The Carmona Family

The city of Carmona, perched on an escarpment overlooking the Sevillian countryside, was one of the ancient centers of Hispanic Judaism. The Jewish presence in Andalusia dates back to the Late Antiquity and experienced, under Muslim rule and later under Christian Reconquest, phases of prosperity and calamity. Haïm Zafrani, in his study of the Jews of Andalusia and the Maghreb, demonstrated how Judeo-Andalusian civilization constituted an intellectual and spiritual crucible whose influence far exceeded the limits of the peninsula [Zafrani, 1996].

The onomastic mechanism that gave rise to the patronym is well known to specialists. When a Jewish family left its place of origin — to settle in another city or, later, to take the path of exile — it was readily designated by the name of the place it had left. Thus were born dozens of Sephardic surnames: Toledano (from Toledo), Cordovero (from Córdoba), Franco, Behar, and of course Carmona. Toledano insists on this point: the ethnic designation was not a confessional distinctive sign, since both Christians and Jews of Carmona could bear this name [Toledano, 1999].

It is necessary here to remain rigorous: the existence of the name Carmona in Andalusia is established, as is the Jewish presence in this city before 1492. Conversely, it would be imprudent to claim to reconstruct a continuous and documented lineage connecting a specific Jewish family of medieval Carmona to the Ottoman Carmona of the following centuries. The archives of the period preceding the Expulsion are fragmentary, and the name spread through multiple channels. What onomastics establishes with certainty is the geographic origin of the name; what it cannot guarantee is the biological unity of all its bearers. The caution of Yerushalmi, who worked so hard to disentangle the skein of Marrano and Sephardic identities, must serve us here as a methodological guide [Yerushalmi, 1998].

This caution does not preclude naming what, in Judeo-Andalusian civilization, nourished the intellectual and literary fiber that the centuries would see flourish in the lineage. Medieval Andalusia was, for the Jews of Spain, a place of relation to knowledge at once Talmudic and secular, where Hebrew poetry, philosophy and exact sciences were cultivated under the same roof. This soil — even if it cannot be directly connected to a specific family before the Expulsion — forms the cultural humus that Ottoman Sephardim claimed for centuries, and of which Elia Rafael Carmona, as we shall see, was a conscious heir.

The decree of expulsion promulgated by the Catholic Monarchs in March 1492 constitutes the founding caesura of Sephardic history. Tens of thousands of Jews left Spain, while others converted, joining the ambiguous and painful mass of conversos. André Chouraqui described this great upheaval and its repercussions throughout the entire Mediterranean world [Chouraqui, 1985]. Yerushalmi, for his part, devoted decisive pages to the fate of the Marranos and the new Christians of Hispano-Portuguese origin, whose destiny extended well beyond the year 1492 [Yerushalmi, 1998].

For the bearers of the name Carmona, the geographical data established by Toledano is illuminating: the name is found principally in the Balkans and in the Ottoman Empire, and much more rarely in North Africa [Toledano, 2003]. This distribution is not fortuitous. The Ottoman Empire, under Bayezid II, welcomed the exiles from Spain with favor, seeing in them a human and economic enrichment for its provinces. Salonique, Constantinople, Andrinople, and later Smyrne, became the capitals of this new Eastern Sephardic world.

The fact that North Africa — despite its geographical proximity to Spain — received far fewer Carmonas than the Ottoman East deserves examination. The works of Hirschberg on the history of the Jews of North Africa and those of Eisenbeth on their onomastics confirm the relative rarity of the patronym in Maghrebi registers [Hirschberg, 1981]; [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This relative absence constitutes, by contrast, an a contrario argument in favor of the Eastern orientation of the lineage: it is toward the Aegean and the Balkans that one must search for the Carmonas, not toward Fès or Tlemcen. The bibliographic repertories of Attal allow one to measure both the extent and the limits of the available North African documentation on these questions [Attal, 1973].

This orientation toward the Ottoman East carries a cultural consequence that the entire subsequent family history would bear the mark of: the Carmonas merged into the Sephardic society of Constantinople and Izmir, learned to navigate between the language of Ottoman administration, the Greek of the port, the Hebrew of the synagogue, and, above all, the archaic Castilian that would survive in them under the name of Judeo-Spanish or Ladino. It is this language that, four centuries after the expulsion, would enable Elia Rafael Carmona to become the writer of an entire community.

