [The Friend of the Family: an illustrated

journal] (1881-1886), and El Instruktor: revista sientifika y literaria [The
Teacher: a scientific and literary journal] (1888-1889). All three weeklies
were nearly entirely
composed of articles translated from contemporary (and
unattributed) English and French periodicals, and were intended to educate
readers in the latest trends in hygiene, child-rearing, nutrition, the natural and
human sciences.
El Tiempo and these weeklies all encouraged the Westernization and
embourgeoisement of Ottoman readers of Judeo-Spanish. In this sense, these
papers' mission was distinct from many turn-of-the-century Jewish journals
of Eastern and Western Europe, which tended to encouarge the accultura
tion of Jews into the culture of their region.8 This goal, as I have already
suggested, reflected the influence of AIU and of the Franco-Jewish elite, a

population that had become concerned for their coreligionists of 'the East'
in early 1840, when the Jews of Damascus were accused of murdering a
Capucin friar to use his blood for ritual purposes. The Damascus blood libel
trial galvanized West European Jewry: numerous Jewish presses emerged in
the wake of the blood libel charge, and their pages were animated with discus
sion of the affair.9 By 1860, the Franco-Jewish elite was determined to use
their social and economic influence to facilitate the emancipation of 'Oriental
: and it was
in this that the AIU was founded. In the
Jewry' spirit opinion of
the AIU, emancipation could best be achieved only after Levantine Jewry
underwent a process of "regeneration," and this, it was thought, was best
accomplished through education. By the eve of the First World War, the AIU
had established 183 schools in the Ottoman
Empire, its former territories,
and in the Maghreb, with 43,700 students in attendance.10 All teaching was
conducted in French: students were also expected to gain a command of local
languages, Hebrew and Jewish history.
In addition to creating schools, the AIU provided funds for other civil
izing projects. El Tiempo and its numerous supplements were
supported by
it, and much of their ideological itinerary was informed by the organiza
tion. In turn, these papers offered extensive coverage of AIU affairs and
usually, though not always unequivocally, supported its endeavors. Often this
support was indirect. For example, these papers furiously derided the use
of Judeo-Spanish whilst encouraging a fluency in French and (to a lesser
extent) Turkish. And because Fresco and his colleagues considered fluency in
Western European languages and cultural trends as necessary tools for readers
wishing to succeed in an economy that revolved around Western economic
interests, El Tiempo republished telegrams announcing the day's news which
reported on events in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and In the
Budapest.11
process, El Tiempo by and large neglected news of Ottoman urban centers,
though it occasionally reported on events in "the provinces." Izmir, Salonika,

-
and Edirne -major Jewish centers in the empire began to receive regular
attention only in the mid 1880s, and even news of Constantinople was hard
to come by in the paper's earliest years. It was only by 1890 that the paper
instituted the column "Del Mundo Izraelita," which reported on affairs in
major Jewish centersthroughout the world.

An interest inWestern European cities and a disinterest in affairs in the
Ottoman Empire could be described as cultural, but it had a material basis.
By the eve of the twentieth century, the Ottoman (and the Ottoman
Jewish)
economy had become subordinate to Western
Europe: European trade had
not merely expanded into the Ottoman Empire, but had encouraged a system
of economic privileges, a growing Ottoman debt, and the establishment of
European credit unions which facilitated lending to the Ottoman regime (and
thus perpetuated a semi-imperial relationship). It is true, as Donald Quataert,
Roger Own, and Sevkut Pamuk have shown, that these affairs did not prevent
Ottoman industrial centers from remaining vibrant, local merchants from
prospering, or the Ottoman textile industry from surviving.12 Nonetheless,
the economic subordination of the Ottoman Empire had implications for the
shaping of culture: in the Ottoman case, embourgeoisement became insepa

rable from Westernization (not only for Ottoman Jewry, but for budding
bourgeoisie of other ethnic and religious groups as well). In El Tiempo, too,
cultural and economic change were inextricably intertwined. The journal was
envisioned as a newspaper of commerce and finance as well as a journal
of political and literary news. Indeed, alongside El Amigo de la Familiya's
descriptions of the habits of the French bourgeoisie, El Tiempo would dili
gently publish data on the arrival of ships, the budgets of towns, religious and
secular organizations: it would reproduce pages of winning lottery numbers,
the exchange rate of foreign currency, and the budgets of Jewish communal
authorities. As this
suggests, though endorsement of the AIU was often
subtly imbedded in El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya, these papers
were explicit in their support of the processes of embourgeoisement and
Westernization. In short, to David Fresco and his colleagues, Judeo-Spanish
papers were a tool designed to help the Ottoman Jewish economy regain its
dwindling economic competitiveness.13
Though this would prove na?ve, Fresco's goal was nonetheless somewhat
canny. In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman Jewry did seem poised to
become a quintessential newspaper culture. Ottoman Jews were primarily
urban, highly literate, and undergoing a process of embourgeoisement:
factors that have been linked to the success of popular daily newspapers in
other contexts.14 Ottoman censuses reveal that between 1881 and 1906, the
empire's cities with the highest concentration of Jews (Istanbul, Izmir, and
Edirne) saw at least a 30 percent increase in the number of Jewish residents

