Tire

Tire is a city of long memory. Founded on the remains of ancient Lydian and Ionian settlements, it fell under Byzantine rule, then was integrated in the 14th century into the Turkmen principality of Aydın before being absorbed by the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 15th century. Its position, halfway between the Aegean coast and the Anatolian highlands, made it very early on a commercial hub. The city was renowned for its tanneries, its textile production — notably cotton fabrics and carpets — and its weekly markets that drew villages from the Küçük Menderes valley.

The Jewish presence in western Anatolia is ancient and well predates the Sephardim. Communities known as "Romaniotes," of Greek rite and Judeo-Greek language, existed in the Aegean region since Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period. It is likely that a Romaniote nucleus preceded, in Tire or in its immediate vicinity, the arrival of Iberian exiles, as one observes in the great cities of western Anatolia. This ancient substrate was then overlaid, culturally and demographically, by the Sephardic wave, a classic phenomenon in Ottoman Jewish history where Judeo-Spanish eventually became the dominant language and Sephardic rite the liturgical norm.

The establishment of a Jewish population in Tire was part of a broader context: that of a Mediterranean frontier where Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in a proximity that was at once fruitful and tense. This history of "neighboring faiths" — to borrow David Nirenberg's title — is neither one of idyllic tolerance nor one of permanent persecution, but a complex regime of regulated coexistence, inherited from both the Iberian world and Islamic law of the dhimmī [Nirenberg, 2014]. Tire, a small provincial town, offers a privileged site of observation for these cohabitations on the local scale, far from the splendor of capitals.

The decisive turning point in the Jewish history of Tire is the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, followed by that from Portugal in 1497. With Sultan Bayezid II opening the gates of his empire to the exiles, tens of thousands of Sephardim flowed toward the ports and cities of the Ottoman Empire. Salonica and Istanbul received the greatest numbers; but the dispersal also touched the secondary towns of western Anatolia, where the newcomers found commercial and artisanal outlets. Tire, active on textile and leather routes, offered precisely the type of economic niche where a merchant community could establish itself.

The process by which a group of exiles reconstituted an organized community — synagogue, rabbinical court, confraternities, cemetery — has been analyzed as a genuine "refoundation." Jonathan Ray showed how medieval Sephardic society had been constructed on a moving frontier, where Jewish identity was constantly redefined through contact with other confessions and political powers; the exiles of 1492 transposed to the East this communal expertise forged in the Iberian Peninsula [Ray, 2006]. The Sephardim of Anatolia, like their cousins in North Africa, reproduced their original structures: they readily regrouped by cities of origin, adopted takkanot — communal ordinances — inspired by those they had known, and maintained a scrupulous attachment to their legal customs.

It can thus be considered probable that the Jewish community of Tire, like those in its environment, lived for a long time according to regulations analogous to the Sefer ha-Takkanot of the Castilian exiles established in Fes, a foundational text that codified marriage, inheritance, and the status of women according to Iberian tradition [Sefer ha-Takkanot, 1871]. This legal and ritual continuity, transmitted from one community to another across the Mediterranean, constitutes one of the foundations of dispersed Sephardic civilization. In Tire, it would have been expressed in the daily life of a population united by language, rite, and Sephardic memory.

Under Ottoman administration, the Jews of Tire fell under the status of dhimmī: protected subjects, subject to the poll tax (cizye), permitted to practice their faith and manage their internal affairs through their own institutions. Ottoman fiscal registers — the defter census records of the sixteenth century — recorded Jewish households (hane) by quarter (mahalle), and it is through these dry but precious sources that one can, for most towns of western Anatolia, measure the presence and size of communities. The Jewish quarter of Tire appeared there as a restricted group, settled in one or more separate quarters, near the markets where its activities were exercised.

The economy of the community mirrored that of the town: trade in textiles and leather, peddling to villages in the valley, money-changing and lending, crafts. This socio-economic profile — that of a merchant and artisan bourgeoisie integrated into regional circuits — is characteristic of small Sephardic communities in the Anatolian interior, whose prosperity depended closely on their articulation with a major port. For Tire, that port was Izmir, whose spectacular growth in the seventeenth century would profoundly reconfigure the Jewish geography of the entire region.

Community life was organized around the synagogue, the ritual bath (miqvé), the school (talmud tora), and the cemetery. The rabbi, often also a judge (dayan), resolved disputes according to Jewish law, while lay notables administered material affairs and negotiated with Ottoman authorities. This dual structure, rabbinical and lay, corresponds to the model described by Benbassa and Rodrigue for the entire Judeo-Spanish world, where the community (kahal) functioned as a micro-society endowed with broad internal autonomy [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000]. In Tire, its numerical modesty excluded neither intellectual ambition nor ritual richness, but made it fragile to population movements.

The destiny of Tire is inseparable from that of Izmir. Until the early 17th century, Izmir was merely a secondary port; then, over the course of a few decades, it became one of the great emporiums of the Eastern Mediterranean, attracting European, Armenian, Greek, and Jewish merchants. The Jewish community of Izmir then experienced explosive growth, fed by migrations from Salonica, the Aegean islands, and the Anatolian hinterland — of which Tire was part. This centripetal movement drained toward the metropolis a portion of the vital forces of the surrounding towns.

