An Anti-Zionist Appeal from Istanbul

Born in Istanbul into a rabbinic family, David Fresco was raised in a multilingual milieu of Ladino, Turkish, French, and Hebrew. He was a prolific Ladino writer and the best-known Sephardic journalist of his day. Fresco served as the editor of six different Ladino newspapers, most significantly El Tiempo (1893–1930), which he ran single-handedly between 1894 and 1930. In addition to writing his own fiction and nonfiction prose, he produced numerous rewritings of English, French, and Hebrew novels and translated works by Moses Mendelssohn, Ludwig Philippson, and Abraham Mapu, among others. Despite his lifelong work as a Ladino writer and journalist, Fresco believed that Ladino had no future and that it isolated Ottoman Jews from their coreligionists outside the empire. Notwithstanding his serious engagement with the Hebrew literature of the Haskalah era, he opposed Zionism and Jewish national ideas generally, supported the Europeanizing work of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and promoted the study of Turkish among his coreligionists.