Jewish Women’s Education in Ottoman Istanbul

Victoria Danon, a graduate of the Alliance Israélite Universelle school system, taught Ottoman Turkish to Jewish girls at Istanbul’s Alliance schools throughout the 1880s. In this letter dated 1895, she asks Ottoman officials for permission to create a new Jewish girls’ school in the capital in hopes of overturning local Muslim opponents of the plan, who claimed the school would be too close to a mosque. In doing so she frames her effort as a patriotic one, noting the importance of teaching Turkish to girls to both combat foreign influence and to shape future generations. In doing so, the letter displays the complexity of the relationship between Ottoman Jews, their Muslim neighbors, and Ottoman leadership during the empire’s final decades.