(in
Salonika, the Jewish population increased by nearly 40 percent). During the
same period, Jewish population in smaller cities (particularly in the regions
of the Aegean and Thrace) increased as well.15 Jewish concentration in urban
areas made the dispersal of newspapers desirable, but a rise in Jewish literacy
made it possible. In the Ottoman context, Judeo-Spanish remained the mother
tongue of 85 percent of Turkish Jews' until the Second World War; by 1927,
65 percent of Jewish men and 48.9 percent of Jewish women could claim
literacy in the language.16 By the turn of the century, nearly two generations
of Turkish Jews had gained fluency in French, forcing Judeo-Spanish journals
to vie with French journals for readers.17 So too was fluency in Turkish rising,
but slowly: despite El Tiempo's support of Turkish, by the turn of the century
few Jews were fluent in the language, seen to be useful only if one wished to
join the civil service, which few students seemed to do.18 (By 1935, only 23.5
percent of Turkish Jewish men and 22.5 percent of Turkish Jewish women
would claim the language as a mother tongue.19) Finally, though reading
ability in Hebrew was maintained by both men and women for religious and
literary use, the circulation of Hebrew-language journals remained low until
the early decades of the twentieth century.20
There is little doubt that these circumstances bolstered the popularity of
El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya. The only direct reference to the
their circulations is contained in a travel memoir, Constantinople aux derniers
jours d Abdul-Hamid, in which its author, Paul Fesch, records that El Tiempo
had a circulation of 900 in 1908.21 These readers were most likely members
of a burgeoning bourgeoisie, loyal to (and perhaps educated by) the AIU,
and concentrated in urban centers in the Ottoman interior. In absolute terms,
El Tiempo's circulation seems small: indeed, it pales next to circulations of
contemporary newspapers published in Constantinople in Turkish, Armenian,
and Greek.22 But when we consider that in 1887, 38 percent of the 47,000
Jews of Constantinople were under the age of 15, and if we assume that each
copy of a newspaper was shared by five readers (a conservative estimate), we
can conclude that one of every six Jewish men and women or 16 percent of
the Jewish population in turn-of-the-century Constantinople would have read
El Tiempo: an impressive figure indeed.23
The success of El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya can not, however,
be judged by circulation figures alone. These newspapers were created before
the ideologies and political movements that would characterize modern Jewry
(and, indeed, modern Turkey) had rigidified. They emerged as the Ottoman
Empire began its transition from the rule of multi-ethnic empire to the rule
of nation-states. And thus they were shaped at moments in which so much
-
that was central to Ottoman Jewry the language one spoke, the political or
professional status one could achieve, the way one looked, dressed, or self
identified, the class one might attain, the importance of traditional practices
- was in
and the strength of traditional loci of power flux. Reading these
newspapers, I would argue, allows us to reflect upon the way in which these
processes were confronted by and eventually transformed one of the least
understood pockets of European Jewry.
The scent of modernity
Let us return to El Amigo de la Familiya to consider how a single journal

- what I think of as
could capture these processes Ottoman Jewry's struggle
- in we turn our attention once again
with modernity its pages. To do so,
to the kind of advise proffered by El Amigo de la Familiya: counsel on the
reshaping of their use of space and time, their relationship to their children
and to one another, their sense of taste and smell. Such counsel, as we will
see, illuminated how complex were the processes of imitation and mimicry,
and how unpredictable the impact of semi-colonial influence. We begin by
considering the way in which El Amigo de la Familiya encouraged readers
to modernize their olfactory glands and palates by eschewing smells long
treasured and by embracing tastes hitherto trayf [nonkosher]. In particular,
the journal encouraged the rejection of the smell of roses and the embracing
of the flavor of butter. These commodities, one familiar to the Ottoman Jewish
landscape but newly discovered by the French bourgeoisie, the other avoided
by Sephardic Jews but a pillar of French cooking, were the subject of much
counsel in the pages of El Amigo de la Familiya, commodities whose use,
the journal intimated, would help turn Ottoman Jewish bodies into proper
European subjects.
Roses and the scent of rose water
proved troublesome commodities for the
contributors to El Amigo de la Familiya, subjects of both scorn and praise.
While some articles condemned the use of scented waters as backward and
unsanitary, elsewhere, readers were offered tips about the production and
use of rose-scented goods. In one issue, readers could find a recipe for rose
water; elsewhere, they were encouraged to use rose pomade to dye graying
temples.24 The smell of roses, in sum, could brand a woman as backward,

but it could also distinguish her as cultivated: a distinction, one suspects,
ultimately determined by ethnicity or class rather than scent. The conflicting

nature of such advice reflected a paradox that lay at the heart of contemporary
French fashion, whereby the heavy smell of roses was both dismissed as
antiquated and embraced as exotic.25 But it also betrayed the complexity of

the kind of literary and cultural translation that the editors of El Amigo de la
Familiya were attempting. A rose, after all, may smell the same in Paris and
Constantinople, but the cultural meaning of that smell is likely to differ. In

Paris, the smell of roses was relatively new, and a scent that conjured up
the ever-expanding reach of French colonialism. A French interest in the
glamorous odor of roses was inspired by and imported from the Ottomans,
for whom the taste and smell of roses were
quintessential: added to food,
used in the cleaning of the body, grown for ornamentation and consumption.
As it drifts through the pages of El Amigo de la Familiya, then, the scent
of roses conjures up the complexity of the cultural encounter between French
and Ottoman Jewish culture. So too does it reflect the strain felt as cultural
allegiances shift and are reinvented. A sense of this strain was captured in
the nostalgic poem "The Rose," written by a Signora R. and published in El
Amigo de laFamiliya in late 1881;
In the early hours of morning,
opening the window,

