A Livornese "Port Jew" and the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire

The Europeans think that there are no people more ignorant and unrefined than the Levantines. And there was one of them who told me that the Levantines are enemies of knowledge, and that they have no zeal for virtues, but that they are only after pomp and wealth and business."¹ Thus does David Attias admonish the readers of his work La Guerta de Oro (The Garden of Gold), published in 1778, arguably the first secular book to be printed in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, the vernacular language of the Sephardi Jews in the eastern Mediterranean.² Attias was born in Sarajevo, in Ottoman Bosnia, but he spent most of his life in Livorno, the Tuscan port city, where he arrived in 1769.³ He wrote his work, the content of which ranges from a seven-page introduction to the Italian language to a short treatise on physiognomy, "to please a friend of his in the East,"⁴ explicitly intending the book for a Jewish reading audience in the land of his birth, the Ottoman Empire.

Judeo-Spanish literature had only begun to flourish in the 1730s; it was by definition popular religious literature until the mid-nineteenth century. Its "classical age" in the eighteenth century was marked by works such as the Me-am loez—an encyclopedic commentary on the Bible begun by Jacob Huli of Istanbul in 1730—and numerous translations and adaptations that presented the essentials of rabbinic learning in a popularized Ladino version.⁵ Only in the mid-nineteenth

century did secular genres—the novel and the theater—emerge and Ladino newspapers were established, all serving to open the Judeo- Spanish public sphere to secular ideas and promoting the project of Westernization.⁶ Writing in the late 1770s, Attias refers precisely to the absence of secular Ladino literature at the time, blaming it more than anything else for the perceived "ignorance" and "backwardness" of Ottoman Jewry:

[A]ll [other] nations publish many kinds of books, but, among us, there is nobody who publishes any kind of book in our Levantine Spanish language—neither history, ancient or modern, nor books on geography or other sciences, and not even a book dealing with commerce that is the dearest thing to us Jews....Everything is just Law [Torah], [written] in the holy tongue [Hebrew], which only few understand. But our blessed rabbis should consider that today we live in a generation different from the ancient ones, and today's youth has an alert spirit, different from the ones before, and not everyone is inclined to [study] the Torah, and to hear always the same thing.⁷

Attias's La Guerta de Oro thus anticipated by more than half a century calls for the secularization of education and, more generally, the Westernization of Ottoman Sephardi Jewry. (From the mid- nineteenth century onward, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals began to make the case for such a Westernization of their communities, created a rich secular literature in Ladino, and pushed for modern education.) Attias advocated the creation of a secular literature in the vernacular language of the Ottoman Sephardim; he considered the study and transmission of traditional rabbinic culture, especially in the Hebrew language of the educated elite, to be unsatisfactory and insufficient.

One way to read La Guerta de Oro is by focusing on the relations between "Western" Sephardim in Livorno and "Eastern" Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire as they are represented by Attias; they are implicit in the assumptions that he makes about his intended readers. Very much a product of Italian Jewish culture in the context of late-eighteenth- century Enlightenment culture,⁸ its image of Eastern Sephardi culture and its educational agenda directed at Ottoman Jews makes La Guerta de Oro an intriguing source for understanding the changing patterns of cultural interaction between different Sephardi communities in the early modern Mediterranean world.

The "Port Jews" of Livorno Between East...