The family notice places the Carmonas' principal establishment in Izmir, the Smyrna of Europeans, a major port of the Ottoman Empire on the Aegean Sea. This localization is consistent with everything that the history of Smyrniote Judaism teaches us.

From the late sixteenth century onwards, and especially in the seventeenth century, Smyrna experienced spectacular commercial growth that made it one of the great centers of the Levant. Sephardic merchants played a leading role there, serving as intermediaries between the Anatolian interior and European traders — Venetians, French, Dutch, English — established in the Levantine trading posts. The notice transmitted to us describes precisely a family "active in Levantine commerce and communal life." This dual vocation — commerce and communal engagement — corresponds to the typical profile of the great Smyrniote Jewish families, whose most prosperous members assumed leadership roles within the kehila.

Here an intersection takes place between family memory and historical knowledge: the tradition that makes the Carmonas merchants and communal notables of Izmir is reinforced by the general picture drawn by historians of Ottoman Judaism. However, in the absence of a thorough examination of archives specifically devoted to this lineage — rabbinical registers, communal pinkasim, notarial acts from the European consulates of Smyrna — we must qualify this concordance as probable rather than established. The likelihood is strong; the documentary evidence bearing the family name remains, given the state of our information, to be produced. It would be dishonest to present as an attested fact what remains a plausible reconstruction based on the coherence of context.

It must nonetheless be noted that the Constantinople branch of the name — the one illustrated by Elia Rafael Carmona — lies geographically and culturally close to the Smyrniote center. In the late nineteenth century, the great Sephardic families of Izmir and Constantinople maintained close relations: the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean coast formed a space of dense circulation, where communities knew one another, sometimes married, and shared the same newspapers, the same rabbis, and the same quarrels over modernity. That a Carmona of Constantinople was the cousin, the neighbor, or simply the namesake of a Carmona of Smyrna belongs to the realm of possibility; what is certain is that the two centers participated in the same universe.

Beyond Smyrna, the name Carmona appears in several centers of Ottoman Judaism, testifying to its Balkan and Anatolian diffusion noted by Toledano [Toledano, 2003]. In Constantinople as in Salonika, bearers of this name figure among the notables, merchants and sometimes men close to power.

Salonika, which Gilles Veinstein rightly named the "city of the Jews," offered the Sephardi population a density and communal autonomy unique throughout the Empire: Jews there long formed a relative majority, structured into congregations arising from different cities of Iberian origin [Veinstein, 1992]. In such an environment, a surname of Andalusian origin like Carmona naturally inscribed itself in the mosaic of congregations called "of the expelled" (megorashim).

Oral tradition and certain chronicles evoke, in Constantinople, Carmonas who held financial positions at the court or among Ottoman dignitaries — the profile of the sarraf (banker-money changer) or tax farmer, roles where Jewish and Armenian elites were numerous. We report this point only with the greatest reserve: it pertains, in its current state, more to transmitted memory than to verified archival evidence within the framework of the present work. One cannot, without direct examination of Ottoman sources, attribute with certainty any specific episode to the lineage we are following. The reader should retain the plausibility of the socio-professional profile — merchants, financiers, communal notables — without prematurely fixing biographical details.

This caution is all the more necessary because the name, borne by several distinct families, does not guarantee unity of origin. As Toledano's onomastic method recalls, the same surname can cover lineages without kinship ties, united only by a common geographical origin [Toledano, 1999]. What indisputably binds the different Ottoman Carmonas is their participation in a shared cultural space: that of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Judaism, rooted in the great cities of the Empire, nourished both by rabbinical tradition and by growing openness to European languages and learning from the nineteenth century onward.

It is in this context that a decisive transformation occurs: slowly, as the nineteenth century advances, the Ottoman Empire engages in the reforms of the Tanzimat, opens its doors to French and Italian influences, modernizes its institutions. For the Jews of Constantinople, this movement translates into the growth of schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the spread of the Judeo-Spanish press, and the emergence of a Sephardi intelligentsia conscious of itself. It was in this effervescent milieu that Elia Rafael Carmona was born in 1869, and it was to this intelligentsia that he belonged throughout his life as a writer and journalist.

