The Fresco Family

David Fresco was born in Constantinople on October 12, 1853, in a family whose tradition claimed Iberian Sephardic ancestry. The city where he opened his eyes was then a metropolis in full transformation: the Tanzimat, the great Ottoman reforms begun in 1839, had undertaken to reshape the Empire on the model of European States, granting confessional minorities legal equality in principle and opening non-Muslim elites to new forms of civic participation. For the Jews of Constantinople, scattered across the neighborhoods of Balat, Hasköy, Galata and Ortaköy, it was an hour of unprecedented change.

Young David pursued his first studies in a local yeshiva — a sign that the family, despite its future orientation toward the Enlightenment, was firmly rooted in rabbinic tradition. But at seventeen, he wrote his first newspaper article, and a vocation was announcing itself. The most decisive event for the Istanbul Jewish elite of his generation was the arrival of the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in Paris in 1860, whose schools opened in Constantinople from the 1870s onward. These establishments, providing instruction in French and oriented toward modern knowledge, formed an entire generation of Oriental Jews in Western culture, creating a fruitful tension — and sometimes conflictual — between tradition and emancipation. David Fresco was both one of the products and one of the promoters of this movement, and El Tiempo quickly became the editorial relay of the Alliance in the Judeo-Spanish community.

Language remained the central identity marker. Haïm Vidal Sephiha emphasized the richness and fragility of Judeo-Spanish, the language of home and community, but threatened in the long term by the Francization of elites and the Turkification imposed by the State [Sephiha, 1986]. The vernacular Judeo-Spanish of Istanbul, as documented by Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, preserves the trace of this pivotal epoch, when archaic Castilian was enriched by Gallicisms conveyed by schools and newspapers [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. The Fresco family, through its editorial activity, was situated at the heart of this linguistic and intellectual laboratory.

To understand the Fresco family, one must go back to the foundation of Istanbul Jewry, shaped by the Ottoman welcome 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 played a notable economic and administrative role there from early on. The work of Minna Rozen on the formative years of Istanbul's Jewish community shows how, between 1453 and 1566, a dense communal fabric was constituted, organized into congregations (kehalim) bringing together the faithful according to their city of origin [Rozen, 2002].

The massive arrival of Spanish exiles after 1492 transformed this community fundamentally. The Sefardim, more numerous and bearers of a high rabbinical and secular culture, gradually imposed their language and rite on the pre-existing Romaniote (Greek) communities. It was in this crucible that Judeo-Spanish identity of the Empire was forged, of which djudezmo was the vehicle both intimate and public, the language of prayer and cooking, of storytelling and, later, of the newspaper.

The Fresco surname itself presumably refers to an Iberian place name or nickname, like so many Sephardic names preserved through centuries of exile. The Jewish Encyclopedia, one of the most reliable sources on David Fresco, designates him as a "descendant of Spanish exiles," without it being possible, lacking notarial records going back to the first generations, to reconstruct with certainty the precise lineage from the Iberian peninsula. What is in any case solidly attested is the family's rooting in Istanbul in the nineteenth century: it belonged to that urban communal bourgeoisie, literate and oriented toward professions of writing, which was to provide the community with its reformist elites.

The status of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, long idealized by apologetic historiography, deserves to be considered with nuance. Marc David Baer has shown how much the narrative of "Ottoman tolerance" and the "savior sultan" was itself a late construction, in part elaborated by modernizing Jewish elites — among whom were precisely the newspapermen of David Fresco's generation — to negotiate their place in the Empire and then in the Turkish Republic [Baer, 2020]. The Fresco family thus evolved in a context where Jewish status, real and protected, was also a matter of representation and discourse.

David Fresco's journalistic work is, by its scale and continuity, without equivalent in the Judeo-Spanish press of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which documents him from its 1906 edition, establishes that he successively directed six periodicals in Judeo-Spanish — an editorial trajectory spanning more than sixty years of uninterrupted activity.

It all began in 1871, when David Fresco founded El Nacional, which became El Telegraphe in 1872, then El Telegrafo. These early publications, which coincided with his seventeen or eighteen years, testify to remarkable precocity and an editorial energy that would never waver. In 1872, another venture took shape in Constantinople: El Tiempo was founded that year by Haïm Carmona, then edited by his son Isaac Haï Carmona. It was within this same constellation that Mercado Fresco, a relative and collaborator, played a role in the founding and initial orientation of the newspaper. David Fresco, meanwhile, initially pursued his own trajectory: in 1879, he launched El Sol; in 1886, El Amigo de la Familla; in 1888, El Instructor. Each of these titles illustrates a distinct pedagogical concern — the sun of the Enlightenment, family friendship, the instruction of the people. These were not mere news journals: they were instruments of cultural transformation.

