Dardanelles Or Chanak-Kalessi

Name of the two cities situated opposite each other on the shores of the strait at the entrance to the Sea of Marmora. The European city is inhabited byMohammedans exclusively; the Asiatic city contains Mohammedans, Greeks, Armenians, Europeans, and Jews The Jewish community dates from the year 1510 according to local traditions which report that the Portuguese rabbi Jacob Ben-Ḥabib, the author of "'En Ya'aḳob," after emigrating from Portugal, established himself at Salonica, and afterward led a colony of twenty Jewish families from Gallipoli to Dardanelles. The old epitaphs in the cemetery of the city are illegible. The community is not mentioned until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the false Messiah Shabbethai Ẓebi was imprisoned by Sultan Mohammed IV. in the castle of Abydos in the vicinity of the Dardanelles. The Jewish population of this city, as well as of all the places along the Sea of Marmora, made a pilgrimage to the pseudo-Messiah (1664). Dardanelles is the birthplace of a Jewish author, Judah Benveniste, who wrote two works, "Tiwwasha' Yehudah" (Judah Shall Be Saved), published at Smyrna, and "Zeker Dabar" (Remembrance of the Word), published at Salonica (1863).

In a total population (1902) of 11,600 inhabitants there are 2,700 Jews. The latter have four synagogues, one school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle with 178 boys, a congregational school for girls (100), a Talmud Torah with 150 pupils, and a society of young people, "Ahabat Re'im," which furnishes a midday meal to poor school-children. Members of the three chief Jewish families, the Sedaccas, Gormezanos, and Taraganos, represent foreign powers as consular agents.

D. M. Fr.