Letter to the Alliance Israélite Universelle

Joseph Nehama

1913

I am in the process of preparing a rather copious work on Salonica, its past, and its present. The history of the [Jewish] community has given me quite a headache. I have gone through a pile of responsa and various obscure writings, including a collection of unedited haskamot1 from the Talmud Torah going back to the first years of the sixteenth…

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Creator Bio

Joseph Nehama

1881–1971

Born in the great Ottoman Jewish center of Salonika (today Thessaloniki, Greece) to a prominent family, Joseph Nehama studied at the teacher training institute for the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) in Paris and embarked on a career in education. Becoming a teacher and then a principal at the AIU school in his native city, he ultimately became city-wide director-general for AIU educational programming. By 1918, Nehama was appointed to the central committee of the AIU, and the following year he was promoted to the post of inspector general of all AIU schools in the Near East. A prolific writer, Nehama wrote a seven-volume history of Salonika’s Jewish community titled Histoire des Israélites de Salonique (1935–1939). He also produced other scholarly works (some under the pen name P. Risal), several literary translations into Ladino, and a Ladino-French dictionary that is still widely used today.

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