The fusion of these efforts resulted in what posterity would retain: David Fresco took over the direction of El Tiempo — which according to sources he directed from 1889 or from 1893-1894 depending on references — and made it, for more than thirty years, the leading organ of Ottoman Jewish life. He directed it alone, relentlessly, until its voluntary closure on March 27, 1930. The newspaper was printed in rashi characters (the cursive Hebrew script peculiar to Sephardic texts) and achieved a circulation of up to 10,000 copies — a considerable figure for the communal press of the time, which made it the most widely read Judeo-Spanish newspaper in the entire Empire. It also included a column in Turkish, written in Hebrew alphabet, appearing every two or three days: a sign that Ottoman integration was not merely a proclaimed ideal, but a concrete editorial program.

On the ideological level, David Fresco was a divisive figure. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, El Tiempo adopted a decidedly pro-Ottoman orientation, reflecting its director's convinced antizionism. This position brought him fierce controversy and even, as early as 1887, an excommunication (herem) pronounced by the rabbinical authorities of Constantinople — an episode revealing the tensions between modern journalism and the traditional religious establishment. Marc David Baer analyzed the way Ottoman Jewish elites constructed a discourse of loyalty toward power, sometimes at the cost of considerable blind spots [Baer, 2020]. Fresco's defense of "Ottomanism" was both a strategy of collective survival and a sincere personal conviction, nourished by his admiration for republican France and European Enlightenment.

A writer as much as a pressman, David Fresco was also a prolific translator. He adapted into Judeo-Spanish works of European literature and foundational texts of modern Jewish thought: among his translations were writings by Moses Mendelssohn, father of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), as well as novels and essays in English, French, and Hebrew. This effort of translation testifies to a specifically pedagogical vocation: to broaden the intellectual horizon of his readers, to give them access to thought circulating in languages they did not yet read. It is in this that Fresco's work expresses a cardinal virtue in the Jewish tradition: talmud Torah — education as a sacred duty toward the community — transposed to the conditions of secular modernity.

The Fresco 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 emerged in Salonika, Smyrna, Sofia, Adrianople and especially Constantinople, forming a Jewish public sphere of remarkable density, where the great debates of the community were elaborated: religious reform, education, the condition of women, relations with the West, national identity.

In this landscape, El Tiempo held a dominant place through its longevity and seriousness. The newspaper was far more than a news sheet: it was an instrument of cultural transformation, advocating for modern schooling, language learning, hygiene, the emancipation of customs and the integration of Jews into reformed Ottoman society. Through his pen, David Fresco disseminated to a popular readership the ideas of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) adapted to the Eastern context.

Here lies one of the most striking paradoxes of this history: David Fresco, the greatest journalist in Judeo-Spanish of his time, was also convinced that djudezmo had no future and that it isolated Ottoman Jews from their coreligionists in Europe. Recent studies on his autobiographical writings show that this anti-Judeo-Spanish position, far from being a personal originality, reflected the influence of Central and Eastern European circles — notably of Ashkenazi Haskalah — which promoted the shift to Hebrew or modern national languages. Fresco assumed this paradox by making El Tiempo an instrument of progressive Gallicization: supported by the Alliance israélite universelle, the journal promoted the teaching of French to its readers, while continuing to appear in djudezmo. The popular language was the vehicle, French culture the horizon.

This opinion journalism, novel in the Sephardic world, made the director of El Tiempo a true opinion maker, a moral and media authority. The newspaper's columns were the theater of resounding confrontations over the opportunity of Zionism — Fresco even addressed an open letter to Max Nordau, leading figure of the Zionist movement, to defend his position —, over the place of religion in public life, over reforms of the millet. Haïm Vidal Sephiha emphasized that this press was at once the great vector of intellectual modernization and, paradoxically, the accelerator of the retreat of djudezmo before French and Turkish [Sephiha, 1986].

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 full transformation. El Tiempo, published for fifty-eight years without interruption, forms one of the most precious deposits — and the columns devoted to the poetry of a Mercado Fresco, to the chronicles of a David Fresco, constitute a primary source for understanding how this community thought of itself at the threshold of the twentieth century.

If the Fresco family is firmly anchored in Istanbul, its history takes on its full meaning only when inscribed within the broader framework of Sephardic diasporas, whose destinies echo one another across the Mediterranean. Sephardic family memory, transmitted from generation to generation, indeed intersects with a collective history that archival work and scholarship allow us 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 until its twilight [Lévy, 1996]. On the Maghrebi shores, communities such as that of Tlemcen, millennia-old, illustrated another branch of this Mediterranean Jewry, studied by Simon Schwarzfuchs and Eliahou-Éric Botbol [Schwarzfuchs, 1997 ; Botbol, 2000]. The rabbinical archives of communities such as Sidi Bel Abbès testify to the vitality of structured Jewish life, between ritual, law, and solidarity.

In the Tunisian world, Claire Rubinstein-Cohen showed, through the case of Sousse, how an Eastern Jewish community shifted in the course 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 emerges: the encounter between a centuries-old tradition and the forces of European modernity, mediated by school, press, and mobility.

This mirroring is not mere analogy. It constitutes a genuine intersection between the transmitted memory of Sephardic families—who know themselves to be connected by language, ritual, and shared exile—and scholarly history that restores its structures. The Fresco of Istanbul, through their work on Judeo-Spanish language and culture, precisely contributed to maintaining this sense of belonging to a dispersed nation united by its Iberian heritage. David Encaoua's reflection on the "transmitters of Jewish thought" usefully illuminates this function of transmission, in which certain lineages become vectors of spiritual and intellectual heritage beyond the ruptures of history [Encaoua, 2018 ; Encaoua, 2024].