I see a flower,
a rose.
I go to it and examine it,

and with great desire,
inhale its odor,
admire its color.
"My dear rose,
you are so beautiful.
Why is your fate,
to die so soon?"
And the rose said,
"Nothing is wrong, my daughter,
Be happy,
that Iwill die so soon."26
This dying rose can serve as a metaphor for the fading integrity of traditional
customs. The pungency and brilliance of the rose, once irresistible, here
confronts its fate: to die so that newer (or perhaps reclaimed) rituals might
take its place. This poem reiterates how El Amigo de la Familiy?'s conflicting
advise about rose water reconfigured an indigenous and traditional practice as
foreign and modern. In so doing, the journal not only reimagined the cultural
resonance of rose water, but essentially claimed it as a European commodity.
This was not an abstract process: in his memoir of turn-of-the-century Jewish
life in Salonika, Leon Sciaky recalls that Ottoman Jews with an interest in
horticulture (such as his father) would import their prize roses from Paris.27
As Ottoman Jews were encouraged to reinvent the cultural meaning of
the scent of roses, so too were they encouraged by El Amigo de la Familiya
JUDEO-SPANISHPERIODICALSOF THE OTTOMANEMPIRE 17
to transform their sense of taste. Attention to food was contained in a series

of articles on the study of hygiene that the journal published in 1885: "the
science of healthy living." Here, the newspaper discussed what foods should
be staples of a healthy diet. Readers were advised that meat was the most
sustaining of foods, and beef and lamb the most nutritious of meats. To
prepare beef, one article suggested, place it in a pot, pierce it, salt it, and
bake it.28 The use of fish, eggs, and potatoes were sanctioned by El Amigo de
la Familiya, and butter recommended over olive oil. The journal labeled green
vegetables nutritious, and the consumption of fruit and compote healthy.

Readers were cautioned that the safest milk comes from a cow, and that
chocolate imported from Mexico was hard on the (Sephardi) stomach.29
Such instructions must have been of mixed value to nineteenth century
Ottoman Jewish readers. Some of this advice was likely to be uncontrover
sial; fish, eggs, and potatoes were all regular parts of a Balkan Sephardic
diet, as were fruits and compote.30 Much of this advice, however, relied on
uncommon foods or the preparation of foods in novel ways. While beef, lamb,
and poultry were staples of the Balkan Sephardic diet, they were more often
than not eaten in small quantities, used, for example, in the filling of paste
likos or borekas, little pies. This no doubt rendered curious the suggestion
that beef be baked in one large piece. Sephardic food is rich in vegetables but
of these, only spinach might qualify as a "green vegetable," thus earning it the
title 'nutritious.' Meanwhile, butter, that quintessential of French flavors, was
virtually absent from the nineteenth century Sephardic diet. Though butter
was a commodity long treasured by the Ottoman administration, olive oil
was a basic ingredient of Ottoman Jewish cooking, and an ingredient which
helped differentiate Jewish and non-Jewish foods.31 Claudia Roden, a scholar
of Jewish food of the Middle
East, has commented that "one could smell a
[Sephardi] Jewish home from the cooking fat."32 Similarly, it is quite unusual
for milk of any variety to be used in Sephardic cooking or given to children.
In her memoir of Jewish life in early twentieth century Rhodes, Rebecca
Amato Levy recalls in rich detail the foodways of the Jews of Rhodes. "You
will note," she writes in conclusion, "that milk has never been mentioned.
The reason is that milk was reserved for the sickly, or sometimes for use in
cooking, since it was

very expensive."33 By sanctioning the use of milkfats,
then, El Amigo de la Familiya encouraged the gentrification of the Sephardic
diet. Equally as important, by promoting milk, the journal implicitly advanced
the secularization of Jewish gastronomy. Butter and milk, of course, were by
and large avoided by Jews accustomed to observing the laws of kashrut, laws
which El Amigo de la Familiya never invoked and thus implicitly eschewed.34
Encouraging the mixing of milk and meat would be unthinkable in any nine
teenth century Russian Yiddish periodical; in the absence of semi-colonial
influence (among other factors), the secularization of Russian Jewish cooking

lagged several decades behind that of Sephardi cooking.35
El Amigo de la Familiya's
emphasis on the scents and tastes of the home
reflects the extent to which
the journal encouraged Jewish embourgeoise
ment in the style of Franco-Jewry and the extent to which it targeted women
as vectors of Westernization. This strategy was defended in the first issue
of El Instruktor: revista sientifika y literaria [The Teacher: a scientific and
literary journal] a weekly edited by David Fresco from 1888 to 1889. There,
Fresco published the first installment of a column entitled "la edukasion de la
mujer" [the education of the woman] which contained a defense of Ottoman

Jewish women's right to a modern education. What a "modern education"
entailed was not explicitly referenced: a reflection of the vagueness of late
nineteenth century journalism, of the defacto supremacy of the AIU, and of
the still-narrow curriculum accessible to even the most bourgeois of women.
Education rids a woman of envy, vanity, superstition, and inarticulateness,
the article argued: it increases her knowledge of business and her sense of
justice. It heightens her love of work, make her prudent, sincere, courageous
and modest, while rendering her less false, hypocritical, intemperate and
egoistic. An educated woman gossips less and is more frank, sincere, cour
ageous, and resigned.36 Such lofty qualities were implicitly measured against
others: those assumed to be prevalent among 'uneducated' "Oriental Jews."
Defraying such 'native' qualities was, indeed, a central goal of the AIU.
Consider the following selection from the AIU's "Instructions for teachers,"
cited by Aron Rodrigue in his study of the AIU teachers; "One of the prin
cipal tasks of the teachers will be to combat the bad habits which are more
or less prevalent among Eastern populations: selfishness, pride, exaggerated
egotism, lack of original thinking, blind respect for wealth and power, and
violent, petty passions."37 These qualities were considered to be particularly
acute in women and girls, who were thought to be sly, superstitious, cunning
and deceitful, more prone to distraction than men.38 The assumption of El
Amigo de la Familiya was that such instincts would fade once women remade
their homes, bodies, and minds in the fashions of theWest. The ordering of
their space and person, it was assumed, would affect their whole being: quell
their passion, disabuse their faith in folk remedies and ways, in short, remake
them into proper bourgeois subjects.
As this suggests, while El Amigo de la Familiya defended the education
of women in the abstract, it also supported women's education because of the
many concrete benefits husbands and children would accrue. One contributor
to Fresco'sjournal explained an ignorant woman was useless,
that while an
educated woman could help ensure the health, honor, and fortune of an entire
family: whence the proverb "lucky is the man with an educated woman in
the house." Such proverbs pepper El Amigo de la Familiya: "woman is the

