Rachel Simon

Between the Family and the Outside World: Jewish Girls in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Descriptions of Jewish life in the modern Middle East and North Africa often depict women as secluded in their homes and girls as trained for their destiny of serving the menfolk of their original family and later their husband’s. Then, so it goes, following the impact of the West, Jewish women gradually got a fairer share in society. In this article, I will examine these assumptions and developments in terms of the status of Jewish women from the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century: What were the attitudes toward girls? How were they educated? What constituted their work? Whom were they in contact with? How did they spend their leisure time? What were the reasons for change? And, how did these changes influence their lives?

Centre and periphery: variations in gendered space among Libyan Jews in the late Ottoman period

ABSTRACT To what an extent did ‘women space’ among Libyan Jews refer only to the home and a secluded female environment? Were there any inter-gender contacts except for those among close family relatives? This article examines gendered space among Libyan Jews in the late Ottoman period (mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries) in the urban coastal centres and the rural hinterland. It shows that the answers to these questions varied depending on locale, socioeconomic status, foreign influence, cultural development, and the passage of time. The available data indicates that the further one was from the geographical and political ‘centre’ and the lower one’s socioeconomic status, the wider the space each gender held, the more flexible and blurred its boundaries, and the greater the possibilities for inter-gender contacts. The study also explores the elasticity of gendered space and how various groups viewed it, as well as its economic, social and communal rationale, based on indigenous and foreign sources. While the sources, which were mostly composed by men, focus on Jews, it is highly likely that the situation among the Muslim majority and in the region in general was similar.

The Contribution of Hebrew Printing Houses and Printers in Istanbul to Ladino Culture and Scholarship

