A Call for the Creation of a Sephardic Society for the Study of Jewish History and Culture

Mercado Joseph Covo was an educator and author who wrote histories of the Jewish communities in his hometown of Serres, then Siroz in the Ottoman Empire (today in Greece) and in nearby Salonika, where he lived after 1908. From 1895 to 1901, he directed the Jewish boys’ school in Serres, later teaching in Salonika. As evidenced by his 1892 “Call for the Creation of a Sephardic Society,” Covo championed the study of postbiblical Jewish history among his Ladino-speaking coreligionists in part as a form of general Jewish apologetics on the model of the nineteenth-century French and German Jewish historians. But he also helped articulate and model the importance of Sephardic Jewish history in its own terms, calling for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire to study the histories of their own communities, and putting this idea into practice himself.