Fresco

The name Fresco belongs to that constellation of Sephardic surnames which, since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, have spread across the Ottoman Empire to reconstitute there — on the shores of the Bosphorus as in the ports of the Mediterranean — a Hispanic civilization in exile. Borne in Istanbul — Ottoman Constantinople — by a family whose Memory merges with that of the Judeo-Spanish press, the name Fresco is today inseparable from the work of David Fresco (1850–1933), a major figure of Ladino journalism and one of the architects of Eastern Jewry's entry into modernity.

The Fresco family belongs to the broader destiny of the Sefardim of the Empire — those whom the sultans welcomed after 1492 and who made Salonika, Smyrna, Adrianople, and Constantinople the capitals of a transplanted Iberian diaspora. This community, which preserved for centuries its language — Judeo-Spanish or djudezmo — its rite, and its institutions, underwent a profound transformation at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, torn between fidelity to tradition and aspiration toward the Western Enlightenment. It is precisely at this juncture that the contribution of the Frescos finds its place: not a rabbinical dynasty nor a house of wealthy merchants, but a lineage of the spirit, devoted to the printed word and to the education of the people.

This Great Book sets out to trace what the archive and scholarship allow us to establish, scrupulously distinguishing between what belongs to documented fact, to probable deduction, and to transmitted Memory. The figure of David Fresco occupies a central place within it, yet unfolds against the backdrop of a collective history: that of the Jews of Istanbul, their language, their press, and their gradual Westernization.

To understand the Fresco family, one must return to the foundations of Istanbul Jewish identity, shaped by the Ottoman reception of Iberian exiles. In the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II undertook to repopulate and revitalize his new capital, and the Jewish community very early held a notable economic and administrative role within it. The work of Minna Rozen on the formative years of the Istanbul Jewish community shows how, between 1453 and 1566, a dense communal fabric was constituted, organized into congregations (kehalim) grouping the faithful according to their city of origin [Rozen, 2002].

The massive arrival of the expelled from Spain, after 1492, transformed this community to its very foundations. The Sefardim, more numerous and bearers of a high rabbinical and secular culture, progressively imposed their language and rite upon the pre-existing Romaniote (Greek) communities. It was in this crucible that the Judeo-Spanish identity of the Empire was forged, of which the vernacular Judeo-Spanish of Istanbul, studied by Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, constitutes the living linguistic heritage [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. This language, blending fifteenth-century Castilian with Turkish, Hebrew, Greek, and later French borrowings, was the vehicle of an entire literature and, in the nineteenth century, of a flourishing press.

The surname Fresco itself most likely refers to a toponym or an Iberian nickname, in the manner of so many Sephardic names preserved across the centuries of exile. While one cannot, in the absence of notarial records reaching back to the earliest generations, reconstruct with certainty the precise lineage of the Fresco family from Spain, their rootedness in Istanbul is, by contrast, solidly attested in the nineteenth century. The family belonged to that urban communal bourgeoisie, literate and oriented toward the trades of writing and commerce, which was to provide the community with its reforming elites.

The status of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, long idealized by an apologetic historiography, deserves to be considered with nuance. Marc David Baer has shown how greatly the narrative of "Ottoman tolerance" and the "savior sultan" was itself a late construction, in part elaborated by modernizing Jewish elites — among whose number figured precisely the men of the press of David Fresco's generation — in order to negotiate their place within the Empire and then within the Turkish Republic [Baer, 2020]. The Fresco family thus evolved within a framework in which the Jewish condition, real and protected, was also a stake of representation and discourse.

In the nineteenth century, the Jewish community of Istanbul, spread mainly across the neighborhoods of Balat, Hasköy, Galata, and Ortaköy, numbered several tens of thousands of souls. It was living through a period of accelerated transformation, shaped by the combined effect of Ottoman reforms (the Tanzimat, from 1839 onward) and the action of Western philanthropic institutions. The Empire recognized the community's own organization, the Jewish millet, granted an official status in 1865 and placed under the authority of the chief rabbi (hahambaşı).

It was within this society in motion that the Fresco family found its field of action. The most decisive event for the Jewish elite of Istanbul was the arrival of the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in Paris in 1860, whose schools opened in Constantinople from the 1870s onward. These institutions, offering instruction in French and oriented toward modern knowledge, shaped an entire generation of Eastern Jews in Western culture, creating a fertile — and sometimes conflictual — tension between tradition and emancipation. David Fresco was both a product and a promoter of this movement.