The name Carmona reaches, with Elia Rafael Carmona (Constantinople, October 21, 1869 – Constantinople, 1931), its highest documented expression. This man, born in the Ottoman capital under the reign of Abdülaziz and died on the threshold of republican Turkey, is to this day the most prolific author of original novels in Ladino that history has retained. His works, his journals and his autobiography constitute primary sources for the history of Ottoman Sephardic Jewry and for the history of the lineage itself ;.

The Man and His Milieu

Elia Rafael Carmona grew up in the Jewish quarters of Constantinople, at a time when the city was experiencing the contradictions and fermentations characteristic of a rapidly declining empire. The Sephardic community of the capital, numbering several tens of thousands, still lived largely according to the traditional structures of the kehila, while being traversed by currents of modernization emanating from schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle — founded in Paris in 1860 — and by the attraction of French and Italian intellectual models. It was in this fertile tension between tradition and modernity that young Elia was formed.

His literary vocation asserted itself very early. In a milieu where Judeo-Spanish was still the language of the home, the popular synagogue and the bazaar, Carmona chose to make it an instrument of art and mass communication. He quickly established himself as a novelist — he is credited with several dozen novels and short stories (romansos) — and as a central figure in a Constantinopolitan editorial milieu that published serialized novels, prayer booklets, school manuals and satirical newspapers in the same cursive rabbinic script known as rashi or solitreo.

El Jugueton: Satire as Commitment

In 1908, the very year of the Young Turk revolution that promised a brief constitutional spring to the Empire, Elia Rafael Carmona founded El Jugueton — "The Player" or "The Facetious One" in archaic Castilian — a satirical periodical entirely written in Judeo-Spanish. The choice of date is not fortuitous: the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in July 1908 briefly opened the public sphere to a freer press, and Carmona seized this window with the promptitude of a man who had been awaiting this moment.

El Jugueton became the longest-lasting satirical periodical in Ladino in Constantinople, and the second-longest Ladino publication in the city across all categories, after the great daily newspaper El Tiempo. It appeared without interruption from 1908 until the death of its founder in 1931, twenty-three years of weekly production filled with humor, social chronicles, political satire and commentary on the everyday life of the Jews of the Ottoman and then Turkish capital. Throughout this existence, Carmona published in serialized form more than fifty novels and novellas, making the publication both a literary laboratory and a press organ.

What El Jugueton represents in Sephardic cultural history deserves to be measured at its true worth. In a community whose young elites were turning toward French, Turkish or modern Hebrew, Carmona made the opposite and deliberate choice: that of fidelity to Judeo-Spanish as a living language, capable of bearing satire, irony and social reflection. This choice is, in itself, an act of cultural resistance and a form of tsedaka toward the language — charity offered to a heritage that others were abandoning. It testifies to a conception of literary knowledge that is inseparable from collective identity: writing in Ladino for Ladino readers is to keep alive the bond between the community and its Iberian past, it is to honor the ancestors expelled from Spain by perpetuating the language they had crossed the sea to preserve.

*The Autobiography: Komo Nasio Elia R. Karmona (1926)*

In 1926, at the age of fifty-seven, Elia Rafael Carmona published his autobiography under the title Komo Nasio Elia R. Karmona — "How Elia R. Karmona Was Born". This text is of an exceptional nature: neither hagiography nor mere chronicle, it presents itself as a picaresque narrative — in the great tradition of the Spanish novel — in which the author traces his ascent from the popular quarters of Constantinople to the celebrity of the journalist and novelist. The implicit subtitle of the work could be: how a child of the people, son of the Sephardic community of the Ottoman capital, became a writer in a language that his own were beginning to abandon.

This autobiography is precious in several respects. It documents the milieu of the press and publishing in Judeo-Spanish in Constantinople in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the first decades of the twentieth — a milieu of which we would have few firsthand accounts without it. It provides information on the material conditions of Jewish life in Constantinople, on the tensions between tradition and emancipation, on how a young man from the community could forge a literary vocation in a society that did not yet have an institutional concept of the Sephardic author. It also documents, by implication, the transformations of the Ottoman Empire: the revolution of 1908, the Balkan Wars, the Great War, the collapse of the Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic.

The picaresque form chosen by Carmona was not innocent. Spanish picaresque — Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache — was the novelistic form par excellence in which low-born heroes traversed the society of their time, revealing its hypocrisies and injustices. By casting himself in this mold, Carmona claimed an Hispanic literary heritage that his ancestors had brought from Spain and that Ladino had preserved in its deepest strata. He was not imitating; he was inheriting.