flower of life," reads one, "the natural friend of man."40 Children, too, were
assumed to benefit from a mother's knowledge. An article in El Instruktor
a child comes from his or her mother:
argued that 90% of the influence upon
a striking reversal of halakhic assumptions about children's
education, the
responsibility for which traditionally lay with fathers.41 In El Amigo de la
Familiya, practical suggestions were offered to ensure that a mother's influ

ence was proper. "First impressions are crucial!" warned one piece, which
went on to offer a daunting quantity of advise; do not treat your child cruelly
or unjustly or he will learn cruelty and injustice. Do not treat your children
differentlyfrom one another, do not impose different standards upon them. If

you punish your child, do it gently: but not too gently. Teach your children to
speak well and to avoid base statements, so that people know they are from a
good family. Teach them to be good to animals, for the child who is cruel to
animals is crueler to humans. Instill in your child kindness, a respect of God,
a love of their neighbors, and a sense of charity. The same article cautioned
parents (both mothers and fathers) to avoid immoral language and frivolous
books.42
Yet more details of child rearing were outlined in El Amigo de la Familiya
in the column consejos provecozos para la familiya [useful hints for the
family]. Here, a reader could discover how to prevent a child from sucking
her thumb, a habit that was thought to cause teeth to grow improperly.43
Consejos provecozos para la familiya also taught mothers how to cure a
child's constipation and dehydration and how to prevent chilblain.44 Worried
mothers were further advised that if they kept children from touching their
eyes, face, and mouth, it would help limit the spread of contagious diseases.45
Elsewhere, readers could learn how to staunch blood (by applying salt water
to the wound) and what to do if one lost a lot of blood.46 An article in El
Instruktor pointed out that if women can be taught simple rules of hygiene,
they would keep a clean home
thereby and prevent their children from
contracting cholera.47 To this end, a number of suggestions on the treat

ment of water were proffered, all undoubtedly borrowed from contemporary
French journals, where the subject of water was frequently discussed in the
to
mid to late nineteenth century.48 Readers were advised to heat their water
78 degrees Celsius before consuming it (a process that "doesn't cost anything
but can save a life").49 They were told that the mixing of water with cognac,
-
vinegar, coffee or wine not only purified water, but helped quench thirst
a useful tip against the threat of dehydration.50 And they told they could
identify healthy water by noting if it was clear and without scent or tint.51
As El Amigo de la Familiya offered readers advice on how to regulate
their food and drink, so too did it advise them to the proper regulation of
their space and time. More than once, the journal cautioned readers against
the playing of dominos and cards: which it called "a dangerous passion" and
a distraction from precious family time. (If you can not stop playing, one
article advised, don't let your children play, as it will cause young ladies to
make a bad impression upon their suitors).52 Gambling and the playing of
cards and dominos were also sources of vexations for the teachers of the
AIU.53 In the pages of El Tiempo and El Amigo de la Familiya, card playing
came under particular suspicion, and attacks on the practice often pointed to
the public nature of the game. The implication of the advise proffered above,
after all, was that one of the dangers card playing was that one could be
"caught" doing so (in this case by an ersatz-suitor). The playing of games in

the privacy of one's home was encouraged as a healthy alternative. To this
end, El Instruktor featured puzzles and mathematical problems for readers to
solve and El Amigo de la Familiya provided readers riddles and word games:
a practice that was echoed in Turkish journals for women.54 "When you know,
you don't know me," reads one riddle published in El Amigo de la Familiya,
"but you know me even if you don't know me." The answer, published in the
next issue: "history."55
In presenting readers with new past-times, Fresco's journals attempted to
- and draw - that
redefine rigid lines between public and private spaces. Given
the reading of late nineteenth century newspapers was often more of a public
than a private enterprise, a certain irony lay behind this goal; a reminder
that the intended impact of a newspaper was often subverted in the hands of
readers. The value of private leisure was emphasized in a fictional exchange
published in El Amigo de la Familiya. A group of women, who have met in
passing, gather to discuss the lottery. "My dear friend," one says to another,
"what is this lottery you are following? I thought your dear husband has been
dead for two years?" "Yes, over two and a half years, but what does that have
to do with it?" the friend responds, "I can play the lottery without ever having
to leave my house!"56 As long as they were protected by the security of their
homes, this dialogue teaches us, even women could safely enjoy gambling:
a hobby once reserved for their husbands. This being said, El Amigo de la
Familiya and contemporary Judeo-Spanish journals were inconsistent in their

