FIFTH CONVERSATION
An inn in Athens, on the corner of
Dioskoron and Lapolignoto Streets
The Conversation Partners
AVRAHAM MANI forty-nine years old, born in 1799 in Salonika, then part of Turkey, to his father Yosef Mani.
Avraham’s grandfather, Eliyahu Mani, was a supplier of fodder to the horses of the Turkish Janissaries and followed behind the Turkish army with five large wagons that housed his large family, which included two wives and two young rabbis who tutored his sons. A shrewd merchant, he sensed immediately upon hearing of the outbreak of the French Revolution that Europe was in for a period of upheavals in which his services as a cavalry supplier would be in great demand. With this in mind, he began to move his activities westward. In 1793, as news reached him of the execution of Louis XVI, Eliyahu Mani crossed the Bosporus and proceeded as far as Salonika, where he found a flourishing Jewish community. And indeed, his gamble paid off and the political and military instability of the times proved a boon for his business. He was able to marry off his children to wealthy and prominent families, and these ties in turn enabled him to expand his affairs even more.
Eliyahu Mani dearly loved his eldest grandson Avraham, who was born at the very end of the eighteenth century. He did not, however, have many years of pleasure from the boy, because soon after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, he himself passed away. His concern was taken over by his son Yosef, who was born in 1776 in the Persian town of Ushniyya near Lake Shahi, then part of the Ottoman Empire too. Despite the many reversals suffered by the empire during the first decade of the nineteenth century, Yosef ran the business enterprisingly and did especially well during Napoleon’s campaigns in Eastern Europe. At the same time, he did not neglect his children’s education and sent his eldest son Avraham to study in Constantinople with one of the most profound and original rabbinical minds of the times, Shabbetai Hananiah Haddaya. Avraham Mani developed a great liking for this rabbi, who was wifeless and childless despite his over fifty years. Rabbi Haddaya, for his part, was fond of Avraham and decided to sponsor him for rabbinical ordination even though he was not a particularly keen student.
In 1815, however, Yosef Mani’s business suddenly collapsed in the wake of both the Congress of Vienna peace agreements and the first signs of Greek war of independence against the Turks, which endangered transport and commercial shipments. In 1819 his son Avraham was summoned back to Salonika to help his father, who had lost everything and was reduced to eking out a living from a small spice shop in the port. Before long the brokenhearted man died, leaving the shop in Avraham’s possession.
His forced separation from his rabbi weighed on Avraham greatly. Even though the war with the Greeks made travel perilous, whenever he was able to free himself of his business obligations he would take a week or two off and cross the Bosporus to visit Rabbi Haddaya. Although Avraham never received his ordination, the rabbi presented him with a certificate authorizing him to serve on a nonpaying basis as the spiritual leader of a small synagogue in the port that was frequented mainly by Jewish stevedores and sailors.
Despite his mother’s urging him to marry, Avraham did not take a wife until 1825, when he wed the daughter of a petty merchant named Alfasi. The couple had a son and daughter: Yosef, born in 1826, and Tamar, born in 1829. In 1832 Avraham Mani’s wife died of an unknown illness that was apparently transmitted by a sailor whom the Manis had put up in their home.
As Avraham’s business began to prosper, he was able to travel to Constantinople more often. However, he did not always find his old teacher there, because Rabbi Haddaya, who had traveled widely as a young man, was again smitten by wanderlust and was often away on some journey. Generally, his trips took him south and east, and he once even spent a few months in Jerusalem. There he met a woman who several months later came to Salonika and became, to everyone’s surprise, the wife of his old age.
After his son Yosefs bar-mitzvah, which took place in 1839, Avraham, who was still a widower with two children, decided to bring the boy to Rabbi Haddaya’s school in Constantinople just as his father had brought him. In doing so, he wished both to obtain vicariously the ordination denied to himself and to strengthen his ties with his old rabbi, for whom his admiration had only grown with the years. Before setting out with Yosef, he even taught himself a few words of French, the mother tongue of the rabbi’s wife, in order to help create a bond with her.
Rabbi Haddaya’s wife, Flora Molkho, took a great liking to Yosef, a vivacious and imaginative youngster who was more intellectually gifted than his father. Having no children of her own, she treated him as her own son and made him her closest companion, since her husband was often away on his travels to the various Jewish communities that invited him to arbitrate legal disputes too knotty for others to unravel.
And so, even though young Yosef did not study with Rabbi Haddaya himself but rather in a school where his education was so laxly supervised that he spent much of the time roaming the streets of Constantinople, all were in favor of his remaining at the rabbi’s house: his father because of the connection this gave him with his revered teacher; the rabbi’s wife because the boy helped occupy her solitude; and the rabbi himself because he regarded the youth highly, even if the reason for this was none too clear to him.
Early in 1844 the news reached Dona Flora that her younger sister’s daughter, Tamara Valero, whom she had not seen since Tamara was little, was planning to travel to Beirut with her stepmother Veducha in order to attend the wedding of Veducha’s brother, Tamara’s step-uncle Meir Halfon. Dona Flora asked and received her husband’s permission to travel to Beirut and meet her niece there — and since he himself was unable to accompany her, it was decided that Yosef Mani, who was by now already a young man, should go with her. Avraham Mani raised no objections, and Yosef and Doña Flora sailed to Beirut. They remained there longer than expected and returned with the announcement that — subject of course to the consent of the two fathers and Rabbi Haddaya — Yosef and Tamara were betrothed.
And indeed, when Tamara returned to Jerusalem, her father gave his approval. But although it was agreed that she would come to Constantinople for the wedding, which was to be presided over by her renowned uncle, the revered Rabbi Haddaya, she failed to arrive — and in the end, unable to restrain himself, Yosef set out by himself for Jerusalem in the winter of 1846 with the intention of bringing his bride back with him. Instead, however, as the families in Constantinople and Salonika later found out, the two were married in a modest ceremony in Jerusalem, where Yosef Mani found work in the British consulate that had opened there in 1838.
Avraham Mani and Flora Haddaya were both greatly disappointed, since they had looked forward to a grand wedding in the rabbi’s home in Constantinople and to the young couple’s being close to them. Apparently, however, young Mani felt sufficiently drawn to Jerusalem to wish to remain there. In any event, since the mails between Jerusalem and Constantinople were highly irregular and a long while went by without any word from the newlyweds, Avraham Mani decided to travel to Jerusalem in the hope of persuading them to settle in Salonika, or at least, in Constantinople.