Creating a taste for news: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish periodicals of the Ottoman Empire

This essay explores the cultural impact of Judeo-Spanish periodicalspublished in the Ottoman capital in the late nineteenth century andsituates this literary milieu within the political landscape of lateimperial Ottoman Jewish culture. In particular, it examines El Amigode la Familiya, an instructional journal published from 1881 to1886 by David Fresco, editor of the Judeo-Spanish daily ElTiempo (1872–1933). El Amigo de la Familiya, likeEl Tiempo, supported the Alliance Israélite Universelleand, in the spirit of this educational organization, encouraged readersto adopt the language and habits of the French bourgeoisie. To this end,El Amigo de la Familiya translated instructional literaturefrom contemporary French periodicals: advice on the grooming ofthe body, on child rearing and nutrition, on proper gender roles. Bytranslating such articles into Judeo-Spanish, El Amigo de laFamiliya produced a cultural synthesis that was neither French,Ottoman, nor (at least in so far as it has traditionally been defined)Jewish. The journal reveals, instead, a cultural landscape that was theunique product of late imperial Ottoman Jewry: the expression of aform of Jewishness and a form of acculturation unparalleled in Europe.