advice about women's use of public spaces. The preceding dialogue, after all,
is enabled by a chance public meeting of a group of women; as this suggests,
while El Amigo de la Familiya urged women to confine themselves to the
home, it also recognized that women traveled with some freedom within their
cities and towns.57 These conflicting standards gestured towards the some
times confused nature of theWesternizing project. While women's space was
traditionally circumscribed by the home in the Ottoman context, this practice
was defended by contemporary Western journals (even as they promoted the
use of public space for leisure); for a journal like El Amigo de la Familiya,
eager to promote change, this presented a quandary not neatly resolvable.58
Further advice about the proper use of public and private spaces appeared
in El Amigo de la Familiya's year-long feature "hygiene, la sciencia de
guardar la salud" [hygiene, the science of healthy living]. Here, readers
were offered information on the proper dimensions and lay-out of homes.
Ventilation was a subject of considerable reflection: good air circulation was
considered critical to good health while poor ventilation was viewed as a
potential cause of death for children. One article informed readers that the
average room has 80-90 meters of air, enough to last eight to nine hours.
As a result, the author warned, it is important to replenish a room with air
on a daily basis. This is particularly true if a room houses a sick person, El
Amigo de la Familiya cautioned, where dangerous gases can circulate and
cause contagion (one article even warned of the combustible properties of
stagnant air).59 To avoid such dangers, the piece concluded, one must open
- not -
doors and windows only interior ones, but exterior ones as well for
several minutes a day. To maintain the purity of interior air, readers were
advised to smoke only in the out of doors and to avoid flowers and fruit
with strong or unpleasant odors.60 To guarantee that children had enough
good air, readers were told to ensure that each resident of a home had four
teen square meters of space.61 This space, advised another installment of the
series, should be kept neat and well ordered so that a "husband and wife"
can "rest in comfort."62 Other articles discussed the quality of air in various
locations. The dangers of urban air were expounded in one issue; in another,
the journal advised that ocean air was healthier than air in land, and that the
thin air of high altitudes should be avoided.63 Jaffa was recommended as a
particularly good destination for the sick (here, the paper explained, northern
ocean winds mixed with cool southern winds, producing a mild and pleasant
climate).64 Yet other articles encouraged readers to engage in regular exercise
such as gymnastics or equestrian sports, both of which would increase the
flow of oxygen to the brain.65
Anxieties about air purity and the threat of contagion from stagnant air
were fueled by French journals such as Revue d'Hygiene, where healthy
air was a subject of much reflection. This and other contemporary journals
elaborated upon the dangers of stagnant air and disease-infused interiors, and
offered suggestions about the size and shape of rooms, the placement of beds,
the dangers of cellars, vaults, and antechambers.66 As Ann-Louise Shapiro
has argued, the extensive debate over hygiene and the sanitation of public
and private spaces in nineteenth century Paris
by social reformers allowed
the bourgeois to define the terms of class and intra-class relationships.67
Similarly, El Amigo de la Familiya offered readers amodel of how they could
structure their physical lives according to European and bourgeois standards.

The difference, of course, is that while the social reformers of Paris were
able to legislate reforms, the producers of El Amigo de la Familiya could
do little more than offer advise. And much of this was impossible to follow,
even by members of the upper middle class. The notion that space should
be sparsely inhabited, or inhabited by "nuclear families" must have been
an anathema to Ottoman
Jewish readers, for whom two-generational or one
family dwellings were

the exception rather than the norm. Avrahm Galante
has described how many of the Jews of Izmir lived in cortijos, communal
structures with courtyards at their center, surrounded by walls in which one
or two-room homes were built. Each of these small homes[maisonettes]
were home to several families.
(According to Galante, these structures were
neglected, unhygienic, and facilitated the spread of epidemics).68 To readers
familiar with such conditions, articles on the dangers of overpopulated urban
space, the advise that healthy bodies needed eight hours of sleep a night, or
warnings against sleeping on the floor or in the kitchen must have seemed
little more than ethnographic details of a distant culture.69 This disparity
renders somewhat ludicrous Fresco's hope that El Amigo de la Familiya could
serve as a "friend of the family." Indeed, the family his bannerhead gestured
towards was a fantastic montage of the bourgeois French home: one which
bore little resemblance to the Ottoman Jewish families itmay have reached.
As this suggests, while Fresco and his colleagues intended for the advise
proffered by El Amigo de la Familiya to be observed, much of the journal's

instructions about living a proper European life must have been impossible
to implement. Which is not to say this information was not closely observed.
Even if details of European bourgeois living were not mimicked, they could
nonetheless be consumed by readers hungry for news. This hunger for infor
mation, I would argue, erased the distinction between the practical and the
esoteric. Whether readers of Fresco's journals of science and literature actu
ally chose to emulate French culture (to bake their potatoes in butter, or to
avoid gambling in public) was less important than the fact that they had the
power to learn about and marvel at this technique.70 Itwas a power that turned
the traditional imperial gaze back upon its source, or, better put, proved how
multi-directional this gaze could be. To put this another way, while Judeo
Spanish journals like El Amigo de la Familiya set out to deepen readers' sense
of the French mode, articles on French fashion were legible to readers only
after they were filtered through a complex process of cultural (and literal)
translation. This process helped shape amodern Ottoman Jewish identity that
was at once Ottoman, French, Jewish, and modern. This may appear contra
dictory to the contemporary eye, accustomed, as it is, to perceiving identity as
a single, reducible phenomena; but late nineteenth and early twentieth century
Ottoman Jewish culture was far from single in inspiration or nature.
This is not to suggest that Ottoman Jewish identity was "hybrid" or
irreducibly multiple in nature, at least not in the sense implied by many
contemporary theorists of identity, who often see in this multiplicity a resis
tance to colonialism (or neo-colonialism).71 Such an understanding of the
"hybrid" fails to accommodate the history of Ottoman Jewry in two signifi
cant regards. First, Ottoman Jews' ability to marvel at French culture cannot
be aptly labeled resistance; not only does this term fail to describe the eager
ness with which Ottoman
Jewry turned to the West, it overlooks the many
nuances in the relationship between Ottoman Jewry, France, and French
Jewry and between the Ottoman Empire and France. Further, though Ottoman
Jews embraced a myriad of affiliations, I suspect that they viewed them
selves in an essentialist
as Jewish way. Even Fresco, editor of El Amigo
de la Familiya and El Tiempo, was quick to recognize that his Westernizing
journals, regardless of their content, were Jewish because they were written
for Jews in a Jewish language.72 To put this another way, at its core, Ottoman
Jewish identity was not plural but self-consciously "Jewish," a category that
held tremendous meaning, particularly in so far as it differentiated Ottoman
Jews from their Christian and Muslim neighbors. This Jewishness, to be
sure, was articulated through and alongside the articulation of other allegi
ances: with Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the modern. But no one of
these allegiances, nor their force as a whole, served to undermine or displace
the importance of the "Jewish" as a mode of self-identification, even as (or
perhaps because) the meaning of Jewishness was constantly in flux.