In Jewish tradition, self-narrative — from medieval confessions to modern memoirs — is inseparable from reflection on Providence and transmission. Komo Nasio Elia R. Karmona participates in this spiritual economy: to recount one's birth is also to recount how a tradition engendered you, how a language shaped you, how a community made you possible. The individual humility that Judaism advocates does not here amount to effacement: Carmona speaks of himself, but he speaks of them all.

Reception and Influence

The work of Elia Rafael Carmona did not remain confined to the shores of the Bosphorus. The Sephardic diaspora of America — notably that of Seattle, where many Ottoman Jews settled in the early twentieth century — preserved his novels with care. Collectors like Emma Adatto Schlesinger, in Seattle, gathered dozens of his romansos, attesting to a transatlantic circulation of Ladino texts often underestimated by literary history. This diffusion illustrates the characteristic mobility of Sephardic Jews from the Ottoman Empire, who departed for America or France carrying Carmona's serials in their baggage as others carried prayer books.

The scholarly edition of the autobiography, established by Robyn K. Loewenthal under the title Elia Carmona's Autobiography: Judeo-Spanish Popular Press and Novel Publishing Milieu in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, circa 1860–1932 (1984), extracted this text from the obscurity into which the decline of Ladino had plunged it, and made it accessible to English-speaking scholars. It is to this scholarly transmission that the Carmona lineage owes its place today in the bibliographies of Sephardic history.

Every great Sephardic family tells itself a story — sometimes tinged with legend — that connects the present to the lost splendor of medieval Sepharad. The Carmona are no exception to this economy of memory. Awareness of Andalusian origins, pride in a Smyrniote or Constantinopolitan rootedness, memory of synagogues and communal functions: all these elements, transmitted from generation to generation, constitute the intangible heritage of the lineage.

This register of transmitted memory must be welcomed with respect, but also with discernment. Family narratives naturally tend to ennoble origins, to fill documentary gaps with glorious figures, to unify what history may have left scattered. The historian does not reject them: he situates them. They express a truth — that of lived and claimed identity — which is not necessarily that of notarial documents.

Language itself was an irreplaceable vector of this transmission. Judeo-Spanish, or ladino, spoken by the Jews of Izmir, Salonika, and Constantinople, preserved for more than four centuries the linguistic memory of lost Spain. To bear the name of an Andalusian city while speaking a language inherited from fifteenth-century Castile: this is the entire Sephardic condition, made of stubborn fidelity to a country that had nonetheless expelled it. The saga of the Jews of North Africa and the Orient, as recounted in contemporary works of synthesis, illustrates this dialectic of loss and fidelity [Goldenberg, 2014].

It is precisely this dialectic that Elia Rafael Carmona embodied with the greatest intensity and coherence. By making ladino the exclusive language of his work — novels, journals, autobiography — he was not merely making an aesthetic choice: he was accomplishing an act of collective memory. He made language the ark in which to traverse time. His readers — artisans, small shopkeepers, housewives, young people torn between Turkish modernity and ancestral tradition — recognized themselves in his pages because this language was theirs, the one their grandmothers whispered, the one their fathers haggled in the bazaar. El Jugueton was not merely a satirical journal; it was a mirror held up to an entire community.

This dimension of transmission — from past to present, from individual to community — is one of the great values that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries. The Talmud teaches that he who preserves one soul preserves an entire world; one might say, by analogy, that he who preserves a language preserves an entire world. Carmona, in the modesty of his weekly paper and serialized novels, was a preserver of worlds.

We place this chapter under the sign of memory and the transmitted, not the archive: it accounts for what the family says of itself and what tradition has bequeathed to it. But unlike the preceding chapters, it now has a solid documentary foundation: the work of Elia Rafael Carmona is the memory of the lineage made text, and this text is preserved.

The twentieth century transformed the Sephardic communities of the Orient and the Maghreb. In Smyrna, the great fire of 1922, following the Greco-Turkish war and the end of the Ottoman Empire, devastated the city and caused the departure or ruin of many families. The Smyrniot Jewish community, long prosperous, then entered a phase of demographic decline, intensified by successive emigrations to France, the Americas, and later Israel.

