Jews of Three Colors: The Path to Modernity in the Ladino Press at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The Alliance Israélite Universelle schools established in the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s propagated among their students the ideas of Franco-Judaism and the European model of Jewish existence. This was the only modern Jewish ideology available to Sephardim until the late 1890s, when new historical circumstances gave rise to the Zionist movement. Sephardi intellectuals were now forced to choose between the two models of emancipation advocated by their European coreligionists. Because Zionism was banned in the Ottoman Empire, the Ladino press could not embrace or even reject it openly. Nevertheless, Sephardi journalists found ways of doing both in the pages of their periodicals, camouflaging their polemics under various disguises. This article uncovers some of the hidden debates in the Ladino press at the turn of the twentieth century by analyzing accounts of the Viennese, Chinese, Ethiopian, and Russian Jewish communities published by the prominent Salonican journalist Sam Lévy.