Abstract:

The Jewish communities, since their arrival, lived under the Ottoman Empire in peace which kept them faithful to tradition and to the extreme conservatism of deeply rooted Sephardic customs. But the 19th century brought a cultural and linguistic revitalisation on three fronts: the modernisation of the Ottoman state itself, the Western influence represented mainly by L’Alliance Israélite Universelle, and from the countries of the North, Zionism. This state of cultural ferment brought with it the emergence of a multitude of newspapers, with opinion articles and debates in the years between two centuries, including, most fundamentally, the Zionism/anti-Zionism debate. In this article we are going to analyse the opinions expressed, over several years, by David Fresko in his newspaper El Tiempo, which he compiled and published in 1909 in Istanbul in a booklet, translated into French, under the title Le Sionisme. The aim of this article is to analyse the articles collected in Le Sionisme, which are a clear reflection of the socio-cultural situation of the Ottoman Sephardim who, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, experienced the leap into modernity that would so affect their way of life, their culture, their linguistic reality, and also the profound revolution in Judaism brought about by the Zionist movement.

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