The Great Book — Carmona

Introduction

The surname Carmona belongs to that vast family of Sephardic names whose origin can be read directly in the geography of medieval Spain. It is an ethnic name — that is, a name derived from a place: the town of Carmona, in lower Andalusia, not far from Seville. As Joseph Toledano notes in his onomastic dictionary, this name of Spanish origin is an ethnic name from the town of Carmona in Andalusia, borne by Jews and Christians of the Iberian Peninsula alike [Toledano, 1999]. This dual belonging — Jewish and Christian — is characteristic of toponyms that became surnames: the town marked the identity of its inhabitants, whatever their faith, and the name accompanied them all as the paths of exile or settlement went their separate ways.

The history of the Carmona family is part of the great secular movement which, through persecutions, forced conversions, and expulsions, dispersed Hispanic Jewry across the shores of the Mediterranean. As Toledano further notes, after the expulsion of 1492, the name Carmona was more widespread in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire than in the Maghreb, with the spelling variant Karmona [Toledano, 2003]. This geographical distribution — eastern rather than Maghrebi — orients our narrative from the outset toward Constantinople, Salonika, and above all Izmir, the Smyrna of the chronicles, where the family record places the principal settlement of the lineage.

The present work attempts to trace, with the caution that the fragmentary state of Sephardic archives demands, the thread of a lineage whose very name carries within it the Memory of an Andalusian place and the destiny of a diaspora. We shall carefully distinguish what belongs to documentary record, what pertains to reasoned inference, and what remains in the realm of transmitted tradition.

Chapter 1: The Name and Its Andalusian Cradle

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 Late Antiquity and experienced, under Muslim rule and then under the Christian Reconquista, phases of both 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 extended far beyond the limits of the peninsula [Zafrani, 1996].

The onomastic mechanism that gave rise to the surname is well known to specialists. When a Jewish family left its place of origin — to settle in another town or, later, to take the road of exile — it was readily designated by the name of the place it had left behind. Thus arose dozens of Sephardic surnames: Toledano (from Toledo), Cordovero (from Cordova), Franco, Behar, and of course Carmona. Toledano emphasizes this point: the ethnic designation was not a confessional distinguishing mark, since Christians and Jews from Carmona alike could bear this name [Toledano, 1999].

Rigor is called for here: the existence of the name Carmona in Andalusia is established, as is the Jewish presence in that city before 1492. It would, however, be imprudent to claim to reconstruct a continuous and documented lineage connecting a specific Jewish family from medieval Carmona to the Ottoman Carmona of subsequent centuries. The archives from the period prior to the expulsion are fragmentary, and the name spread through multiple pathways. What onomastics establishes with certainty is the geographical origin of the name; what it cannot guarantee is the biological unity of all those who bore it. The caution of Yerushalmi, who labored so greatly to untangle the skein of Marrano and Sephardic identities, must here serve as our methodological guide [Yerushalmi, 1998].

Chapter 2: The Expulsion of 1492 and the Path to the East

The expulsion decree promulgated by the Catholic Monarchs in March 1492 constitutes the founding rupture 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 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 bearers of the name Carmona, the geographical data established by Toledano is illuminating: the name is found primarily in the Balkans and in the Ottoman Empire, and far 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. Salonika, Constantinople, Adrianople, and later Smyrna, became the capitals of this new Eastern Sepharad.

The fact that North Africa — geographically close to Spain though it was — received fewer Carmona than the Ottoman Orient merits pause. 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 the Maghrebi registers [Hirschberg, 1981]; [Eisenbeth, 1936]. This relative absence constitutes, by contrast, an a contrario argument in favor of the eastward orientation of the lineage: it is toward the Aegean and the Balkans that one must look for the Carmona, not toward Fès or Tlemcen. The bibliographic repertories of Attal allow one to measure the scope, but also the limits, of the North African documentation available on these questions [Attal, 1973].

Chapter 3: Izmir (Smyrna), Cradle of the Lineage

The family notice places the main establishment of the Carmona at Izmir, the Smyrna of the Europeans, a major port of the Ottoman Empire on the Aegean Sea. This location is consistent with everything history teaches us about Smyrniote Judaism.

Smyrna experienced, from the end of the sixteenth century and especially during the seventeenth century, a spectacular commercial expansion that made it one of the great trading 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 échelles. The notice transmitted to us describes precisely a family "active in Levantine trade and communal life." This dual vocation — commerce and communal engagement — corresponds to the typical profile of the great Jewish families of Smyrna, whose most prosperous members assumed leadership roles within the kehila.

Here an intersection occurs between family Memory and historical knowledge: the tradition that makes the Carmona merchants and communal notables of Izmir is reinforced by the general picture drawn by historians of Ottoman Judaism. However, in the absence of an archival survey specifically devoted to this lineage — rabbinical registers, communal pinkasim, notarial records of the European consulates of Smyrna — we must qualify this concordance as probable rather than established. The plausibility is strong; the nominative documentary proof remains, given the current state of our information, yet to be produced. It would be dishonest to present as an attested fact what remains a plausible reconstruction based on the coherence of context.

