Jewish Workers in Istanbul and the 1906 Strike at the Cibali Reji Tobacco Factory

Large hall with young female workers rolling cigarettes. Photograph: Guillaume Berggren. Collection Kadir Has Museum. Used with permission.

The 1906 strike at one of the largest factories in Istanbul at the time has all but disappeared from the history of the city and the labor history of Turkey. Located right next to the heavily Jewish Balat neighborhood, the Cibali Reji Tobacco Factory saw a strike that brought together workers of different backgrounds. The story also reveals the vulnerabilities of citizenship and gender.

Salonica and Istanbul were the industrial centers of the Ottoman Empire. In both cities, Jews constituted an important segment of the working class. Jews were an essential component of the emerging multicultural union movement in these cities (visibly more so in Salonica). One of the largest sectors for this new working class was tobacco and cigarette production – an industry where young women were noticeably numerous.

The center of this sector in the imperial capital of Istanbul was the Cibali Reji (Regie) Factory. As academic Gülhan Balsoy explained, “this factory had the capacity to process 12 tons of tobacco a day. With over two thousand workers in the early 1900s, it was a major enterprise. The demographics of the nearby neighborhoods along the Golden Horn were reflected in the Cibali workforce. The factory employed Greek, Jewish, and Muslim men and women.”

The Phanar-Balat area on the southern side of the Golden Horn had long been a mixed Jewish and Greek neighborhood. Jews had lived in Balat ever since the 1660 fire destroyed the previous Jewish neighborhood in Eminönü and were banned from reestablishing their homes in such prime real estate. Thus, they had moved further up the horn to Balat. The neighborhood of Phanar on the other hand was home to the Greek elites and the Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchate (where it still is today). Balat boasts many synagogues including the Kastorya Synagogue, built by Romaniote Jews from the region of Macedonia who settled in Istanbul decades before the arrival of the Sepharadim. Right across the water from Phanar-Balat is Hasköy, a working class neighborhood of Jews and Greeks. Hasköy was also home to almost fifty synagogues including Romaniote, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Karaite houses of worship. Small numbers of Muslims and Armenians also lived in these areas.

According to Balsoy, “workers of different backgrounds shared not only a place of work but also grievances with their work. Wages were too low to live on and the workdays, especially in the summer months, were up to 14 hours long. The workspace for processing tobacco was stuffy and dusty. As a result, tuberculosis and other diseases ran rampant among the workers. All these problems led to many industrial actions: work stoppages, machine breaking, striking. The goal was protesting the working conditions and get what they deserved.” At the time, there was no weekend – workers had to labor every day. There was also no eight-hour workday, which is why bosses would often demand work for up to 14 hours. These demands had been part of the manifesto of the Salonica Socialists led by Avram Benaroya, a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria. The largest part of this group were the famed Salonica dock workers, most of whom were Sephardic Jews. 

The 1906 strike was not the first industrial action in the Empire, Istanbul, or even this particular factory. But it is notable for its cause and the severity of punishment received by its leaders. As Easter approached, the factory management decided it would not give the workers paid time off during the Christian holiday even though that had been the established practice of previous years.

The refusal of paid time off for Easter caused all the workers to spring into action. On March 29th, the workers declared their intent to strike. They left work to march from Cibali to Karaköy (another very Jewish area) where the management building of the Reji company was located. There were around 250 demonstrators in the crowd, all of whom were Greeks or Jews, and at least 50 of the protesters were women.

The protest for paid time off for Easter led Jewish workers, along with the Greeks, to strike - a strike that the government immediately saw as a threat. With government intervention, the factory management was to accept some of the workers’ demands, but the list of accepted demands was designed to break solidarity between Jews and Greeks. The management refused to give Jews paid time off for Easter because they did not celebrate the holiday and agreed to give this only to Christian workers. This had not been the case in previous years. The Jews of the factory had gotten involved because they saw this attempt to cut paid time off as a way of eroding all worker’s hard-won benefits. That March it was Easter, at the end of summer it could have been Yom Kippur that the company decided to cut off.

Moreover, both the company management and the government obtained the names of twelve workers who led the industrial action. Among these three are Jewish women: Mari Behar, Rachel Eskenazi, and Bin (?) Behar. All three women among the twelve leaders were Jews. Two others were Jewish men: Sigaraci (Cigarette maker) Nesim and Vangel Sarandi. These two men and a Greek worker, Vasil Yani, were found guilty of having instigated the strike. While Yani and Sarandi were imprisoned, Sigaraci Nesim, who held Italian papers, was deported. We do not know where exactly he was sent (presumably to Italy) but like many other Jews in the Ottoman Empire who held foreign papers, he most likely had never been to Italy and likely had no immediate familial connection to it.

The punishments broke down on gender and citizenship lines. While the women in leadership were deemed to not ‘actually’ be responsible for the strike, the one ‘foreigner’ was removed from the country. Despite the partial success of the strike, some of its leaders paid a high price for paid time off on Easter. This episode of the 1906 Cibali strike is but a small slice from the multicultural history of Ottoman labor movements.

This piece originally appeared in Turkish in Avlaremoz, August 2021.