In Constantinople — renamed Istanbul by the Turkish Republic in 1930 — Elia Rafael Carmona lived the last years of the Empire and the first years of the Republic. He died in 1931, the very year El Jugueton expired with him. His death coincides with the end of an era: one in which a single man could almost alone carry an entire communal press, and where Ladino was still the everyday language for the majority of Jews in the capital. The Turkish Republic, nationalist and secular, was to impose Turkish as the sole public and educational language; the Alliance schools retreated; the Ladino press dwindled until it survived only in a few activist publications.

For the Carmonas of the Orient, as for so many Sephardic families, the century was one of dispersion: from Smyrna to Western Europe, from Salonika — whose community was annihilated by Nazi deportation during the Second World War — toward the few possible refuges. The tragic history of Jews under regimes of persecution has been documented for North Africa by Michel Abitbol in his study of the Vichy period [Abitbol, 1983], and for other regions by abundant literature. For branches possibly established in Morocco or the Arab world, the works of Robert Assaraf on the contemporary history of Moroccan Jews illuminate the context of the last decades [Assaraf, 2005].

The work of Elia Rafael Carmona survived these cataclysms through the paths of diaspora itself: his novels traveled in the baggage of Sephardic emigrants who departed for Seattle, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Tel Aviv, and were found in cardboard boxes in family attics that researchers began to reopen from the 1970s and 1980s onward. The progressive digitization of these collections — as evidenced by the presence of his texts in the Corpus Zakhor — now ensures their preservation and accessibility for future generations ;.

We qualify this chapter as probable in so far as it applies to the Carmona lineage the major established movements of twentieth-century Sephardic history, without being able to trace, for lack of family archival materials examined here, the individual journey of each branch. The overall trajectory — decline of historical centers, dispersion toward new countries, recomposition of identities — is firmly established; its application to the details of the family remains a reasoned inference. What is no longer a matter of inference is the figure of Elia Rafael Carmona: a real man, a real work, a documented destiny.

At the end of this journey, the Carmona lineage appears as a faithful mirror of Sephardic destiny as a whole. Its name, an Andalusian ethnic term drawn from the city of Carmona near Seville, carries inscribed within it the memory of a place of origin; its geography of dispersal, oriented toward the East rather than the Maghreb, connects it to the great centers of Ottoman Judaism — Smyrna first and foremost, but also Salonika and Constantinople [Toledano, 1999] ; [Toledano, 2003].

What can now be affirmed with certainty belongs to two registers. On one hand, onomastics and context: the origin of the name, its geographic distribution, the probable insertion of the lineage into Levantine commerce and Smyrniote and Constantinopolitan communal life. On the other hand — and this is the decisive contribution of the new sources integrated into this book — the documented reality of Elia Rafael Carmona: his birth in Constantinople in 1869, his founding in 1908 of the satirical periodical El Jugueton which he directed until his death in 1931, and the publication of his autobiography Komo Nasio Elia R. Karmona in 1926 ;. These three facts constitute the hard, incontestable core of the Great Book of the Carmonas.

What remains in the realm of transmitted Memory — the commercial figures of Smyrna, possible functions in Ottoman power, biological continuity from medieval Andalusia — deserves to be preserved as identity heritage, but not confused with established fact. The historian's honesty consists precisely in maintaining this distinction, and this book has never lost sight of it.

Among all the values that the Jewish tradition has carried through the centuries, the Carmona lineage will have, above all, best expressed that of literary knowledge in service of collective memory. Not the learned knowledge of academies or yeshivot, but the popular and fraternal knowledge of one who writes to be read by his own, who makes shared language an act of solidarity, who chooses satire — a form of intellectual humility as much as civic courage — to speak truth to his community. Elia Rafael Carmona was not merely a novelist: he embodied, for twenty-three years of uninterrupted publication, the ideal of the popular talmid hakham — one whose knowledge reaches down to the humblest reader and unites them in a shared laugh, a shared recognition, a shared Memory. In him, the Carmona lineage joins the long cohort of those who, scattered to the four corners of the Mediterranean, kept alive the flame of a language and identity that history had sought to extinguish.

The Great Book of the Carmonas remains an open work: it calls for the examination of the pinkasim of Smyrna, the consular archives of the Levant, the rabbinic registers of Salonika and Constantinople. It also calls for a complete critical edition of the work of Elia Rafael Carmona, much of which still lies buried in private collections and archival holdings of the Sephardic diaspora. It is at this double price — archival and philological — that Memory will become fully History, and that likelihood will yield to certainty.