Moïse Allatini

Origins and early life

Moïse Allatini was born in Salonica in 1809 into a Sephardi Jewish family from Livorno; his father Lazaro Allatini had come to the city in 1802, and the family never left Judaism.

Work and career

Salonica was then the only city in Europe with a Jewish majority — some sixty thousand Sephardim, descendants of the exiles of 1492, who filled the port, the trades and the docks, and closed the harbour on Saturdays. Allatini studied medicine at Florence and Pisa, then gave up practice on his father's death to take over the family business and turn it into the industrial base of the city: he built the great steam flour mills, brick and tile works, a brewery, tobacco processing and a silk factory, financed with the support of the Rothschilds, and became the leading employer of the Ottoman Balkans.

His deeper work was education. Convinced that his community could not survive the coming century on the traditional Talmud Torah alone, he founded in 1856 the Lippmann school, the first modern Jewish school of Salonica, teaching French, mathematics and science, and fought the fierce opposition of the rabbinical old guard, which twice had the school closed; he brought in the Alliance israélite universelle, whose Salonica schools eventually taught thousands, and he supported the community's hospitals, orphanage and the Italian-language press.

He is remembered in Salonica as the Angel of the city. He died there in 1882. The community he built for was destroyed sixty years later: some 48,000 Jews of Salonica were deported to Auschwitz in 1943, and the Allatini mill still stands.