Safeguarding the “Home of the Public”: The Jews of Late Ottoman Izmir in a Changing Urban Environment

By the early twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had undergone dramatic urban transformations. The city saw numerous large-scale public works projects, among them the institution of a modern municipality system, the transformation of its port into a modern waterfront, public water and electricity systems, horse-drawn tramway lines, and gas powered streetlamps. It was not merely Izmir’s port that saw dramatic change, but the city as a whole, as westernizing measures emphasizing hygiene, rationalized street patterns, improved sanitation, and the general maintenance of order were implemented to protect what a 1910 pamphlet published in Turkish, Greek, Ladino, and Armenian called “the home of the public.”

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored Ladino archival sources, among them charity registers, taxation records, and correspondence, as well as the local Jewish press, this paper will consider the range of responses employed by Izmir’s Jewish community in meeting the demands of this changed urban landscape. Most notable among them was the appropriation of distinctly modern attitudes towards manifestations of poverty in the public domain, as Izmir’s Jews formed associations to curtail begging and rationalize the distribution of charity. In addition, they reconfigured traditional holiday celebrations, such as the boisterous carnival of Purim, in accordance with norms prioritizing public order and stability. The paper will then turn to inter-ethnic relations, demonstrating how in some cases new public spaces and institutions catalyzed new relationships between Jews and their neighbors, while at other times they failed to destabilize long-standing patterns of Ottoman communal life. More broadly, the paper will shed light on how the Jews of Izmir redrew not only the physical boundary between public and private space, but the boundary between traditional communal autonomy and the demands of the shared collectivity being constructed in Izmir along western lines.