Language remained the central marker of identity. Haïm Vidal Sephiha has underscored the richness and fragility of Judeo-Spanish, the language of the home and the community, yet ultimately threatened by the Frenchification of the elites and the Turkification imposed by the State [Sephiha, 1986]. The djudezmo press, of which David Fresco was the undisputed master, played a paradoxical role here: while serving as the great vehicle of Western modernity, it extended the public life of Judeo-Spanish and made it the language of an intellectual debate of remarkable vitality.

The vernacular Judeo-Spanish of Istanbul, as documented by Bornes-Varol, moreover preserves the trace of this pivotal era, when archaic Castilian was being enriched by Gallicisms carried by the schools and newspapers [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. The Fresco family, through its editorial activity, stood at the heart of this linguistic and intellectual laboratory.

David Fresco (1850–1933) embodies, in a single figure, the pinnacle of a family's intellectual adventure and one of the major chapters in the history of the Ottoman Jewish mind. Journalist, publisher, polemicist, and educator, he devoted more than half a century to informing, instructing, and guiding his community. His name remains inseparable from El Tiempo ("The Time"), the most important and most enduring of the Judeo-Spanish newspapers of Constantinople.

Founded in 1872, El Tiempo became, under the direction of David Fresco — who took its helm and shaped it for decades — the reference organ of Ottoman Jewish opinion. The newspaper was far more than a broadsheet: it was an instrument of cultural transformation, advocating for modern schooling, language learning, hygiene, the reform of social customs, and the integration of Jews into reformed Ottoman society. Through his pen, David Fresco brought the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), adapted to an Eastern context, to a popular readership.

Fresco's work was not confined to El Tiempo. He directed or founded several other publications — news journals, periodicals for youth and families, literary anthologies — transforming his workshop into a veritable publishing house in the service of popular instruction. He translated and adapted works of European literature into Judeo-Spanish, helping to broaden the cultural horizons of his readers.

On the ideological level, David Fresco was a polarizing figure. A resolute advocate for the integration of Jews into the Ottoman and later Turkish nation, he was critical — even hostile — toward the nascent political Zionist movement, seeing in it a risk to the position of Jews within the Empire. This stance, which earned him sharp controversy, belongs to the broader debate analyzed by Marc David Baer regarding the ways in which Ottoman Jewish elites constructed a discourse of loyalty toward power and of celebrated tolerance, sometimes at the cost of considerable blind spots [Baer, 2020]. Fresco's defense of "Ottomanism" was at once an expression of a strategy for collective survival and a personal conviction.

It must be noted, however — in the interest of historiographical honesty — that a detailed reconstruction of the Fresco family's biological genealogy (spouses, children, collateral relatives) remains fragmentary in the accessible sources, and that one must resist the temptation to fill these gaps with conjecture. What is firmly established, by contrast, is the intellectual legacy of David Fresco, abundantly documented by the historiography of the Sephardic press.

The Fresco family's enterprise can only be understood in light of the extraordinary rise of the Judeo-Spanish press that marked the Ottoman Empire between the mid-nineteenth century and the interwar period. Hundreds of titles came into being in Salonique, Smyrne, Sofia, Andrinople, and above all Constantinople, forming a Jewish public sphere of remarkable density, within which the great debates of the community took shape: religious reform, education, the condition of women, relations with the West, national identity.

Within this landscape, El Tiempo held a dominant position by virtue of its longevity and its seriousness of purpose. Judeo-Spanish was employed there as a modern language of expression, capable of accounting for world affairs, science, and politics. This press was, according to Sephiha, the great vehicle of a linguistic and intellectual modernization, while paradoxically accelerating the retreat of djudezmo before French and Turkish [Sephiha, 1986]. The Fresco family thus found itself at once the guardian and the unwitting gravedigger of a language it nonetheless served with fervor.

The role of the press as an instrument of debate is likewise measured by its controversies. The columns of El Tiempo were the theater of resounding conflicts over the merits of Zionism, over the place of religion in public life, over the reforms of the millet. David Fresco deployed a vigorous pen there, not hesitating to clash with religious conservatives and Jewish nationalists alike. This opinion journalism, novel in the Sephardic world, made the director of El Tiempo a genuine opinion-maker, a moral authority as much as a media figure.

Recent historiography has reassessed the importance of this press as a source for the social and cultural History of Ottoman Jews. Far from being mere gazettes, these newspapers constitute today an irreplaceable archive of the mentalities, practices, and aspirations of a community in the full throes of transformation. The work of the Fresco family forms one of its most precious deposits.

If the Fresco family is firmly rooted in Istanbul, its history only takes on full meaning when inscribed within the broader tapestry of the Sephardic diasporas, whose fates echo one another from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. The Sephardic family memory, transmitted from generation to generation, indeed intersects with a collective history that archival research and scholarship have made it possible to document at many points.

