The Jews and the Fatherland

Born Samuel (Shmuel) Sa‘adi ha-Levy into the family of the well-known Salonikan publisher, journalist, and musician Saadi Halevy (Sa’adi a-Levi), Sam Lévy was educated at an Alliance Israélite Universelle school and, later, at the Imperial Turkish Lycée. In 1897/8, while taking classes at the Sorbonne, Lévy wrote for his father’s periodicals, covering the Dreyfus Affair in particular. Following his father’s retirement in 1898, he returned home to become the editor in chief of his family’s Ladino newspaper, La Epoka, and its French one, Le Journal de Salonique. In the summer of 1905, in an effort to dodge Ottoman censorship, Lévy founded the Ladino El Luzero newspaper, and its French counterpart Le Rayon, in Zemun in the Austria-Hungarian Balkans (Semlin, now a neighborhood of Belgrade, Serbia); both were suppressed by Austrian-Hungarian censors. In July 1911, Lévy left Salonika and moved to Belgrade, before relocating to Switzerland and then France, where he lived the rest of his life. Contributing to Salonikan newspapers even after his departure, Lévy always identified with his hometown and hoped to revive the Ladino press there. In 1947–1949, he published in Paris the bimonthly Les Cahiers séfardis, dedicated to recording the histories of different Sephardic communities.