In 1523-24, the Jews of Cairo suffered looting and extortion thanks to a revolt by Ahmed Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt. Benjamin Lellouch returns to this episode, but also to the separate narratives to which he gave rise, from Cairo to Eastern Europe.
In 1517, the Ottomans bought to conquer Syria and Anatolia. While various uprisings still took place, in 1523, the young Sultan Soliman appointed a seasoned man, Ahmed Pasha, as governor in Cairo. But against all odds, the latter is preparing a coup, hoping to take possession in his own name from Egypt. Acts of violence are multiplying, until Hmed Pasha orders the capture of the Cairo Citadel, then delivers the Jewish district to looters, before multiplying the substantive extortion itself against several communities, including the Jews.
This attack on the Jewish district of Cairo is an opportunity for Benjamin Lellouch to engage in meticulous work of reconstruction, by comparing Arab, Ottoman, Jewish and Italian sources. It is also the starting point for a philological investigation, to understand how this event was written and preserved in very independent traditions, which brought it to a certain notoriety in eastern Europe to the XIXe And XXe century. And this at a time when the Jews of Cairo, on the other hand, still celebrated the memory of these events by a local pourim, probably one of the first instituted in the Mediterranean, which was respected “ Until exile, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis (1956) (…) and perhaps even until the departure, after the Six-Day war (1967), of the vast majority of the thousands of Jews who have remained in difficult conditions in the country (P. 3).
Finally, this is an opportunity to examine how the topos of a particular bond between Jewish communities and Turkish-Ottoman power was formed, a story marked by famous stories such as the sultans’ reception of European Jews in these same decades-after two centuries of increasing persecution in the West.
The work therefore attaches as much to the events of 1523-24 as to the texts which relate them, and thus navigate between the beginning of modern history and the metamorphoses of societies in the contemporary era. A challenge that makes this reading, often pointed out in his method, very wide in his remarks, emphasizing the specific issues of the writing of an erudite Jewish history, between Mediterranean and Eastern Europe between the end of the XIXe century and beginning of XXe century.
Getting out of a community history
As early as 1525, the Ottomans regained control of Egypt, and Damnatio Memoriae which was then the subject of the rebellious governor Ahmed Pasha in the Ottoman sources obscures the course of the events of Cairo. In particular, the versions differ on these moments very scrutinized by historians between which the authorities deliver the Jewish districts to looting, then ultimately restore order, always on different conditions.
The crossing of the sources produced by the author, on the contrary, makes it possible to place the event in a complex political context, which is not limited to an application or a suspension of the famous Ottoman protection, but exceeds the “ strictly community history (P. 106). Unlike other Jewish neighborhood attacks known by unique documentation, the sources gathered here highlight the general context of violence in the post-conquest years, attacks against other market or religious communities, including Muslim, and finally the link between these different “ nipple groups, or if we prefer outsiders (P. 158), who coexist in Cairo.
The Jews of Cairo: a diverse community confronted with a coup d’etat
In this large capital, the Jews may represent 1/8e of the population, which makes it the third Jewish community of the Ottoman Empire, after Istanbul and soon Salonica. The locations then tend to multiply, but before the migrations from the West before, several dozen Jewish communities are found through Egypt. Several groups coexist: Rabbanites, Karaïtes, Samaritans, or Marranes returned to Judaism. Between 1516 and 1521, other cases of tension or violence against the Jewish communities of Syria are spotted, “ In those years when Mamluk power collapses and where Ottoman authority is only difficult to consolidate ».
The Ottomans then resettled a chief at the head of the Jewish populations of Cairo, responsible for rendering justice and collecting taxes. In 1523, the latter was Abraham Castro, a large merchant, also director of the Hôtel de la Monnaie. Put in difficulty, he managed to flee to Istanbul. In January 1524, the situation accelerated: the governor of Gaza responsible for assassinating Ahmed Pasha failed, and was executed, leading to the death of the main Ottoman army leaders by the rebels. The survivors lock in the citadel with many Maghrebians, Jews and Roums (here Muslims from Anatolia and the Balkans), who were held as pro-Ottomans from the conquest period. On February 8, the citadel was taken by armed Mamelouks civilians, who engaged in the wake of the Jewish district bag (p. 138-140). The sources are not unanimous on the number of deaths, but agree that Hmed Pasha himself puts an end to looting, orders the restitution of spoiled goods, then claims the Jews a very important sum.
From Cairo to Europe: the distinct inheritations of Ahmed Pasha’s persecution
It is to celebrate the salvation granted to the Jewish community of Cairo that the additional Purim then established. Other comparable local festivals are known in Damascus, Crete, in Algiers, but Benjamin Lellouch hypothesizes that that of Cairo created before 1554, could have been the first and serve as a model. As for the real Purim, Esther’s book serves as a reading key to events, the enemy being presented as “ Haman “, And the Savior like a new Mordogy. The study of additional pourim has since enhanced other parties, for example the most famous Los Cristianos pourimby which the Jews of Morocco celebrated the defeat of the King of Portugal in 1578.
As in these additional further pourim, in Cairo we read the Megillah said of Cairo, anonymous text which relates the events of 1523-24, and of which B. Lellouch describes the two known versions, probably fruit of subsequent developments. His recitation also kept the memory of the attacks on Muslims, and made it possible to signify both a loyalty to the Ottoman power, and perhaps recall that the Jews of Cairo “ were part of an urban community (P. 161).
Other stories exist among Jewish sources, but with extremely different destinies. THE “ most detailed and closest story to events (P. 106), but almost without posterity before its learned rediscovery, is due to the rabbi of Crete Élie Capsali (1489/91-1550), thanks to the new learned from the port of Candie.
On the contrary, the attack on the Jewish district is told in a more synthetic version: the Ševeṭ yehudah From Šelomoh Ibn Verga, in which his son inserted the summary of the violence inflicted on the Jews of Cairo, before having it printed in Edirne in 1554. Quickly reprinted in Salonica, then in Italy, this text was a huge success in Europe, and particularly among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in the Eastern Europe XIXe And XXe centuries, where the Ševeṭ yehudah is then the second most reissued Hebrew book – while a translation into Yiddish exists at the end of XVIe century. Many Jews from Eastern Europe then know the name of Ahmed Pasha – even if he represents only a brief episode of the work – and read it as an example of Providence protecting the Jewish people.
When, at XIXe A century, a scientific turning point took place with the implementation of publications and comparisons, the idealization of the relationships between Jews and Ottomans is already at work. It is also the moment of a rise in the Sephardic identity, the Jews of Cairo in XVIe century being sometimes assimilated to this identity, but also in order to give a model of tolerance and assimilation to the authorities of the places where these stories are published – for example in Prussia.
Then in the first half of the XXe century accelerates the “ nationalization of Muslim societies in the Mediterranean (P. 105), societies where religious minorities such as Jews struggle to find their place, and the models of loyalty are highlighted. We thus find under the pen of the scientist Abraham Galané, in his Turks and Jews from 1932, the version that Abraham Castro, head of the Jewish community in Cairo at XVIe century, would have fled to Istanbul to secretly warn Sultan Soliman, in a fine example of “ patriotism ».
These different texts, as well as other accounts of Ahmed Pacha’s revolt, are translated and compared to the end of the work, while the whole book feeds on the other available sources, including the Italian letters and chronicles (or Ragusaine) as well as the Ottoman chronicle of Diyarbekri, still used at the end of a philological lesson which tracks the origin and reception of these texts. A crossing that makes this scholarly work a fine example of a history more political than community, and more Mediterranean than Jewish strictly speaking.