Jacques Loria

Jacques Loria (Jak Lorya) was born in Istanbul and graduated from an Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school there before teaching in an AIU school in Tatar-Bazardjik (today Pazardzhik, Bulgaria), later becoming its director. Some authors have suggested that while there, Loria secretly embraced Zionism, leading to his termination in light of the AIU’s anti-Zionist stance at the time. Later, he directed AIU schools in Tunis and Salonika. In 1914, Loria moved to France, but he then returned to Istanbul, where he published La Nation (1919–1922), the organ of the Zionist Federation of the Orient. In the 1930s, he relocated to Buenos Aires. Loria first became known to the reading public as the author of a 932-page sensational novel, Les Mystères de Péra (1897). Throughout his literary career, Loria wrote in French, Ladino, and Turkish, often publishing under pseudonyms, including “Comte de Persignac” and “Prinkipo Bey,” the latter of which he used for the publication of his Turkish novel Topkapı Hazine-i hümayunu (1909). Loria’s most important Ladino works are his novel La Sangre de la matsa (1910) and the play Dreyfus (1903); both thrillers treat antisemitism from a Zionist perspective, that is, as fundamentally ineradicable as long as Jews are in exile. Although Dreyfus was chiefly based on the protagonist’s memoir, Loria skillfully added a few fictional characters and episodes. This gripping five-act play with a clear ideological message became extremely popular and was staged at least through the 1920s.