Salomon Rosanes

Born in Rusçuk, Ottoman Empire (today Ruse, Bulgaria), Salomon Rosanes belonged to a family prominent in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Ottoman Sephardic diaspora; his father Abraham Rosanes was a noted scholar and merchant. After receiving his education partially at the local Alliance Israélite Universelle and partially through self-study, Salomon Rosanes began his working life as a moneychanger. After being beaten and robbed in 1878, he decided to pursue writing and scholarship as a way out of the money markets, conducting research in various libraries and archives during his business travels. He settled in Sofia, Bulgaria during World War I, accepting a position as a librarian for the local Jewish community. During this period, he contributed to periodicals and scholarly journals, writing in Ladino, Hebrew, Bulgarian, and Romanian. Rosanes’s scholarly efforts focused mostly on the history of Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, though he produced philological and anthropological studies as well. His six-volume Korot ha-yehudim be-Turkiyah ve-artsot ha-kedem (A History of the Jews of Turkey and the Orient) remains an important source for scholars of Ottoman Jewry.