The Karasso Family

The surname Karasso belongs to the Iberian onomastic layer of Jews expelled from the kingdoms of Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, welcomed by Sultan Bayezid II. Salonika, repopulated by these exiles, became within a few decades a majority-Jewish city, organized into "congregations" (kehalim) bearing the names of their cities of origin — Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, Lisbon, Majorca, Provence, Sicily — and durably preserving Judeo-Spanish, ladino, as their vernacular, literary, and liturgical language [Borovaya, 2012].

The etymology of the name remains disputed. Several hypotheses circulate among linguists of Sephardic studies: a derivation from the Castilian-Portuguese carrasco / carrasco (the kermes oak, the sessile oak), or alternatively a root evoking color (cara / negro). In the absence of a systematic examination of medieval Iberian notarial registers, none of these readings can be held as certain, and one should refrain from making of them an assured narrative of origin. What is solidly established, on the other hand, is the family's rootedness in the Judeo-Spanish social fabric of Salonika, where the Karasso appear as a family of notables at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Salonikan modernity in which this lineage flourished was largely shaped by two forces. On one hand, the press and belles-lettres in ladino, which made Salonika and Constantinople the capitals of a printed Sephardic culture, a vehicle for new ideas, translations, and debates — a "modern ladino culture" that profoundly transformed the intellectual life of the communities [Borovaya, 2012]. On the other hand, the school of the Alliance israélite universelle, opened in Salonika in 1873, which Frenchified the elites and opened them to the ideals of the Enlightenment and emancipation. It is from this double crucible — Sephardic and Francophone — that the intellectual profile of the Karasso emerges: rooted in Iberian Judaism, open to European modernity.

The central figure of the lineage is Emmanuel Carasso (often dated c. 1862 – died 1934), a lawyer by training, from the Jewish bourgeoisie of Salonique. He belongs to that generation of non-Muslim Ottoman intellectuals who, through their command of law and European languages, became integrated into the public life of the Empire during its final decades. Salonique, where he practiced, was then a cosmopolitan and restless city — Ottoman yet largely Jewish — whose intellectual and political ferment nourished the reform movements [Naar, 2016].

Emmanuel Carasso is above all known for his role in Salonique's Freemasonry. He led the lodge "Macedonia Risorta", affiliated with the Italian obedience, which provided the conspirators of the Committee of Union and Progress (the "Young Turks") with a meeting space protected by the extraterritoriality statutes enjoyed by Masonic institutions under foreign patronage. This protection made Salonique the cradle of the Young Turk revolution, and Carasso one of the foremost intermediaries between the city's cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and the reform movement. His trajectory illustrates the participation of Ottoman Jewish elites in the Empire's political modernization — a participation not without its ambiguities, for these elites sought to reconcile Ottomanist loyalty, civic emancipation, and the defense of their community's interests.

The Salonique context renders this engagement intelligible. The city brought together a business bourgeoisie, a vibrant press in several languages, modern schools, and an Ottoman administration permeable to ideas of reform. The Jews of Salonique, by virtue of their demographic and economic weight, were active participants in this public life: they were not a tolerated minority on the margins, but a structural component of the city, to the point that Salonique was sometimes perceived, from the outside, as a Jewish city of the Empire [Naar, 2016]. It is within this singular configuration that the political career of Emmanuel Carasso takes on its full meaning.

The Young Turk revolution of July 1908 restored the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II, and convened a new parliament. Emmanuel Carasso was elected as a deputy for Salonique in these elections — one of the Jewish representatives within the new Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, where elected members of all the Empire's faiths now sat together. This election consecrated the integration of a Salonican Jewish elite into the heart of the reformed Ottoman state, in the moment of constitutional hope that followed the revolution.

The name of Carasso remains associated with a dramatic episode: in April 1909, following the failure of the counter-revolution in favor of the sultan and the entry of the "Army of Action" into Constantinople, the Committee of Union and Progress secured the deposition of Abdülhamid II. According to the historical tradition widely reported in the sources, Emmanuel Carasso was among the members of the parliamentary delegation tasked with conveying to the deposed sultan the assembly's decision. The choice of entrusting this mission, among others, to a Jewish deputy from Salonique struck contemporaries and subsequently nourished, in antisemitic propaganda and circles nostalgic for the old regime, a body of hostile narratives. The historian must here distinguish the fact — Carasso's participation in parliamentary life and in Unionist circles — from its polemical overinterpretation. The exact composition of the delegation and the precise details of the words exchanged belong to versions that are sometimes divergent, and which should be cited "according to the sources" rather than elevated to certainty.

Beyond this episode, Emmanuel Carasso pursued a career in the service of the new regime, of which he was a faithful supporter. His trajectory, from the lodges of Salonique to the benches of the parliament in Constantinople, condenses the history of a generation that believed in constitutional Ottomanism as a framework for the emancipation of non-Muslim communities — a hope that the following decade, marked by the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), the loss of Salonique to Greece, and the First World War, would largely undo.

One cannot understand the Karasso family outside of the city that shaped it. Salonique was, for more than four centuries, one of the greatest Jewish communities in the Mediterranean world, and the only major European city where Jews long constituted the majority of the population. Jewishness was inscribed in the very fabric of urban life: the trades of the port, commerce, craftsmanship, the press, the schools, and a social calendar rhythmed by the Jewish holidays [Naar, 2016].

