The Fez as a Sign of Patriotism: An Appeal for Imperial Allegiance during the Greco-Ottoman War

Alexander Benghiat

1897

The religious ideal that forms the basis of Judaism and that should remain ever present in our Jewish hearts creates no conflict with the requirements of citizenship.

It is true that in the past we Jews formed a distinct national and political community, but it is also true that this situation ceased to exist some twenty centuries ago and that on…

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In 1897, Aleksander Benghiat founded the Ladino newspaper El Meseret (The Joy), in Ottoman Izmir. In the first issue, he explained that this journal would act as an “interpreter between the Jewish community and the Ottoman authorities,” and therefore he initially published the frontpage in Turkish. In this very early article—which was unsigned but presumably written by Benghiat—the author urges Jews to demonstrate their Ottoman patriotism during the 1897 Greco-Ottoman War by donning the fez, the distinctive half-conical red cap that had over the course of the nineteenth century come to be associated with the Ottomans.

Creator Bio

Alexander Benghiat

1863–1924

Aleksander Benghiat (Ben Giat or Ghiat) was born in Ottoman Izmir (Smyrna), where he spent almost all his life. He began his studies in a meldar (traditional Jewish elementary school) before attending an Alliance Israélite Universelle school. He published several Ladino periodicals in Izmir, including his weekly (later daily) El Meseret (The Joy, 1897–1922), which had, at different times, four literary supplements. Benghiat saw himself as an educator of the poor and “ignorant” Sephardic masses. He belonged to a generation of young intellectuals seeking to advance the modernization of Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire. In addition to producing his own works, he was a prolific rewriter of European literature. Among the works he produced and published in serialized form were Ladino versions of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, and about three dozen other novels that were available to him in French or Hebrew.

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