In conclusion, El Amigo de la Familiya can be read as evidence of the way
in which cultural change was articulated by and for Jewry in the Ottoman
interior on the eve of the twentieth century: amoment in which the meaning of
Ottoman Jewishness was at once incredibly complex and irrevocably fragile.
So too does the journal encapsulate the uniqueness of the modernity exper
ienced by readers of Judeo-Spanish, and the way in which this modernity
influenced the texture of Jewishness in the Ottoman Empire. In sharp contrast
to patterns of acculturation evidenced in Eastern and Western Europe, in the
Ottoman setting, the Jewish elite encouraged Jews to emulate not the culture
of their region, but the culture of a far-away land. Explicit in the first half of
and implicit in the latter half, is a second argument: that popular
this article,
newspapers in Jewish languages are invaluable documents of turn-of-the
century Jewish life, not only because they captivate the historian, but because
they captivated their readers. As
this suggests, historicizing Jewish news
papers demands not only a study of the texts in their pages, but attention to
the way in which they were consumed. El Amigo de la Familiya and journals
like it offer us the rare opportunity to track cultural change as it was written,
read, and experienced on a daily or weekly basis. Like the capricious scent
of roses and taste of butter, much of this change has eluded other historical
documents, hiding, as it does, in obscure corners of popular newspapers, and
awaiting our discovery.
Notes
1. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 6 Shevat,

5642; "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered,
18Av, 5645.
2. "Diversos", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 23 Kislev, 5642.
3. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 18
Kislev, 5646.
4. "Hygiene, la sciencia de
guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 4
Kislev, 5646; "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya,
unnumbered, 4 Kislev, 5646.
5. See, for example, "Komportiendo del padre imadre con sus kreaturas", El Amigo de la
Familiya #61, 12Tamuz, 5642 (1881).

6. For more on the theme of "difference" and the multi-ethnic nature of the Ottoman
Empire,
see; Aron Rodrigue, "From Millet to Minority: Turkish Jewry", in Pierre Birnbaum and
Ira Katznelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton,
1995); Aron Rodrigue, interviewed by Nancy Reynolds, "'Difference' and Tolerance in
theOttoman Empire", Stanford Humanities Review 5(1) (1996), 81-92.
7. Exceptions to this trend include: Aviva "The Ladino
Ben-Ur, Press in
(Judeo-Spanish)
the United States", in Werner Sollars
(ed.), Multilingual America: Transnationalism,
Ethnicity and the Languages of American Literature (New York, 1995), 64?77; Esther
Benbassa, "Presse d'Istanbul et de Salonique au service du sionisme (1908-1914)", Revue
Historique 560 (1986), 337-367; Esther Benbassa, Une diaspora s?pharade en transition
(Paris, 1993); David Bunis, Voices From Jewish Salonika, Selections from the Sudizmo
Satirical Series Tio Ezra i su mujer Benuta and Tio Bohor i su Mujer Djamila (Jerusalem,
1999); RuthWisse, "Not the 'PinteleYid' but the Full-Fledged Jew", Prooftexts 15 (1995),
33-61; Yehuda Slutzky, Haltonut HaYehudit-Rusit BeMeah HaEsrim (1900-1918) (Tel
Aviv, 1978); Yakov Shatzky, "Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Prese", inRaphael Abramovitch
et al. (eds.), Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (New York, 1942), 199-285; Dovid Druk, Tsu der
geshikhte fun der Yidisher Prese inRusland un Poylen (Warsaw, 1920);Marc Angel, La
America: the Sephardic experience in the United States (Philadelphia, 1982).
8. This was not, of course, the case. Readers of Yiddish who lived in Congress
always
Poland, for example, were often to their in the Russian
encouraged improve fluency
language and culture rather than in Polish:
surely this is one example among many. A
more detailed of turn-of-the-century Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and
comparison presses,
their positions on acculturation, can be found in my dissertation, The Creation of Yiddish
and Judeo-Spanish Newspaper Cultures in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, written for
Stanford University's Department of History, June, 1999.
9. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder", Politics, and the Jews in 1840
(Cambridge, 1997).
10. Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle and the
Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington, 1990), p. xii.
11. This focus was reiterated in the paper's advertisements, which promoted and stores
goods
based in these European cities.
12. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy (London/New York, 1981); Sevket
Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913: Trade, Invest
ment, and Production (Cambridge, 1987); Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in
the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1993); See also; Beshara Doumani,
Rediscovering Palestine (Berkeley, 1995).
13. Early editorials in El Tiempo
juxtaposed the economic state of Ottoman Jewry with that
of other Ottoman millets,
suggesting that the lack of Judeo-Spanish newspapers reflected
and perpetuated the devolution of the Ottoman Jewish economy. Though the successes of
"rival" millets were alluded to only vaguely, they are quantifiable. By 1885, there were far
fewer Jews than Greeks
and Armenians in Constantinople, and the latter millets dominated
the key positions in the city's economy; Greeks and Armenians represented 22.53 percent
and 20.58 percent of the active population of Istanbul and 25.41 percent and 26.99 percent
of the population working in trade craft and industry, while Jews represented 5.59 percent
of the active population and 5.24 percent of the population working in trade, craft, and
industry. One
of the earliest expressions of the Greek and Armenian millets' newfound
economic security was their production of newspapers in Greek, Armenian, and Turkish
transliterated into the Greek and Armenian alphabets, all of which quickly gained in
popularity. Stanford Shaw, "The Population of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century", Turk
TarihDergisis 32 (1979), p. 412. Cited by Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, The Jews
of the Balkans: the Judeo-Spanish community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford, 1995),
p. 82.
14. Among those studies of emerging newspaper cultures that I have found the most useful
are: Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, 1985); Natalie Zemon
Davis, "Printing and the People", Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stan
ford, 1975); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, 1996); Carla Hesse,
Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Berkeley, 1991);
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in theModern World (New York, 1971); Thomas Richards,
The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914
(Stanford, 1990); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News, a Social History of Amer
ican Newspapers (New York, 1967); Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse,
the Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca,
1985).
15. Walter F. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity (New York/London, 1992).
16. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity.
17. Sam Levy, son of the editor of La Epoka Sa'adi Bezalel recalled that in the 1880s,
HaLevy,
though Salonika was home to 20,000 Jewish families, the paper had only 50 subscribers,
a circulation that paled in comparison to the circulation of French-language such
journals
as the Salonika-based Journal de Salonique, which reached 1,000 subscribers. Sam Levy,
"Mes M?moires: Salonique a la fin du XIXe si?cle", Tesoro de los Jud?os Sefard?es:
Estudios Sobre la Historia de los Jud?os Sefard?es y su Cultura (Paris: Archives of
the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle, 1961), Volume VII, pp. LXI-LXII. See also: Esther
Benbassa, "Presse d'Istanbul et de