Sephardi printers were pioneers of moveable type in the Islamic world, establishing a Hebrew printing house in Istanbul in 1493. Initially emphasizing classical religious works in Hebrew, since the eighteenth century printers have been instrumental in the development of scholarship, literature, and journalism in the vernacular of most Jews of the western Ottoman Empire: Ladino. Although most Jewish males knew the Hebrew alphabet, they did not understand Hebrew texts. Communal cultural leaders and printers collaborated in order to bring basic Jewish works to the masses in the only language they really knew. While some books in Ladino were printed as early as the sixteenth century, their percentage increased since the second quarter of the eighteenth century, following the printing of Me-’am lo’ez, by Jacob Culi (1730), and the Bible in Ladino translation by Abraham Assa (1739). In the nineteenth century the balance of Ladino printing shifted toward novels, poetry, history, and biography, sciences, and communal and state laws and regulations. Ladino periodicals, which aimed to modernize, educate, and entertain, were of special social and cultural importance, and their printing houses also served as publishers of Ladino books.Thus, from its beginnings as an agent that aimed to “Judaize” the Jews, Ladino publishing in the later period sought to modernize and entertain, while still trying to spread Judaic knowledge. 125 J U D A I C A L I B R A R I A N S H I P V O L S . 16/17 2011 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 2009). This is part of a larger study on Hebrew printing houses and printers in the Islamic World. For an overall survey, see Simon (2010b), pp. 100–112. The introduction of movable type in Europe in the fifteenth century greatly facilitated the spread of knowledge among wider socioeconomic circles than had previously been the case. Another cultural result was the gradual increase of publications in vernacular languages intended for the masses, in contrast to the past, when manuscripts were mainly written in sacred languages used almost exclusively by religious, cultural, and political elites, who consequently were their main audience. Vernacular languages developed, enriched their vocabularies, and regularized their orthographies and structures in response to the growing need to formally express new and varied ideas and subjects. Thus, in Christian Europe, Latin gradually lost its prominence as the language of scholarship and culture at the expense of growing numbers of publications in German, French, English, and other languages. Jews faced a similar trend, and in many regions publications in Hebrew gradually became less widespread than those in Jewish vernaculars. A case in point is the increase of Ladino2 publications in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was one of the major Jewish printing centers in the Islamic World.3 Other major centers of Ladino printing included Salonika4 and Izmir,5 as well as in Amsterdam and Venice. This process, which took over two hundred years, was one result of the introduction of movable type to the Islamic World, when in 14936 Sephardi printers established a Hebrew press in Istanbul.7 In addition to being a pioneer in this field, the importance of Hebrew printing in Istanbul is based on the 126 Rachel Simon 2 This paper does not deal with the differences among the various languages which were spoken and written by Sephardim. 3 Out of 758 titles in Hebrew type printed in Istanbul, over 280 books and periodicals were in Ladino (see below). 4 Printing in Hebrew type in Salonika started in 1512 (Simon 2010b, pp. 101–102); Vinograd (1995, vol. 1, pp. 666–686) lists 941 titles in Hebrew type printed in Salonika until 1863, of which, according to the language index (vol. 2, p. 486), 120 titles were in Ladino and four in Spanish. Ben Naeh (2001, p. 91) mentions that according to Yaari (no reference provided and personal query to Ben Naeh did not result in any, either) more than 3,500 titles had been printed in Salonika. On Ladino periodicals published in Salonika, see: Simon (2010a, pp. 77–80). 5 Printing in Hebrew type in Izmir started in 1657. Yaari (1958, pp. 113–114) lists 415 books in Hebrew type printed in Izmir; of these, 117 books were entirely or partially in Ladino, starting in 1838. Most of the periodicals (at least 23) were in Ladino. See also Posner and Ta-Shema, (1975, p. 134); Simon (2010b, pp. 102–104) (Izmir). On Ladino journals published there see Simon (2010a, pp. 74–77). 6 The date is: 4 Tevet, five thousand, two hundred, and fifty-four; some think that it should be “sixty-four” (Yaari 1967, p. 17). It would have been the first press of its kind in the Islamic world, even had it started in 1503. 7 On Hebrew printing in Istanbul, see Simon (2010b, pp. 100–101). Hebrew printing soon spread to other Ottoman cities, including Salonika (1512), Cairo (1557), Safed (1577), and Izmir (1657). Armenian and Greek printing followed suit, also in Istanbul (1567 and 1627 respectively), as did printing in Arabic type, which started in 1728 at the Muteferrika Press, with some help by the main Jewish printer in Istanbul at the time, Jonah ben Jacob Ashkenazi. quantity and variety of genres it produced, as well as the centrality of Istanbul as the Ottoman capital with a Jewish community of significant cultural and political impact. Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, numerous Sephardi Jews settled in the Ottoman Empire. Sephardim had great cultural influence on indigenous Jews, though local customs were slow to disappear. Sephardi customs and especially their language—Ladino—eventually became the norm for most Jews in the western parts of the Ottoman Empire. Hebrew remained the language of ritual, prayer, and scholarship, but its comprehension by the Jewish masses decreased, despite the existence of communal Jewish religious education where Hebrew was taught. Jewish education in the Ottoman Empire, as in other parts of the Jewish world, was at the time designed to enable men to participate in communal public life: to pray and read in the synagogue from the Holy Scriptures in Hebrew and Aramaic (Lehmann 2005, pp. 29–30). Thus, because only adult males were active participants in the formal communal religious life, community leaders felt obliged to provide education to boys only. The latter usually studied for four to six years, and learned Hebrew script in order to be able to read texts using that alphabet. Only a small percentage of them continued to advanced Jewish studies, intending to fill communal religious and educational positions. Hebrew was not the spoken language of most Jews, and until the mid-eighteenth century no effort was made in Istanbul to provide proper, systematic translations of the Holy Scriptures and other basic texts. Consequently, most Jewish men did not understand what they read and merely recited Hebrew and Aramaic phrases (including prayers) from written texts (Lehmann 2005, pp. 29–30, 34–37; Simon 2000). The majority of Jewish women were even less literate, because their education was experience-based, taught at home by older female relatives, and geared toward running a Jewish home by applying relevant Jewish laws to this end and to their personal life. Thus, many women could not read at all, and in the western parts of the Ottoman Empire they generally knew only the Jewish vernacular: Ladino (Simon 2000, pp. 88–90). These cultural conditions had far-reaching implications for the development of printing by the Jews of Istanbul (Lehmann 2005). The following analysis is based on Abraham Yaari’s study of Hebrew printing in Istanbul (1967). As is the case with any bibliography, this one, too, might be incomplete, but it still provides a solid picture of printing with Hebrew type in Istanbul. The early Hebrew printers in Istanbul focused on printing Hebrew classical rabbinical works and Jewish law books, which were felt to be in short supply or lacking altogether. Thus, for example, in 1493 the brothers David and Samuel Nahmias from Portugal, who pioneered Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire, printed in Istanbul the Hebrew language legal treatise by Jacob ben Asher, Arba‘ah t.urim. This trend continued until 1730 almost 240 years following the establishment of the first Hebrew printing house in Istanbul, by which time close to 330 books had been printed there, most of them in Hebrew. Only seven were translations, or included translations, or were original works in other Jewish languages—mainly Ladino but also Greek in Hebrew script, JudeoContribution of Hebrew Printing Houses and Printers in Istanbul to Ladino Culture 127

Reference Sources for Sephardic Studies

Some of the main reference sources for Sephardic studies in the broader sense, namely, covering issues related not only to the Jews of the Iberian peninsula and their descendants, but also to those of the Middle East and North Africa for the same period of time, are described. The categories covered are: Sepharad and Sephardic culture, the Sephardic diaspora, catalogs of special collections, and subject catalogs.