Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (review)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews in the Russian and Ottoman Empires shared a number of important characteristics. Both lived in multinational empires undergoing revolutionary change in which questions of national identity played an important role. Both retained distinctive cultural features, among the most important of which was language—"Judeo-German," or Yiddish, in Russia and Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, in Ottoman lands. On a more mundane level, there were numerous contacts. The dynamic Russian port city of Odessa thronged with Jews from the Ottoman Empire, while Constantinople was a magnet for Russian Jews, including the small groups of proto-Zionists using it as a transit point to Palestine.

Yet, the two empires were almost never paired as Jewish places, either by contemporaries or by historians. For Russian Jews, comparisons were to be made with France, Germany, or Britain, which served more as favorable models than the presumably backward lands ruled from the Sublime Porte. Ottoman Jews looked almost exclusively to France. Moreover, the Jews of both empires were heirs to very different cultural traditions, the Ashkenaz (western) and the Sephardi (eastern). Nor did it help that Russia and the Ottoman Empire were frequently at war during the nineteenth century.

A comprehensive comparison of Russian and Ottoman Jewries would be daunting in any case, even if it ignored further internal sub- divisions, such as those represented by Constantinople/Salonika and Warsaw/St. Petersburg. Stein has begun this difficult process by examining one aspect of their respective cultures, the Jewish-language press in Yiddish and Ladino (and only tangentially in Hebrew). She presents three case studies, in which the comparative aspect is usually close at hand: the creation of a modern Jewish press culture; the use of images to convey an ideological message; and the information conveyed to Jewish readers by newspaper advertising. In her study, the press serves as an index to the process of the modernization of Jewish communities, as vehicles for "making Jews modern."

The process of modernization within Jewish communities, which involved the formation of modern Jewish identities, occurred within empires that were themselves engaged in the search for a national identity. Was the Russian Empire to be ethnically Russian (russkii) or multi-ethnic (rossiiskii)? Was the Ottoman Empire to remain based on the millet system of corporate bodies based on religion, or to become a centralized Turkish state? Given these themes of constructed national identity within the public sphere, the work of Anderson and Habermas—both cited in the bibliography—come immediately to mind.¹ However, this book is largely theory-free. Stein prefers to deal with the specific test cases of two newspapers that were published in Russia and the Ottoman Empire during the fin de siècle—Russia's first Yiddish-language daily, Der fraynd (St Petersburg-Warsaw, 1903–1913) and the long-lived Ladino paper El tiempo (Constantinople, 1872–1930).

The strongest chapters in the book are those describing how the two newspapers created a "newspaper culture," which involved defining a role as well as attracting readers. Their most obvious goal was to serve as a conduit of modern values and sensibilities to the Jewish masses. For Der fraynd, it entailed the promotion of secularism, support for the Yiddish language (then being accepted as "a national language of the Jewish people"), and a lukewarm support for Zionism, as the movement grew in popularity. The paper tried to be all things to all readers, exemplified by its initial foundation in the national capital of St. Petersburg and subsequent movement to Warsaw, in the very midst of "Yiddishland."

El tiempo had to fight language battles that were largely resolved in Russia. In Eastern Europe, enlightenment-minded novelists of the nineteenth century yearned to write in Hebrew but were constrained to write in Yiddish in order to find an audience. Similarly, for the editor of El tiempo, Ladino...