Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi

Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi Ashkenazi (Saadi Haalevy) was a publisher, journalist, and musician from Salonika. A passionate advocate of cultural reform in Sephardic Jewish culture and society, he was instrumental in establishing the first Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Salonika (1873) and helped pioneer a Ladino-language newspaper culture that preached Westernization of Sephardic cultural life and heightened Jewish Ottoman civic patriotism. His outspoken attacks on what he regarded as the corruption and fanaticism rife in Salonikan Jewish society and its religious and lay leadership earned him the enmity of local elites, and in 1874, local rabbis even went so far as to issue a ḥerem (writ of excommunication) against a-Levi on false charges. Beyond his work as editor, publisher, and modernizing gadfly, a-Levi wrote poems and songs for holidays and special occasions, in addition to his autobiography. A vital source on the history and customs of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, his memoir is also a work of argument and polemic in which a-Levi presents himself as a victim of the ignorant masses and a heroic fighter for progress.