Butchers, Rabbis, Foreignness—and Tax Revenue

I came across the Ashkenazi butchers’ petition from 1889 through a basic keyword search on the website of the Ottoman State Archives. The term I was looking for was ecnebi—“foreign.” I was in the early stages of outlining a paper focused on the experiences of Jews who were non-Izmirlis, meaning non-native to Izmir, who had migrated to the city and lived there during the late nineteenth century. I hadn’t expected that I’d eventually find myself right in the heart of Istanbul, the Ottoman imperial capital, researching a once-dramatic conflict between the (Sephardi) Chief Rabbinate and Ashkenazi butchers revolving around meat, kosher rules, and, above all, money and power. 

In 1890, Avram, an Ashkenazi Jewish subject of the Russian Empire who owned a butcher shop in the busy district of Galata in Istanbul, sold taref (non-kosher) meat to Jews. Surprisingly, he did so without attempting to hide it, and didn’t seem to express any shame or regret. Was the meat truly taref ?

To answer this question, I delved into a historical episode from 1889, when a conflict broke out between Ashkenazi butchers in Istanbul and the Chief Rabbinate.¹ It began when the butchers sought complete exemption from the gabela, a tax levied on kosher meat, and led to the Chief Rabbi’s decision to label their meat taref. 

Meat was an essential part of both Sephardi and Ashkenazi cuisine in late Ottoman Istanbul. As the historian Minna Rozen recounts, the kosher slaughtering of animals and selling of kosher meat were strictly regulated by the Chief Rabbinate. In addition to a commitment to Jewish law, the stringent supervision of the kosher meat economy had a financial purpose: the gabela was an important source of income for Jewish communities and the Chief Rabbinate.² As such, it was inflexible in its application. The Chief Rabbinate stood firm in imposing the tax on all Jews involved in the kosher meat trade, both to sustain and demonstrate its total control over Istanbul’s Jewish population as a whole, and also to ensure that “foreign” Jews were not unfairly advantaged by tax-free sales over local, tax-paying Sephardi butchers. 

In this context, when employed by the Chief Rabbinate and Turkish officials, the term “foreign” referred specifically to Ashkenazi Jews, pointing to an intracommunal rift that undergirded the gabela conflict. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to Istanbul as refugees from Eastern Europe for a variety of reasons. Yet the event that increased their population in Istanbul was the arrival of around four hundred families from Kerch during the Crimean War in 1854–1855.³ Upon settling in their newfound enclaves in Istanbul, they opened their own butcher shops and appointed their own shohet (ritual slaughterer), thus taking essential steps toward forming a community with its own rich social fabric and ensuring the continuous preservation of Ashkenazi customs.⁴

Given that Ashkenazi Jews living in Istanbul established an independent network of butcher shops and synagogues, it is clear they generally did not acknowledge the Chief Rabbinate’s jurisdiction in spiritual or communal matters. From the perspective of the Chief Rabbinate, the “foreignness” of Istanbul’s Ashkenazi inhabitants, and their unwillingness to adhere to its norms, posed a threat to the Chief Rabbinate’s aim for cohesive control and financial regulation of the city’s Jewish population. The Ashkenazi butchers’ refusal to pay the gabela was an act of defiance against an institution that ruled over a primarily Sephardi population and consisted of Sephardi rabbis and personnel, further deepening the rift between the two groups.

Before I got lost in the ensuing drama of the gabela conflict and realized that the Ashkenazi butchers’ petition was an important key to understanding the sociopolitical dynamics of late Ottoman Jewish communal life, the petitioners’ signatures caught my attention. Written in blue and black ink, in shaky Latin and Hebrew cursive, there were -steins, -bergs, and a couple of Katzes.⁵ Just to the left of the signatures, there were the seals of the Ashkenazi community of Istanbul, one with the Star of David and another with a stout palm tree. They were largely illegible to me (due in part to my unfamiliarity with Yiddish, and to the way the ink had faded over time), but I could make out two words: “Kanstantinapal” (קאנסטאנטינאפעל)—“Istanbul” (still preserved as “Constantinople”) in Yiddish—and “Avrohom” (אברהם)”—interestingly, always recognizable in nearly all languages and scripts. 