Chapter 4: The Carmonas in the Ottoman World — Figures and Functions

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

Salonique, which Gilles Veinstein aptly called the "city of the Jews," offered the Sephardic population a communal density and autonomy unique throughout the Empire: the Jews long formed a relative majority there, organized into congregations originating from the various cities of the Iberian peninsula [Veinstein, 1992]. In such an environment, a patronym of Andalusian origin such as Carmona naturally found its place within the mosaic of congregations known as "those of the expelled" (megorashim).

Oral tradition and certain chronicles mention, in Constantinople, Carmona who held financial functions at court or in the service of Ottoman dignitaries — the profile of the sarraf (banker-moneychanger) or tax farmer, roles in which Jewish and Armenian elites were numerous. We report this point only with the greatest reserve: in its current state, it belongs more to transmitted Memory than to the verified archive within the framework of the present work. Without direct examination of Ottoman sources, one cannot with certainty attribute any specific episode to the lineage we are tracing. The reader will retain the plausibility of the socio-professional profile — merchants, financiers, communal notables — without prematurely fixing its biographical details.

This caution is all the more necessary given that the name, borne by several distinct families, does not guarantee a single common lineage. As Toledano's onomastic method reminds us, the same patronym may encompass lineages with no kinship ties, united solely by a shared geographical origin [Toledano, 1999].

Chapter 5: Memory, Transmission and Permanence of the Name

Every great Sephardic family tells itself through a narrative — 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. The awareness of an Andalusian origin, the pride of Smyrniote rootedness, the recollection of synagogues and communal functions: these are all elements that, transmitted from generation to generation, constitute the intangible heritage of the lineage.

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

Language itself was a vehicle 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: that is the whole Sephardic condition, made of obstinate fidelity to a country that had nonetheless expelled it. The saga of the Jews of North Africa and the Levant, as retraced by contemporary works of synthesis, illustrates this dialectic of loss and fidelity [Goldenberg, 2014].

We therefore place this chapter under the sign of memory and the transmitted, not of the archive: it accounts for what the family says of itself and what tradition has bequeathed to it, without claiming documentary certainty.

Chapter 6: The Twentieth Century, Between Dispersions and Erasures

The 20th century profoundly disrupted the Sephardic communities of the Orient and the Maghreb. In Smyrne, the great fire of 1922, following the Greco-Turkish war and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, devastated the city and brought about the departure or ruin of many families. The Smyrniote Jewish community, long prosperous, entered thereafter a phase of demographic decline, accentuated by successive emigrations toward France, the Americas, and later Israel.

For the Carmona of the Orient, as for so many Sephardic families, the century was one of dispersion: from Smyrne toward Western Europe, from Salonique — whose community was annihilated by the Nazi deportations during the Second World War — toward the few refuges that remained. The tragic history of Jews under persecutory regimes has been documented for North Africa by Michel Abitbol in his study of the Vichy period [Abitbol, 1983], and for other regions by an abundant literature. For any branches that may have settled in Morocco or the Arab world, the work of Robert Assaraf on the contemporary history of the Jews of Morocco illuminates the context of the last decades [Assaraf, 2005].

We qualify this chapter as probable insofar as it applies to the Carmona lineage the broad, attested movements of Sephardic history in the 20th century, without being able to retrace — for lack of family archives examined here — the individual journey of each branch. The overall trajectory — the decline of historic homelands, dispersion toward new countries, the recomposition of identities — is solidly established; its application to the particulars of the family remains a reasoned inference.

Conclusion

At the end of this journey, the Carmona lineage appears as a faithful mirror of the Sephardic destiny as a whole. Its name, an Andalusian ethnic toponym drawn from the town of Carmona near Seville, carries inscribed within it the memory of a place of origin; its geography of diffusion, Eastern rather than Maghrebi, ties it to the great centers of Ottoman Judaism — Smyrne above all, but also Salonique and Constantinople [Toledano, 1999]; [Toledano, 2003].

What can be stated with confidence belongs to the realm of onomastics and context: the origin of the name, its distribution, the probable insertion of the lineage into Levantine trade and Smyrniote communal life. What remains in the domain of transmitted Memory — the illustrious figures, the precise functions held near Ottoman power, the biological continuity from medieval Andalusia — deserves to be preserved as a heritage of identity, but must not be conflated with established fact. The historian's integrity consists precisely in maintaining this distinction.

The Great Book of the Carmona thus remains an open work: it calls for the examination of the pinkasim of Smyrne, the consular archives of the Levant, the rabbinical registers of Salonique and Constantinople. It is at this price that Memory will become History, and that likelihood will yield to certainty.