Letter to the Alliance Israélite Universelle

Joseph Nehama

1913

I am in the process of preparing a rather copious work on Salonica, its past, and its present. The history of the [Jewish] community has given me quite a headache. I have gone through a pile of responsa and various obscure writings, including a collection of unedited haskamot1 from the Talmud Torah going back to the first years of the sixteenth…

Please login or register for free access to Posen Library
Register
Already have an account?
Engage with this Source
Painting of bearded man in glasses and hat seated at table with cigarette in one hand and Yiddish newspaper in the other.
Tooltip info icon

Related Guide

Jewish Intellectual Inquiry at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

1880–1918

Jewish scholars combined empirical social science with philosophical inquiry, while others explored Jewish history, folklore, and identity to address the challenges of modernity and antisemitism.

Creator Bio

Joseph Nehama

1881–1971

Born in the great Ottoman Jewish center of Salonika (today Thessaloniki, Greece) to a prominent family, Joseph Nehama studied at the teacher training institute for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Paris and embarked on a career in education. Becoming a teacher and then a principal at the AIU school in his native city, he ultimately became city-wide director-general for AIU educational programming. By 1918, Nehama was appointed to the central committee of the AIU, and the following year he was promoted to the post of inspector general of all AIU schools in the Near East. A prolific writer, Nehama wrote a seven-volume history of Salonika’s Jewish community titled Histoire des Israélites de Salonique (1935–1939). He also produced other scholarly works (some under the pen name P. Risal), several literary translations into Ladino, and a Ladino-French dictionary that is still widely used today.

You may also like

A History of the Jews in Russia

The idea of publishing a complete History of the Jews in Russia scarcely calls for extensive explanations or justifications. Russian Jewry, which quantitatively represents the most significant…
View Source
Page with Yiddish text and simple decorated border.
Tooltip info icon

Der pinkes (cover)

Der pinkes (The Book of Records, or The Annals) appropriated the term for the old-fashioned record book of a Jewish community or institution to name a very new phenomenon: the first “annual for the…
View Source

The Jewish Ethnographic Program

With good reason the Jewish people have earned the highest title to which a nation can aspire, the honor of being called The People of the Book [Am ha-seyfer]. “Der Seyfer,” the book, has…
View Source

Jewish Customs

An Addendum to the History of R. Moses Isserles Rabbinic literature assigns to customs (minhag) an extensive and highly prominent role. In fact, the talmudic sages always looked upon customs with…
View Source

Kehillah Meeting Address

I would like to say that this meeting is a meeting of the members of the Executive Committee and of the Advisory Council of the Kehillah. It is not a meeting that is open to the public or to the press…
View Source

The Coveted City: Salonika

The city modernizes more and more. One hardly sees those baggy, dark, unsightly breeches of old, the ones that Muslims, Christians, and poor Jews still wore in the middle of the last century. Until…
View Source