The Querido Family

Salonika — Thessaloniki — became, from the sixteenth century onwards, the most Jewish city in the eastern Mediterranean, a refuge for the expelled from Sefarad welcomed by the Ottoman sultan. Research into the social and family structure of Mediterranean Jewry in the modern period shows how deeply Iberian surnames became the foundation of communal organization based on the kehillot, these congregations often named after the city of origin of the exiles — Aragon, Castile, Lisbon, Majorca [Rozen, 2014]. It is within this dense network of Sephardic families that the name Querido takes root.

The patronym itself belongs to that category of names of affection or quality that Jews of North Africa and the Orient bore in great numbers, alongside names of trade, place, or priestly lineage [Toledano, 2003]. In this, the Querido participate in a collective Sephardic memory: that of a people who, expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, jealously preserved their language, Judeo-Spanish, their names and their liturgy, making fidelity to the memory of Sefarad a form of resistance. This piety of memory — the refusal to forget the lost land and the engulfed world — was one of the great virtues that the Sephardic diaspora carried through the centuries, and to which the families of Salonika, including the Querido, fully belonged.

In 1648, a young Romaniote Jew from Smyrna, Shabbetaï Tsevi (1626-1676), inspired by the mystical doctrine of the kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534-1572), proclaims himself Messiah; banned from Smyrna, he travels through Salonique, Constantinople and other cities [according to POCRAM/Hypothèses]. The movement he sparks sets the entire Jewish world ablaze, from the Ottoman Empire to Europe. But summoned by Ottoman authorities to choose between death and conversion, Shabbetaï Tsevi apostasizes and embraces Islam in 1666, leaving his followers in vertiginous disarray.

This is where the theology of paradox intervenes, one that would justify the unjustifiable. Around the figure of Nathan of Gaza, tireless propagandist, was constructed an interpretation of apostasy based on the Lurianic doctrine of tikkoun, "repair": the Messiah's conversion was read as the descent of the righteous into the abyss of the "qelippot" (shells) in order to liberate the sparks of divine light held captive there [according to Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Dönmeh"]. The Salonique crisis erupts into the open when, following Tsevi, several hundred families among the city's wealthiest decide, around 1683-1686, to embrace Islam. The rabbinic authorities, powerless, witness this hemorrhage; the Ottomans, for their part, look favorably upon these conversions [according to History of the Jews in Salonique].

This chapter bears shadow as much as light. For the Sabbatean crisis was, for Jewish tradition, a warning about the dangers of misdirected messianic fervor and of transgression raised to principle. In contrast to this drift, the firmness of the rabbis who condemned the movement and worked to preserve the community recalls another cardinal virtue of Israel: the exacting conception of the Law (halakha) as a bulwark against illusion, and humility before the mystery of redemption, which cannot be forced.

It is at the heart of this crisis that the Querido family enters History. Jacob Querido — "the beloved" — was born around 1650 in Salonique. According to sources, he was the son of Joseph the Philosopher and the brother of Jochebed, last wife of Shabbetaï Tsevi [according to Encyclopaedia Judaica and concordant notices]. At the death of the messiah in 1676, his widow Jochebed — whom conversion to Islam caused to be named Aïcha — proclaimed that her brother Jacob was the reincarnation of her deceased husband, so that he might succeed him at the head of the faithful. Jacob Querido thus gathered a considerable community around him and positioned himself as Messiah.

Here, History and Memory answer each other and sometimes contradict one another, for the figure of Jacob Querido reaches us through polemical accounts and internal traditions difficult to disentangle. Around 1683, in his wake, a significant portion of the Sabbateans of Salonique officially converted to Islam while secretly maintaining their faith and kabbalistic beliefs: these are the Dönme ("returned," "converted"), crypto-Jews of the Ottoman Empire who embraced Islam but secretly preserved their Jewish faith and kabbalistic convictions [according to Encyclopaedia Judaica / Dönmeh]. The branch founded by Jacob Querido, called the Yakubi ("Jacobites"), was one of the first schisms arising from the primitive nucleus of the Izmirli [according to Dönme notice].

Tradition reports that Jacob Querido undertook, at the end of his life, the pilgrimage to Mecca — a gesture of outward conformity to Islam — and that he died around 1690 in Alexandria, Egypt, on the way back [according to biographical notices]. One can measure the tragic weight of this destiny: a man bearing the name of "the beloved" leading his own into a double life made of concealment and waiting. If one must seek, in this History, the trace of a virtue, it resides less in the person of Jacob Querido — whose adventure remains a theological drift condemned by normative Judaism — than in the obstinacy of his faithful in not entirely breaking the thread that bound them to Israel, albeit at the price of secrecy.

After the death of Jacob Querido, the movement fragmented. Alongside the Yakubi descended from Querido and the original Izmirli group, a third branch arose from Baruchiah Russo (1677-1720), at the origin of the faction known as the Karakash, while another offshoot, the Kapandji, distinguished itself socially [according to the Dönme entry]. These communities lived in Salonique a separate existence: Muslim in the eyes of the Ottoman state, they practiced in reality a syncretic religion, blending apparent Muslim rites and secret Sabbatean beliefs, strict endogamy and clandestine transmission.

