Sepher HaTakanoth MeHevrath Talmud Torah [constitution and bylaws].

In the great port cities of the Aegean (Istanbul, Salonika, and Izmir) the influx of large numbers of Iberian refugees in and after 1492 resulted in the absorption into the immigrants’ Spanish-speaking Sephardic culture of the Greek-speaking indigenous Jewish population, together with their Byzantine (“Romaniot”) traditions. Inland, however, in northern Greece, in the more isolated, less prosperous city of Ioannina, the Greek-speaking locals remained the majority and their Romaniot rite prevailed. Both Spanish- and Greek-speaking Ottoman Jews retained the use of Hebrew script for their respective languages (Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Greek), but by 1875, the situation in Ioannina sounds rather dire, to judge from the present manuscript: “Because, here in our town, Jewish youth have hitherto had no advantages, they have succeeded neither in Torah nor in secular studies, which are the precondition for Torah, as the ancient rabbi said: ‘No livelihood, no Torah.’ And they have learned neither Hebrew grammar nor how to write and read Greek, the language of this land of ours, and all the more so have they not learned any other languages. But God has inspired some members of our community to say ‘How much longer are we to remain the people that time forgot (or words to that effect)? Let us wake up and organize things properly in accordance with the spirit of our time, so as to bestow the blessings of progress on our youth by teaching them to read and write in the vernacular.’ The idea is not to start a new school but to coordinate the existing traditional schools and help, or cajole the teachers to improve their standards. Oral examinations in Hebrew and other languages are to be held once a year over the course of four days during Chol Hamoed Sukoth, and the mayor is to receive an invitation to drop by. Further, the society proposes to establish a free lending library for the community. Membership in the society is open to anyone willing to pay the annual fee of one-half Turkish lira and to adhere to these bylaws, which are to be printed in a Hebrew and Greek bilingual edition as soon as a Greek translation has been prepared. It was to that end, according to a note in French, by someone very likely with an Alliance education, that alternate pages in this manuscript have been left blank by the scribe. The trouble was, and this was the main reason for founding the society, the Ioannina Jews, unlike those in Corfu, spoke but did not write Greek. Those alternate pages, therefore, remain blank to this day.