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 t