The study of crypto-Jewish religions illuminates this paradox: among the Marranos of the West as among the Dönme of the East, persecuted or concealed faith is transmitted through women, through the household, through gestures and dates rather than through the open book, and eventually transforms itself, drifting far from its origin [Gitlitz, 1996]. Tradition reports that the Dönme observed rituals commemorating the events in the life of Shabbetaï Tsevi and interpreted his conversion as a supreme act of tikkoun [according to Donmeh, New World Encyclopedia].

The movement subsequently experienced slow demographic growth, essentially through natural increase. According to the traveler Carsten Niebuhr, approximately six hundred Dönme families lived in Salonique in 1774, or some two to three thousand persons, a number that rose to more than ten thousand on the eve of the First World War, then representing nearly one-third of the formally Muslim population of the city [according to the Dönme entry, citing Niebuhr]. Smaller groups lived in Istanbul.

We must here maintain the measure and honesty of the account. The Dönme were not Jews who remained faithful: they had placed themselves outside the community of Israel, and halakha did not consider them its own. But the history of their tenacity nonetheless joins an experience that Judaism knew painfully — that of forced or voluntary converts, whose aggadic tradition itself strove to think through their fate, between condemnation and hope for a return [Goldin, 2011]. In this, the destiny of Querido's descendants questions tolerance and the care of the other: what is to be done with those who have departed? Jewish thought, refusing to erase even the strayed from its memory, offers here a lesson in nuance.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thessalonike remained the great Jewish metropolis of the Balkans, its Israelite population making it one of the rare cities in the world where Jews formed the majority, before the upheavals of Balkan national awakening and Ottoman modernization transformed its face [Veinstein, 1992]. In this ferment, the Dönme — whose memory traced back to Jacob Querido — occupied a singular place: figures of commerce, Ottoman administration, modern education, they were among the actors of the city's modernization and participated, according to several historians, in Young Turk reformist circles.

The Dönme world collapsed at the same time that Thessalonike ceased to be Ottoman. Attached to Greece in 1912, then struck by the great fire of 1917, the city saw its fate sealed by the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923-1924: considered Muslims, the Dönme were forced to leave Greece for Turkey [according to works on the population exchange]. This uprooting, added to the secularization of the Turkish Republic, progressively dissolved an identity already founded on secrecy.

The annihilation of Salonian Judaism itself, during the Shoah — nearly the entire community deported and murdered in 1943 — tragically closed the chapter of "the city of the Jews" [Veinstein, 1992]. From this vanished world, there remains the memory of a Sephardic culture of extraordinary vitality, of which the Dönme had been but a heterodox branch. The great virtue that this chapter bears is that of involvement in collective life and of economic and intellectual contribution: for even in their dissidence, the descendants of Querido inscribed themselves in the destiny of a city that was, until its destruction, a beacon of Mediterranean Jewish civilization.

It would be unjust to reduce the entire name of Querido to the Sabbatean adventure. The patronym was also borne by Sephardic families who remained fully faithful to Judaism, scattered from the Ottoman Empire to the Western communities where Sephardim dispersed — Amsterdam, Italy, North Africa. The coexistence, under a single name, of a strayed branch and branches that remained in the house of Israel illustrates a constant reality of Sephardic onomastics: a patronym does not determine a faith [Toledano, 2003].

At the margins of the Ottoman world, in the Jewish societies of North Africa and the East, faithful Jewish life continued according to its ordinary and sublime virtues: Talmudic study, charity organized by confraternities (hevrot), care for the poor and orphans, hospitality toward the exile and the stranger [Fenton, 2019] [Lewis, 1984]. These virtues, which halakha ordains and which tradition has magnified, were the daily lot of Sephardic families who remained in their faith, and one can legitimately suppose that they were also those of Querido who remained Jews. Thus, alongside the painful Memory of the Dönme branch, persists the luminous Memory of a Sephardic name among others, woven into the fabric of Israel's collective faithfulness.

This very duality is fruitful: it reminds us that the History of a lineage is never univocal, and that the collective Memory of Israel knows how to make room for both its faithful and its strayed, to draw from both cases an instruction.

At the end of this journey, the Querido lineage appears as a mirror of the extreme tensions of Jewish history: messianic fervor and its perversion, faithfulness and apostasy, secrecy and memory. Jacob Querido, "the beloved," gave his name to one of the branches of the Dönme, those crypto-Jews of Salonika whose clandestine existence extended for more than two centuries before dissolving into the exile of 1924 and Turkish secularization. It is a tragic destiny, which normative Judaism cannot claim as its own, but which the historian cannot ignore, for it illuminates by contrast what gives a tradition its strength: its resistance to transgression elevated into salvation.

If one must name, above all others, the virtue that this lineage will have best expressed — not in the wandering of its chief, but in the underground obstinacy of its descendants — it is the tenacity of memory in adversity: that capacity, inherent to Israel since the Marranos of Sefarad through the Dönme of Salonika, to make survive in secret, from generation to generation, the remembrance of an origin, even beneath the mask. And if the Dönme ended by drifting until they left the house, their history sends the faithful community back to its own highest virtue: to renounce none of its children, to keep the door of return open, and to make memory — even that of wanderings — an instrument of truth. It is in this that the singular destiny of the Querido joins the collective Memory of Israel: through this tenacious refusal of forgetting that, from Sefarad to Salonika, was the red thread of a people.