Whether a community’s history is well documented and researched is often an accident of nature. Due to a combination of different factors, some Jewish communities’ records are sparse and hard to piece together, while in others, even small, rather insignificant places, endless records and books exist recording the happenings of the Jewish community. I was excited this week to acquire a large collection of 37 calendar/almanacs written in Ladino, that supplied endless informative information on 3 communities where scholarship has been lagging in digging up and publishing information, that of Izmir, Salonica and Istanbul.
These calendars, printed in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, shed a bright light on the life in these unique communities and cultures and the language spoken by the Jews within, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). While they all contain records of the Hebrew and Secular calendars of the year, supplementary information abounds, each being 50-100 pages. In the Salonika calendars, we find at the end of each volume the details of the Oriental Railway, detailing the information and costs needed for the many stops along the way from Salonica to Paris. Cities such as Monastir (Bitola, Macedonia today) that would be hard to find on a map find prominent mention on the train routes due to the close connection between the Jewish communities of Greece and Monastir. The Salonica and Istanbul calendars have an interesting feature on each month’s calendar page, using as a header for each page a name of a different synagogue in the city, thus allowing us to record the names of the community’s synagogues at any given year and the disappearing of ones at a certain date and new names being added at later dates. Already in the late 19th century, we find in Salonica synagogues mentioned of Ashkenaz and Italian Jews alongside the local synagogues and those of the Iberian exiles. Another interesting feature of some of the Salonica volumes is a list of the number of years passed from important Jewish dates, such as the Redemption from Egypt, Destruction of the Temples and the Spanish Expulsion.
The Izmir calendars were published by the local Talmud Torah as a fundraiser, and contain several chapters on the activities of the local organizations, their ambitions and financial obligations. This is followed by an astoundingly broad list of donor names by city of residence, containing for examples Jews from New York, Los Angeles, Atlantic City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Cuba, Alexandria, Cairo, Corfu, Cities in England and Mainland Europe. While the Salonica calendars list all the secular and Christian holidays, the Turkish ones list prominently the many Muslim holidays and their corresponding Jewish dates.
The Istanbul calendars, particularly the later ones, added at the end transliteration to Turkish of crucial Jewish prayers, such as that of the Kaddish, Shema Yisrael, Blessings for the Torah etc, indicating a lack of Hebrew literacy among at least part of the community. The Istanbul calendars all begin with a corresponding date from 13 years prior, so one can calculate when their Bar Mitzvah would occur based on their Arabic Calendar birthday. All these calendars also include the zemanim, allowing us to understand the customs of these communities in these matters, which can surprisingly differ from tradition to tradition.
With the decimation of Salonica’s Jewry in the Holocaust, the dissolution of Izmir’s Jews with the establishment of the state of Israel and the slow decline of Istanbul’s community to emigration and intermarriage (estimated to be over 50% today), these calendars give a window in to the active religious and cultural life of these communities in their heyday.
