Anti-Zionist Tendencies and Social Messages in the Hebrew Poetry Published in El Tiempo: the Newspaper of the Ottoman Empire’s Ladino- Speaking Community in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The newspaper El Tiempo, was circulated throughout the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the twentieth-century, which was a time of many changes for Sephardic Jewish society. These changes included the loss of time-held traditions in the face of the Zionist vision, the conflict between loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and commitment to the Zionist Movement, and the Young Turks revolution and modernization of education. The newspaper adhered to an anti-Zionist, nationalistic, ideological-literary trend, and the paper’s editor, David Fresco, provided a platform for the literary works of Mercado Fresco, with the aim of establishing and spreading these ideologies. It was a publicist newspaper, which, in addition to opposing Zionist ideology, reflected social criticism and protest. It accused the Zionist idea and its implementation in the Ottoman Empire of upsetting the community’s social equilibrium.

This article will examine the essence of El Tiempo and the literary-political line it supported through the analysis of the unique thematic and poetic characteristics of the following works: two “Songs of Praise,” one written by an anonymous teacher and the other by the teacher Yitzhak. B. Shabtai; and five poems and three laments written by Mercado Fresco (signed with his initials, פ”מ). All of the poems reproduced in this article appear in the original Hebrew, as published in El Tiempo between the years 1908 and 1911. This article will explore how works of unlimited symbolism, seemingly unconnected to their time and place of creation, can nonetheless serve as a mirror of their time and as a medium for social criticism and protest, expressing the prevailing mood of a period.