The literature on Mediterranean port cities in the late Ottoman period has focused disproportionately on both the foreign merchant class as well as local bourgeoisies. Yet such an approach sidelines much of the urban fabric, leaving many dynamics of city life uninterrogated. This marginalization is particularly the case for the Sephardi communities of the eastern Mediterranean basin, who in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly concentrated not in the global commerce of the Empire’s ports but rather in small-scale petty trade, artisanship, and manual labor. Drawing on unstudied archival material as well as newspapers in Ladino, this paper attempts to remedy this silence by foregrounding the experiences of petty traders, artisans, and guildsmen in the Sephardi communities of Izmir and Istanbul. Through an array of sources from everyday life such as guild agreements, inventories, newspaper editorials, and correspondence, I interrogate their discourse of attachment to an “esnaf,” a term borrowed from Turkish signifying both guilds as well as a broad array of middling and lower social classes. Tracking its increasing prominence in varied Ladino-language sources in the waning years of the Empire, I argue that the “esnaf,” with both its real and imagined boundaries, became a crucial category of belonging for Ottoman Sephardi Jews. It not only scaffolded their daily life, business interactions, and personal relationships, but animated their growing self-awareness as “working class” and ultimately undergirded their sense of what it meant to be “modern.” Furthermore, by prioritizing the esnaf and the spaces in which it is most visible, such as the street, the courtyard, and market-stall, the paper points to how a focus on socioeconomic class uncovers shared zones of contact between Jews and their Muslim neighbors that have until now remained unexplored.