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One simple question arose:
if they arrived in the city
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following the expulsion
of Jews from Spain,
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how could they so quickly, over
the course of 16-17 months,
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establish a full-fledged printing house
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capable of producing not a small pamphlet
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but a hefty volume containing,
I think, 409 or 410 pages?
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[PEOPLE OF THE PRINTED BOOK]
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[III. Constantinople]
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“Early in the morning, we
entered the Bosphorus.
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A wonderland city, drenched in sunlight,
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sparkled before my eyes.
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The slender pikes of minarets,
sugar-white palaces, and
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a tower from which unfaithful wives were
probably thrown into the Bosphorus.
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Small caiques, red fezzes.
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Countless red fezzes.
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People dressed in white,
the sun, guttural speech.
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And flags, flags, endless flags, as if
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it were a parade and
everyone were celebrating.”
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This is the first impression
of Istanbul recorded by
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the well-known Russian chansonnier
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(and, by the way, a laureate of
the Stalin Prize, second category)
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Alexander Nikolaevich Vertinsky in 1920.
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For some reason, it seems to me that
the city stayed pretty much the same.
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I had the same impression
in the late 1990s.
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And probably so did the exiles from Spain
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who came to Istanbul (or Constantinople,
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as they called it) by ship after 1492.
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Welcome back!
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As you’ve probably figured out,
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today we’ll be talking about
Jewish printing in Constantinople.
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What do we know for sure?