The end of David Fresco's life coincided with the disappearance of the world that had made his work possible. The fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, 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 of minorities an unprecedented linguistic and cultural assimilation.

The policy of Turkification, and notably the campaign "Citizen, speak Turkish!" (Vatandaş Türkçe Konuş !) of the late 1920s, dealt a decisive blow to Judeo-Spanish and its press. David Fresco himself drew the consequence of this impasse: on March 27, 1930, he voluntarily closed El Tiempo, after fifty-eight years of uninterrupted publication. This gesture, deliberate and acknowledged, marks the end of an era. Shortly after, he left Constantinople to settle in France—according to sources, in Nice—where he died in 1933, at the age of eighty.

Marc David Baer has analyzed the way in which the Jews of Turkey, heirs to the Ottomanism defended by men like Fresco, had to renegotiate their loyalty to the new State, to the point of sometimes subscribing to its official narratives [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. There is something poignant in this final picture: the man who had dedicated his life to the integration of Jews in the Ottoman Empire died in France, in that West that he had so admired and which he had made his editorial horizon, three years after closing the last great Judeo-Spanish newspaper of Constantinople.

Of this mutation, the vernacular Judeo-Spanish of Istanbul remains the residual witness, studied today as the trace of a civilization fading away [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. The gradual disappearance of djudezmo as a public language, the emigration of part of the community to France, the Americas and later Israel, marked the end of a world. 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 was, and of which the Judeo-Spanish press constitutes the most enduring legacy.

David Fresco (October 12, 1853 – 1933) — born Dawid Fresco in Constantinople, sometimes spelled Fresko in Ottoman sources, listed in the Jewish Encyclopedia under the form Fresco, David.

Born in Constantinople into a Sephardic family descended from the Spanish exiles, David Fresco received his early education in a local yeshiva before devoting himself to journalism at the age of seventeen. He successively headed six periodicals in Judeo-Spanish — El Nacional (1871), El Telegrafo (1872), El Sol (1879), El Amigo de la Familla (1886), El Instructor (1888) and El Tiempo (1893–1930) — making the latter the most widely read Ladino newspaper in the Ottoman Empire, with a circulation reaching 10,000 copies. Translator of Moses Mendelssohn and European authors, advocate of Ottomanism and declared opponent of political Zionism, he voluntarily closed El Tiempo on March 27, 1930 and settled in France, where he died in 1933. A major intellectual figure of the eastern Haskalah, he was also struck by rabbinic excommunication in 1887, testimony to the tensions between modernity and tradition that he embodied throughout his life.

Mercado Fresco (dates unknown) — active in Constantinople in the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

A relative of David Fresco, Mercado Fresco was one of the actors in the founding and initial orientation of El Tiempo, alongside Sami Alkabez and Isaac Carmona, in the 1870s. He contributed to the journal as a poet and literary author, and recent studies of Hebrew poetry published in El Tiempo in the early twentieth century emphasize his role in the expression of an anti-Zionist and Ottoman nationalist tendency carried by the journal. His precise biography remains poorly documented, but his name appears among the founders of the printed Sephardic literary tradition in Constantinople, at the crossroads of journalism and poetry.

The Fresco lineage, as it can be grasped through the sources, is not first and foremost a genealogy of blood but a genealogy of the spirit. If the archival record does not allow us to reconstruct in detail the family line from medieval Spain, it establishes with clarity nonetheless 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 intermediaries who brought their community into the age of the Oriental Enlightenment, at the cost of vigorous debates and ideological wagers that history would sometimes overturn.

What distinguishes the Fresco among all Sephardic families of the Ottoman Empire is the value they expressed most fully: the transmission of knowledge as a civic and communal act. Director of six newspapers, translator of Mendelssohn, founder of periodicals for youth and family, educator as much as polemicist, David Fresco embodied for more than half a century the Jewish ideal of the education of the people — this secularized talmud Torah which, in the context of the Oriental Enlightenment, took the form of the printed newspaper, the weekly column, the translation of a European work made accessible to a reader of Balat or Hasköy. This pedagogical calling, exercised without interruption despite the excommunication of 1887 and controversies over Zionism, constitutes the most enduring heritage of the lineage.

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 language and attraction to the West, between loyalty to the Empire and the upheavals of nationalism. There is something symbolically fitting in the fact that David Fresco closed his newspaper himself and died in France: a man of the threshold, he lived precisely at the juncture of two worlds, bringing one to its perfection while the other took shape. Through him can be read the history of a world — that of the Jews of Istanbul and their language — of which Judeo-Spanish press remains the most living of testimonies.

Inscribed in 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 linked by Iberian exile, language, and transmission. The Great Book dedicated to them intends to honor this double fidelity: to the rigor of established history, and to the remembrance of a Judeo-Spanish civilization whose brilliance continues to reach us.