Salonique au service du sionisme (1908-1914)."
Revue Historique 560 (1986). Paul Dumont, "Le fran?ais d'abord", Gilles Veinstein (ed.),
Salonique, 1850-1918: La 'ville des Juifs' et le r?veil des Balkans (Paris, 1992).
18. Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Isra?lite Universelle and the
Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 116-120,
86.
19. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity.

20. In the Ottoman Empire, it was forbidden to publish journals in Hebrew until after the
Young Turk Revolt in 1908. Even then, the circulation of Hebrew periodicals remained
low. Benbassa, Une diaspora s?pharad en transition, p. 92.
21. Paul Fesch, "La presse et la censure", Constantinople aux derniers jours d'Abdul-Hamid
(Paris, 1907), p. 68.

22. Circulations of Greek, Armenian, and Turkish papers can be found in: Gia Aivazian, "The
Role of the Armenian Press in Istanbul, 1908-1915 in the Shaping of the Armenian
National Identity", paper delivered at the Middle East Studies Association Annual
Conference, San Francisco, 1997; Fesch, "La presse et la censure."
23. The number of Jews living in Constantinople is cited by Riva Kastoryano, Ottoman and
Turkish Jewry, Community and Leadership, Ilhan Basgoz (ed.), vol. 12, Indiana University
Turkish Studies Series (Bloomington, 1992). See also Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the
Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991), p. 11. The percentage of
children under the age of 15 is derived from Justin McCarthy's age pyramids, based upon
the Ottoman census of 1912. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: the Population of
Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York, 1983), Appendix 4, pp. 193-226.
24. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 20 Shevat,
5642; 30 Adar, 5642.

25. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination
(Cambridge, 1986), p. 74.
26. "Poezie de Signora R.", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 16 Kislev, 5642
27. Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Sal?nica, Portrait of an Era (New York, 1946), p. 11.
28. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 26 Tevet

5642.
Adar, 5645.
30. In referring here to the "Balkan

Jewish diet", or, as I do in the following paragraph, to a
Sephardic diet, I am
referring to the cooking habits of the Iberian Jews of the Balkans.
-
This is meant to distinguish them from the Sephardim of the Maghreb Morocco, Tunisia,
-
Algeria, and Libya and from the Mizrahim, the Jews of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and
Yemen, all of whom had their own forms of Jewish cooking.

31. Sami Zubaida reminds us that clarified butter was regulated and guarded by the Ottoman
administration, and a commodity particularly prized in Istanbul. Sami Zubaida, "National,
Communal and Global Dimensions inMiddle East Food Cultures", in Sami Zubaida and
Richard Tapper (eds.), Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (London, 1994), p. 42.
32. Claudia Roden, "Jewish Food in theMiddle East", in Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper
(eds.), Culinary Cultures of theMiddle East (London, 1994), p. 155.
33. Rebecca Amato I Remember Rhodes ...
Levy, (New York, 1987), p. 48.
34. For a discussion of Sephardi foodways, see: Claudia Roden, "Jewish Food", p. 155. For a
memoiristic account of the scarcity of milk, see: Amato Levy, I Remember Rhodes, p. 48.
35. Claudia Roden argues (and arguably exaggerates) this point in her article "Jewish Food",
p. 154.
36. Unsigned. "La edukasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
37. "Instructions pour los professeurs", Archives of the AIU, France XI.E.l. Cited by; Aron
Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition, the Teachers of the
Alliance Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle, 1993), p. 72.
38. Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries, see especially Chapter Five, "The
Rodrigue,
Emancipation and Reformation of Women." See also "El habito de la lektura", El Amigo
de laFamiliya #1, 1 Iyar 5648.
39. Unsigned. "La educasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
40. "La mujer", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 23 Kislev, 5642.
41. "La edukasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
42. del padre imadre con sus kreaturas", El Amigo de la Familiya #61, 12
"Komportiendo
Tamuz, 5642 (1881).
43. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, #61, 12 Tamuz, 5642
(1881).
44. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya #61, 12
45. Tamuz, 5642 (1881); #1, 16Kislev, 5642.

Shevat, 5646.
47. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 23 Kislev,
5642.
48. Unsigned. "La educasion de la mujer", El Instruktor, #1, Iyar 5648 (1888).
49. Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water (Oxford, 1986). See especially "The Power
of the Press", pp. 117-128.
50. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 25 Adar,
5642.
Sivan, 5645; unnumbered, 18 Av, 5645.

52. El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 14 Sivan, 5645.
53. "Komportiendo del padre i madre con sus kreaturas", El Amigo de la Familiya #61, 12
Tamuz, 5642 (1881).