At the beginning of the twentieth century, this community endured a succession of ordeals: the fire of 1917, which ravaged the Jewish heart of the city and left tens of thousands of people homeless; integration into the Greek state after 1912, which imposed new relations between the community and national power; and the migrations that scattered some of its members toward France, Italy, the Americas, and Palestine. Devin Naar has shown how this community, caught "between the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece," strove to preserve its identity, its institutions, and its Memory within a new national framework, oscillating between the persistence of Séfarade traditions and adaptation to Greek and European modernity [Naar, 2016].

In this world, printed culture in Ladino held a decisive place: newspapers, serialized novels, theater, translations, manuals — all forms that made Judeo-Spanish a language of modernity rather than a mere domestic relic [Borovaya, 2012]. Notable families such as the Karasso were both the actors and the beneficiaries of this ferment: it was this effervescence that made possible the emergence of lawyers, journalists, physicians, and politicians from within the community. The destruction of Salonican Jewry during the Shoah — nearly the entire community was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 — abruptly closed this world, of which the survivors and earlier emigrants became the bearers of Memory.

Following the upheavals of the twentieth century, the name Karasso / Carasso spread beyond Salonique. The dispersion of Salonican Sephardim toward Western Europe and the Americas carried the patronym toward new horizons, where it met with varied destinies — in business, the liberal professions, and the arts. These branches belong more to transmitted family memory and the economic history of the twentieth century than to the ancient Sephardic archive, and one should be careful not to mechanically link every bearer of the name to the Salonican lineage without genealogical proof.

Sephardic Memory, indeed, operates through transmitted narratives: one remembers an ancestor who came from Salonique, a Ladino tongue spoken by grandparents, a name inscribed on a vanished register. Sephardic genealogy — as practiced by the databases and directories devoted to the Jews of the Mediterranean basin — strives to cross-reference these memories with the rare surviving sources: Ottoman and Greek civil records, consular registers, communal lists, and press archives. For the Karasso lineage as for so many others, the establishment of a continuous family tree remains an open undertaking, one in which prudence demands that the documented be distinguished from the plausible.

This chapter, in all honesty, therefore remains largely within the register of transmitted memory: it records the persistence of a name and the consciousness of a Salonican origin, without claiming to reconstruct — for want of accessible archives — an exhaustive line of descent between Emmanuel Carasso and the contemporary bearers of the patronym. Such is the common fate of the great Sephardic families, whose History stands at the junction of the lacunary archive and living Memory.

Every encyclopedia of a Sephardic lineage poses, in watermark, a question: what does it mean to think and transmit from within that Mediterranean Jewishness of which Salonika was one of the summits? Without linking the Karasso lineage to any specific philosophical work — which nothing in the archive authorizes —, one can illuminate its spiritual horizon through the great tradition of Jewish thought arising from the Sephardic world and its diasporas, of which the work of Emmanuel Levinas offers a major and accessible expression. This juxtaposition belongs to acknowledged editorial conjecture: it affirms no family connection, but proposes an intellectual backdrop.

Levinas placed at the center of his philosophy responsibility for the other as the primary structure of subjectivity, prior to all freedom and all knowledge. It is in the ethical relation to the other, and not in the solitude of the subject, that the meaning of the human is at stake [Levinas, Éthique et infini, 1982]. This priority of ethics — "ethics as first philosophy" — displaces metaphysics toward relation, toward the Face of the other who commands and obliges. His reading of time as a relation to alterity, where the future is what comes from the other and not what the subject masters, extends this intuition [Levinas, Le temps et l'autre, 1983].

This thinking is also rooted in a Hebrew source that Levinas explored through his Talmudic readings, showing how the Jewish text nourishes a universal ethical demand [Levinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques, 1968; Du sacré au saint, 1977]. Commentators have underscored how his trajectory articulates the Jewish heritage and Western philosophy, making trace and return categories of thought [Malka, 2002; Chalier, 2002; Lévy, 1998]. In his most demanding work, it is the "otherwise than being" — a beyond of ontology — that names this responsibility without reserve [Levinas, Autrement qu'être, 1974; De Dieu qui vient à l'idée, 1982; L'au-delà du verset, 1982]. To evoke this horizon in relation to a Sephardic lineage is not to attribute to it a philosophical genealogy, but to recall that Mediterranean Jewishness was also a matrix of thought — one in which ethics, text, and Memory correspond.

The history of the Karasso lineage reads like a condensed account of Ottoman Jewish modernity and its aftermath. Born of the great Iberian exile and shaped by the Séfarade culture of Salonique, it gained access, with Emmanuel Carasso, to the political stage of the Empire at the precise moment when the latter was attempting to reinvent itself on constitutional foundations. The Salonican lawyer, intermediary between the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of his city and the Young Turk movement, then deputy and actor in the deposition of Abdülhamid II, embodies the hope — and the ambiguity — of an emancipation conceived within the Ottomanist framework [Naar, 2016].

This horizon closed with the Balkan wars, the Grecization of Salonique, and above all the annihilation of the community during the Shoah, which scattered the survivors and transformed a lived history into a Memory to be preserved. Of the name Karasso there thus remain two inseparable registers: the established History of a family of Salonican notables and a prominent political figure; and the transmitted Memory of a dispersed Séfarade lineage, whose continuing genealogy remains, for lack of archives, largely to be reconstructed. It is within this fertile tension between the archive and Memory — between what one knows and what one remembers — that this Great Book has sought to inscribe the Karasso lineage, heir to a Mediterranean world that has vanished but is not forgotten.