It is therefore likely that Tire functioned, from the 17th century onward, as a satellite of Izmir: its merchant families maintained business and kinship ties with the great city, its young people went there to study or trade, and local religious life gravitated in the orbit of the great Izmirite rabbinic academies. This phenomenon of polarization, in which a metropolis progressively absorbs the substance of its Jewish hinterland, explains in large part the demographic weakening of small communities like that of Tire over the generations.

The 17th century was also that of the great spiritual upheaval of Sabbatianism. It was precisely in Izmir that Sabbatai Tsevi was born, in 1626, whose messianic proclamation in 1665-1666 upheld the entirety of Ottoman Judaism and far beyond. No community in Western Anatolia remained indifferent to this ferment, and it is likely that the Jews of Tire, so close to the Izmirite center, were profoundly affected — divided, as everywhere, between messianic hope and the distress of the final apostasy of the "messiah." This episode, which left a lasting mark on Sephardic religious sensibility, belongs to the common fund of the Jewish Memory of the region [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

For lack of an abundant collection of archival materials, knowledge of the inner life of the Jews of Tire is largely gained through analogy with better-documented Sephardic communities and through family memory. This comparative approach is not a makeshift solution: it reflects the very nature of Judeo-Spanish civilization, woven from shared customs across the Mediterranean. The minhagim — liturgical and matrimonial usages — the melodies, the proverbs in Ladino, the cuisine of the festivals, all this heritage was found, with local variants, from Tlemcen to Salonika and from Fez to Izmir.

Scholarly works devoted to the great communities of Sephardic North Africa illuminate by ricochet what Tire may have been. The monographs by Simon Schwarzfuchs and Eliahou-Éric Botbol on Tlemcen, "a thousand years of history of a Jewish community," show how a small town could preserve, over the centuries, a ritual and genealogical identity of remarkable stability, structured around a few founding families and their takkanot [Schwarzfuchs, 1997] [Botbol, 2000]. The registers of the Jewish cemetery of Tlemcen and the rabbinic archives of Sidi Bel Abbès attest to the density of this funerary and juridical memory, whose equivalent in Tire has reached us only in fragments [Registers of the Tlemcen cemetery] [Rabbinic archives of Sidi Bel Abbès].

Genealogical transmission plays a central role here. The great Sephardic family databases — such as those gathered around the Encaoua tree or contemporary genealogy platforms — make it possible to trace the dispersal of Iberian surnames across the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, and to link families from Izmir and its region to common roots [Encaoua Tree, 2024]. It is in this tension between orally transmitted tradition and archival evidence that the memory of the Jews of Tire is reconstructed, fragment by fragment. As Léon Askénazi reminded us, Jewish tradition is not a mere preservation of the past, but a living transmission that articulates the written and the spoken, the archive and the narrative [Askénazi, 1999] — a principle that applies eminently to communities whose written trace has disappeared.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sealed the fate of the Tire community. Several converging factors hastened its extinction. First, the growing attraction of Izmir and, later, Istanbul, which gradually emptied the towns of their youth and elites. Next, the political and demographic upheavals of the late Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic: the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, the population exchange of 1923, and the Izmir fire profoundly altered the balance of communities throughout western Anatolia. Finally, from the 1920s onward and especially after 1948, emigration to France, the Americas, and the State of Israel accelerated the Jewish depopulation of the region.

For a small community like Tire, these movements proved fatal: below a certain threshold, a Jewish community can no longer ensure the minyan, maintain its synagogue, or transmit its institutions. The community thus died out not through a single violent event, but through slow erosion—departures, regroupings in Izmir, progressive dissolution of religious structures. The fate of Tire thus joins that of many small Ottoman Sephardi communities, whose contraction at the turn of the twentieth century Benbassa and Rodrigue have described, as modernity, the nationalization of societies, and emigration reconfigured the entire Judeo-Spanish world [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2000].

Today, nothing remains of the Jewish community of Tire but faint traces: mentions in Ottoman censuses, a few surnames scattered in the diasporas, perhaps tombstones or architectural remnants integrated into the modern urban fabric. The wording of the entry—"ancient Sephardi community, now disappeared"—expresses this reality exactly: a real presence, spanning several centuries, and an absence now consummated, which only Memory and research can still document.

The history of the Jews of Tire is that, in miniature, of an entire facet of Eastern Sephardic life: a community born of Iberian exile, grafted onto perhaps Romaniote foundations, inserted into the economy of an Anatolian town, long living in the shadow of the great port of Izmir, then swept away by the demographic and political upheavals of modern times. It left us no great academies or monumental archives; its grandeur was the discreet one of a micro-society faithful to its language, its rite, and its memory as Sephardic.

Restoring Tire means accepting to work at the boundary between established history and transmitted memory. Ottoman fiscal registers fix its presence; analogy with better-known communities of the Maghreb and the Aegean illuminates its structures; genealogy and oral tradition extend its echo to our own day. As Léon Askénazi suggested, Jewish tradition lives precisely in this articulation between the written word that attests and the spoken word that transmits [Askénazi, 1999]. In the case of Tire, where the archive is sparse, it is this spoken word that preserves the thread, awaiting new research—in Ottoman defter, rabbinic responsa from Izmir, and Sephardic genealogical collections—to clarify its outlines. The Great Book of Tire is thus less a finished monument than an invitation to continue the excavation of this memory threatened with oblivion.