Kushta: where the exiles came, and whom they found there

The event 'Where the exiles went' tells where they dispersed. Here is what was at the other end of the road.

The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, and Mehmed II began resettling the emptied capital with people from everywhere—Jews among them. The community there was old and Romaniote: Greek-speaking, with its own rite, minhag Romania, resembling neither the Ashkenazi nor the Sephardi, and its own language—Yevanic, Greek written in Hebrew letters. Those communities were by then more than a thousand years old.

After 1492 the Spaniards and Portuguese came. They were more numerous, richer and more learned—and the city became the largest Jewish city in the world. It was organised not as one community but as dozens: each kahal by place of origin, with its own synagogue, rite and ordinances. Hence the whole knot: whose custom now governs, whom to pay, whose court to obey.

Two men settled it. Rabbi Moses Capsali—a native of Crete, rabbi of Constantinople already under the Byzantines, from 1445, and still rabbi under the Ottomans. It is often written that the sultan appointed him hakham bashi and seated him in the imperial council; the Encyclopaedia Judaica says plainly this is untrue—there was no such office then. His authority was real but rested on recognition.

Rabbi Elijah Mizrahi—himself a Romaniote, who became the first man after Capsali's death. He supported the exiles—and he also defended the long-established against having another custom imposed on them. That is, he refused to settle the dispute by force of numbers, and that seems his chief act: a custom is not abolished by the newcomers being more numerous.

It did not help. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Romaniote communities had gone over to Ladino and to the Sephardi rite; their own held longest at Ioannina. So a rabbi's ruling that another's custom may not be imposed proved right in law and powerless against how it came out on its own.

And one more thing these two dealt with, seldom told: a Karaite community lived in the city, and both took up the question of relations with it. Capsali adjudicated the dispute over whether Karaites might be taught Talmud; Mizrahi ruled that they may be taught Torah but not married, and grounded it halakhically. To teach, yes; to intermarry, no—kept apart deliberately.