Perhaps for the first time in the course of my research, I had found an example of marginalized Jews outwardly explaining their dire situation, advocating for themselves, and addressing state authorities directly.

I’ve grown accustomed to incomplete stories and missing testimonies. My first book, still in progress as I write this essay, traces the lives of marginalized Jews living in late Ottoman Izmir. (By marginalized Jews, I mean “controversial” Jewish individuals and groups that did not adhere to either communal or imperial norms of their time.) In the Ottoman Archives and the Ladino local press, marginalized Jews appear and disappear from view unexpectedly, making it difficult to give substance to their existence and narrate their stories today. But this time it was different. In their petition, Istanbul’s Ashkenazi butchers wanted to be heard by one of the highest-ranking figures in the whole imperial realm: “devletlü fehâmetlü efendimiz hazretleri”—“the auspicious and illustrious” Grand Vizier.⁶ Perhaps for the first time in the course of my research, I had found an example of marginalized Jews outwardly explaining their dire situation, advocating for themselves, and addressing state authorities directly. This was an initiative that emerged from the perspective of a marginalized group, giving me a window into their lives beyond the top-down accounts of authorities. Of course, there are other historical examples of this, but this was the first time I encountered one in an archive myself. Their voices echoed in my flat in Istanbul, not very far from where their butcher shops once stood, a century and a couple of decades later.

Feeling excluded from Istanbul’s Jewish community, and aiming to strengthen their ties to the imperial capital, the Ashkenazi butchers started their petition for exemption from the meat gabela by emphasizing their localness and presenting themselves as “members of the Jewish community who have resided in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Istanbul, for fifty years.”⁷ At the same time, they mentioned their separate synagogue and rabbi as proof of their detachment from the local Sephardi Jewish community. They portrayed themselves as different, yet not foreign—a framework that demonstrated their simultaneous struggle to contradict an established religious institution and to legitimize their autonomy in the eyes of imperial authorities.

The conflict led to a series of correspondences between the butchers, the Chief Rabbi Moşe Halevi, and the Ottoman state. Throughout the letters they exchanged with Ottoman authorities, Halevi portrayed Ashkenazi butchers as enemies of the public good, claiming that they sabotaged the existing communal and economic order and promoted their own interests at the expense of local Sephardi Jews, since a portion of the collected gabela revenue was distributed among the local Jewish poor, widows, and orphans. In effect, he painted them as foreign parasites invading an otherwise healthy body.

For example, in one letter written in the midst of this correspondence, Halevi openly attacked the petitioners by describing them as “Lehli yahudilerin esâfilinden mürekkeb bir cem‛iyyet”—“a group composed of the vilest of the Ashkenazi Jews.”⁸ Beneath this harsh language lay a deeper fear of the Chief Rabbinate: “a few ill-minded foreigners” (birkaç ecânib-i bed-endîşin) attempting to deceive and mislead the “loyal millet” (teb’a-i sâdıka).⁹ As a result, the Sephardi Rabbinate ultimately banned the purchase and consumption of meat prepared by Ashkenazi butchers altogether, an act designed to exclude them even further from Istanbul’s economic sphere and to cut off their communication with local Sephardi Jews. 

The conflict over the gabela was not unique to Istanbul. Ashkenazi butchers’ attempts at evading the tax were also a source of disorder in Izmir, Alexandria, and Jerusalem throughout the nineteenth century; those who were deemed foreign were constantly pressured to obey the existing bureaucratic rules.¹⁰ These tensions shed light on the modern anxieties of Sephardi religious leaders as their conceptualizations of foreign Jews soured during the final decades of the empire. 

The fluidity of foreignness in imperial and post-imperial contexts emerged as a valuable tool for constructing social, political, and economic hierarchies. Despite the numerous changes that the term “foreign” has undergone since the nineteenth century, one thing remains the same: a crucial need for the image of the “foreigner” to be defined, tested, and punished.

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Canan Bolel is an Assistant Professor in Jewish Cultures, Languages, and Literatures of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington. Her current book project focuses on marginalized individuals and groups of the Jewish community of nineteenth-century Izmir. Bolel received her Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington in 2022. She holds a Master of Sciences in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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