the East with Rome, but it was the Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand
and Isabella who transformed the straggling Turkish town into one of the
most prosperous cities of the Levant by making it their home. And to-day
the Jewish women of Salonika, the older ones at least, wear precisely
the same costume that their great-grandmother wore in Spain before the
persecution--a symbol and a reminder of how the Israelites were hunted
by the Christians before they found refuge in a Moslem land.

There are no less than eight distinct ways of spelling and pronouncing
the city's name. To the Greeks, who are its present owners, it is
Saloniki or Saloneke, according to the method of transliterating the
_epsilon_; it is known to the Turks, who misruled it for five hundred
years, as Selanik; the British call it Salonica, with the accent on the
second syllable; the French Salonique; the Italians Salonnico, while the
Serbs refer to it as Solun. The best authorities seem to have agreed,
however, on Salonika, with the accent on the "i," which is pronounced
like "e," so that it rhymes with "paprika." But these are all
corruptions and abbreviations, for the city was originally named
Thessalonica, after the sister of Alexander of Macedon, and thus
referred to in the two epistles which St. Paul addressed to the church
he founded there. Owing to the variety of its religious sects, Salonika
has a superfluity of Sabbaths as well as of names, Friday being observed
by the Moslems, Saturday by the Jews, and Sunday by the Christians.
Perhaps it would be putting it more accurately to say that there is no
Sabbath at all, for the inhabitants are so eager to make money that
business is transacted on every day of the seven.

Besides the great colony of Orthodox Jews in Salonika, there is a sect
of renegades known as Dounmé, or Deunmeh, who number perhaps 20,000 in
all. These had their beginnings in the _Annus Mirabilis_, when a Jewish