On the western side of this diaspora, the free port of Livorno played the role of hub for the Sephardic "nation," a place of passage and refuge for Iberian Jews, whose history Lionel Lévy traced up to its twilight [Lévy, 1996]. On the Maghrebi shores, communities such as that of Tlemcen, centuries-old a thousand times over, illustrated another branch of this Mediterranean Jewish identity, studied by Simon Schwarzfuchs and by Eliahou-Éric Botbol [Schwarzfuchs, 1997] [Botbol, 2000]. The rabbinical archives of communities such as Sidi Bel Abbès bear witness to the vitality of a structured Jewish life, combining rite, law, and solidarity [Archives rabbiniques de Sidi Bel Abbès].

In the Tunisian world, Claire Rubinstein-Cohen showed, through the case of Sousse, how an Eastern Jewish community passed in the space of a century from "orientality" to "westernization," a trajectory that directly echoes that of the Jews of Istanbul and the modernizing work of the Fresco [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011]. Everywhere, the same movement takes shape: the encounter between a centuries-old tradition and the forces of European modernity, mediated by school, press, and mobility.

This mirroring is not a mere analogy. It reflects a genuine intersection between the transmitted family memory of Sephardic families — who know themselves to be connected by language, rite, and shared exile — and the scholarly History that restores their underlying structures. The Frescos of Istanbul, through their work on the Judeo-Spanish language and culture, contributed precisely to sustaining this sense of belonging to a nation dispersed yet united by its Iberian heritage. David Encaoua's reflection on "transmitters of Jewish thought" usefully illuminates this function of transmission, whereby certain lineages become the vehicles of a spiritual and intellectual heritage across the ruptures of History [Encaoua, 2018] [Encaoua, 2024].

The end of David Fresco's life, who died in 1933, coincided with the disappearance of the world that had made his work possible. The fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, followed by the founding of the Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal in 1923, radically transformed the condition of the Jews of Istanbul. The cosmopolitan Ottomanism that Fresco had championed gave way to a Turkish nationalism that demanded from minorities an unprecedented linguistic and cultural assimilation.

The policy of Turkification, and notably the "Citizen, speak Turkish!" campaign of the late 1920s, dealt a decisive blow to Judeo-Spanish and its press. The cultural world that the Frescos had served then entered a long decline. The progressive disappearance of djudezmo as a public language, the emigration of part of the community to France, the Americas, and later Israel, and the marginalization of the Ladino press marked the end of an era.

Marc David Baer has analyzed the manner in which the Jews of Turkey, heirs to the Ottomanism championed by men like Fresco, were compelled to renegotiate their loyalty toward the new State, to the point of sometimes subscribing to its official narratives — including in their most problematic aspects [Baer, 2020]. The trajectory of the Fresco family thus illustrates the fate of a minority elite caught between fidelity to its heritage and the demands of an assimilationist nationalism.

From this transformation, the vernacular Judeo-Spanish of Istanbul remains the residual witness, studied today as the trace of a civilization in the process of erasure [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. The work of David Fresco now belongs to History: no longer the daily record of a living community, but the monument of a culture that once was, and of which the Judeo-Spanish press constitutes the most enduring legacy.

The Fresco lineage, as it can be grasped through the sources, is not primarily a genealogy of blood but a genealogy of the spirit. If the archive does not allow us to reconstruct in detail the family's filiation from medieval Spain, it nonetheless establishes with clarity the decisive contribution of David Fresco to Ottoman Jewish modernity. Director of El Tiempo, the principal Judeo-Spanish newspaper of Constantinople, he was one of those cultural intermediaries who brought their community into the age of the Eastern Enlightenment, at the cost of vigorous debates and ideological wagers that history would sometimes confound.

The destiny of the Fresco thus condenses the great tensions of Sephardic Jewry at the turn of the twentieth century: between tradition and modernity, between fidelity to the Iberian tongue and the pull of the West, between loyalty to the Empire and the upheavals of nationalism. Through them we read the history of a world — that of the Jews of Istanbul and their language — of which the Judeo-Spanish press remains the most living of testimonies.

Inscribed within the vast Sephardic diaspora, from Livorno to Tlemcen and from Sousse to the Bosphorus, the Memory of the Fresco joins that of all those scattered families bound together by Iberian exile, language, and transmission. The Great Book dedicated to them seeks to honor this twofold fidelity: to the rigor of established History, and to the remembrance of a Judeo-Spanish civilization whose brilliance continues to reach us.