54. See Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition, pp. 75-76.
55. Elizabeth Brown Frierson, "Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the
Hamidian Era", Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1996, p. 126.
56. "Enigma", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 6 Shevat, 5642; 20 Shevat, 5642.
57. "Diversos", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 14 Tevat, 5642.
58. One finds this to be true of other Judeo-Spanish presses of the period. By the turn of the
century, El Tiempo was full of advertisements for clothing that pictured women strolling
through public spaces (either alone or with their families). The notion of the public stroll,
indeed, was now tied to numerous sartorial accouterments: the parasol, the cane, gloves,
the elegant hat.
59. On traditional uses of public and private space in the Ottoman Jewish world, see Jacob
Barnai, "On the History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire", in Esther Juhasz (ed.),
Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects of Material Culture (Jerusalem, 1990),
p. 31. Of the many works on the transformation of women's space inWestern the
Europe,
following two have been most useful: Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, Imagery of
the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914 (London, 1987); JudithWalkowitz, City of Dreadful
Delight (Chicago, 1992).
Tishrei 5645.
61. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 16 Elul,

5645.
Alul, 5645.
63. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 9 Alul,
5645.
64. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 6 Adar,
5646; unnumbered, 26 Tammuz, 5645; unnumbered, 26 Tarnmuz, 5645.
65. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 18 Av,
5645.
66. A fascination with horse-back riding was most likely
inspired by British journals rather
than a vision of life in Palestine or the Ottoman
provinces; note that horses are evoked
as vehicles of leisure rather than transport. la sciencia de guardar la salud", El
"Hygiene,
Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 2 Tevat, 5646; 9 Tevat, 5646.
67. Corbin, The Foul
and the Fragrant.
68. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison, 1985).
69. Avram Galante, Histoire des Juifs de Turkquie (Istanbul, 1985), vol. 3 of 9, pp. 116-117.
70. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 2 Tevat,
5646.
71. Tracing the impact of these journals upon readers habits would be particularly difficult
given the scarcity of Sephardi autobiographies from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Partly as a result of lacunae, there has been little exploration of Ottoman
Jewish material culture of the period. On the rarity of the autobiographical form, see Aron
Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe: The Autobiog
raphy and Journal of Gabriel Ari?, 1863-1939 (Seattle, 1998). For a study of Sephardi
material culture, see Juhasz, Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire.
72. I refer here, in particular, to Homi Bhabha's opaque definition of hybridity: is
"Hybridity
the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name
for the strategic reversal of the process of domination disavowal ...
through [Hybridity]
unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identi
fications in strategic subversion that turn the gaze of upon the discriminated
the back
eye of power." Homi Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817", The Location of Culture (New York,
1994), p. 113. Other theories of hybridity I have found useful have been generated by:
Gloria Andaluza, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestize (San Francisco, 1987);
Homi Babha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse", October:
Anthology (1987), pp. 125-133; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Boston, 1993).
73. David Fresco commented thusly in the opening editorial of his journal El Instruktor. El
Instruktor #1, 1 Iyar 5648.

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Creating a Taste for News: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish Periodicals of the Ottoman Empire

Author(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Creating a taste for news: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish

SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

Abstract. This essay explores the cultural of Judeo-Spanish

The Judeo-Spanish weekly El Amigo de la Familiya, published in

Universelle (AIU), an organization founded by French Jews in 1860 designed

policies of governments. In this sense, newspapers can be thought of as port

In order to support the use of popular Jewish presses as historical sources,

unique barometer of Jewish cultural change in the Ottoman Empire. To under

Judeo-Spanish publishing in the Ottoman Empire

newspapers founded by Fresco and would become one of the longest-lived

Judeo-Spanish newspapers of the Ottoman Balkans. It would run continu

familiya: revista periodika ilustrada [The Friend of the Family: an illustrated

suggested, reflected the influence of AIU and of the Franco-Jewish elite, a

though it occasionally reported on events in "the provinces." Izmir, Salonika,

major Jewish centersthroughout the world.

shaping of culture: in the Ottoman case, embourgeoisement became insepa

Edirne) saw at least a 30 percent increase in the number of Jewish residents

The scent of modernity

Let us return to El Amigo de la Familiya to consider how a single journal

temples.24 The smell of roses, in sum, could brand a woman as backward,

ultimately determined by ethnicity or class rather than scent. The conflicting

antiquated and embraced as exotic.25 But it also betrayed the complexity of

Constantinople, but the cultural meaning of that smell is likely to differ. In

opening the window,

I go to it and examine it,

to transform their sense of taste. Attention to food was contained in a series

vegetables nutritious, and the consumption of fruit and compote healthy.

cooking, since it was

influence (among other factors), the secularization of Russian Jewish cooking

mujer" [the education of the woman] which contained a defense of Ottoman

the house." Such proverbs pepper El Amigo de la Familiya: "woman is the

responsibility for which traditionally lay with fathers.41 In El Amigo de la

Familiya, practical suggestions were offered to ensure that a mother's influ

differentlyfrom one another, do not impose different standards upon them. If

contracting cholera.47 To this end, a number of suggestions on the treat

"caught" doing so (in this case by an ersatz-suitor). The playing of games in

published in El Amigo de la Familiya. A group of women, who have met in

Familiya and contemporary Judeo-Spanish journals were inconsistent in their

structure their physical lives according to European and bourgeois standards.

family dwellings were

proffered by El Amigo de la Familiya to be observed, much of the journal's

perhaps because) the meaning of Jewishness was constantly in flux.

1. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 6 Shevat,

Familiya #61, 12Tamuz, 5642 (1881).

Benbassa, "Presse d'Istanbul et de

19. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity.

(Paris, 1907), p. 68.

Conference, San Francisco, 1997; Fesch, "La presse et la censure."

5642; 30 Adar, 5642.

28. "Consejos provecozos para la familiya", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 26 Tevet

29. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 16

30. In referring here to the "Balkan

Yemen, all of whom had their own forms of Jewish cooking.

45. Tamuz, 5642 (1881); #1, 16Kislev, 5642.

Sivan, 5645; unnumbered, 18 Av, 5645.

Tamuz, 5642 (1881).

61. "Hygiene, la sciencia de guardar la salud", El Amigo de la Familiya, unnumbered, 16 Elul,

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