Documenting Jewish Cooperation with Muslims During the Islamic Conquests of Europe and the Near and Middle East

This article offers an excerpt from the book: The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic by Stanford J. Shaw. This book was published by New York University Press in 1991, and it is now evidently out of print. It must be noted, that Wikipedia acknowledges that Shaw himself has Jewish heritage, although he was born and raised in St. Paul Minnesota. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to document Jewish history outside of Christian nations without employing Jewish sources, and at times, even within Christian nations.

According to Wikipedia, Shaw has been criticized for a lack of “factual accuracy” on account of a pro-Turkish bias, for which reason he denied to Armenian genocide of the early 20th century. Of course, he doesn’t deny the “Nazi holocaust”, which actually never did happen, however he is also criticized for his portrayal of the Turkish role in “saving” Jews from extermination in that purported holocaust. So with all fairness, we may imagine that just as Shaw was prone to downplaying Turkish atrocities in the 20th century, his assessment of the history of Turkish conquests of Christian lands in the Medieval period may also have been affected by his bias.

However our interest lies in his documentation of Jews in the Ottoman empire, and the Jewish role in assisting the Ottoman conquest of what had remained of Byzantium. Even in this, Shaw’s biases are found throughout his narrative, which we may summarize in two statements: Jews are oppressed and persecuted in Christian nations simply because they are Jews, and never for any injustices which they may have actually committed, while the Turks protected and accommodated Jews for no other reason than the goodness of their own hearts, and their interest in universal prosperity, ad nauseam.

In spite of his biases, Shaw was a professor of Turkish history and language for over ten years at Harvard University, and for nearly thirty years at the University of California in Los Angeles. Finally, he taught for seven years at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, until his death in 2006.

From the front cover flap:

The Ottoman Turks provided the principal source of refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium from the emergence of the Ottoman Empire in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East in the thirteenth century until the nineteenth century, when it also received thousands of Jews persecuted in Tzarist Russia, and the twentieth century, when it provided refuge for Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust.

This book studies the Ottoman Jewish community and the economic, cultural and religious contributions of its members, with special attention to the Ottoman role in protecting their Jewish subjects from Christian anti-Semitism within the Empire during the nineteenth century, and to the relations of Ottoman Jewry and the Ottoman government with the Zionist movement as it developed in the late nineteenth century. It goes on to describe the Jewish role during the First World War, the Turkish War for Independence that followed, and Jewish life in the Turkish Republic in the interwar years, with special emphasis on Turkey’s role in rescuing thousands of Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War and in maintaining relations with the State of Israel since its establishment despite its close connections with the Islamic world.

For a note on the author, please see the back flap

From the rear cover flap:

Stanford J. Shaw is Professor of Turkish and Near Eastern History at the University of California in Los Angeles. He was previously Assistant and Associate Professor of Turkish Language and History at Harvard University and Director of its Near Eastern Summer programme. Professor Shaw pioneered the use of the Ottoman archives in Istanbul while writing numerous books and articles on Ottoman and Turkish history and society, including Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III and History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.

He has served as President of the Turkish Studies Association of North America, was the founder and first editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and has been an elected Honorary Member of the Turkish Historical Society of Ankara, Turkey since 1981 and a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Turkish Studies, Washington, DC, since 1983. He received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ford foundations and two major research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Harvard University and the Bosporus University, Istanbul, and served as Fulbright Hayes Research Professor at the Bosporus University in 1990-1.

The jacket-design reproduces a photograph of Rabbi Moshe Ha-Levi, Acting Grand Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, 1872—1908 (courtesy of Chief Rabbi David Asseo).

The portion of this book which is of primary interest is from Chapter 1, which is titled Ingathering of the Jews, and the last portion of that chapter, which is subtitled Jewish Absorption into the Emerging Ottoman Empire, which begins on page 25 and ends with the end of the chapter, on page 36. We will reproduce the page numbers in the text below, in brackets at the place where each page begins, and each page number will be linked to a facsimile copy of that page. We have already linked the cover facsimiles in the foregoing text. 

Interestingly, our copy of this book was recently purchased used online, and whoever the original owner was, he must have been interested for this book for reasons similar to our own, since he underlined many of the passages of the sort for which we ourselves would search. This will be evident in the provided facsimile images. These pages were scanned on a Hewlett Packard Lasrerjet printer, saved in PNG format, trimmed in GIMP and the OCR was done using Tesseract on Linux. Minimal editing was required, but hopefully nothing was missed. We amended a few typographical errors in the original text, and we have neglected to reproduce footnotes. So what follows is the text of the relevant portion of the book, which we shall not indent because we are not adding any notes or comments:

[25:] Byzantium, however, was breaking up, fortunately for the few Jews who remained under its dominion. As the Turkomans invaded Anatolia starting with their rout of the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and formed Turkoman principalities throughout the peninsula, and as the Seljuk Turks established a more settled state centered, first in defense of the Abbasid Empire of Baghdad, and later in Konya and central Anatolia starting in the twelfth century (the Seljuks of Rum, 1077-1246), Byzantine Jewry sprang rapidly to their assistance, welcoming the tolerance and prosperity which the rule of Islam was offering them once again, as it had done previously both in the Middle East and Spain, with thousands of Jews fleeing from Byzantine persecution to Seljuk protection even before the Ottoman state was born.

The Ottomans first established their principality in northeastern Anatolia about 1300 under the leadership of the founder of the dynasty, Osman (d. 1324?). Within a century, after taking over most of western Anatolia, they expanded through Southeastern Europe all the way to the Danube, conquering what are today Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania and Yugoslavia. For a time they bypassed Constantinople, which remained, though already depopulated and ravaged by the Latin Crusaders who occupied it early in the thirteenth century, isolated from the outside world, until it finally was conquered by Mehmed II the Conqueror in 1453. At the same time the Ottomans moved rapidly through Anatolia to the East, reaching the Tigris and Euphrates in the late fourteenth century. After a temporary check due to an invasion of Anatolia by the Tatar chief Tamerlane, they solidified their rule of eastern Anatolia by the end of the fifteenth century and then went on to conquer Syria and Egypt under the leadership of Selim I between 1512 and 1520. His successor, Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-66), called Kanuni, ‘the lawgiver’ by the Turks, completed the great Ottoman conquests in Europe, crossing the Danube and conquering Hungary in 1526. He then placed Vienna under siege in 1529, challenging the Habsburg Emperor, Charles V. In the East he conquered Iraq and much of the Caucasus in 1535, and then extended Ottoman rule across North Africa almost to the Atlantic before his reign came to an end in 1566.

These Ottoman conquests marked a very substantial change for the Jews of the Middle East and Europe. They meant instant liberation, not [26:] only from subjugation, persecution, and humiliation but often from actual slavery in Christian hands. As a result, Jews contributed significantly to the Ottoman conquests. The Jews of Bursa, Byzantine administrative center of northwestern Anatolia, actively helped Osman’s son Orhan (1324-59) capture the city in 1324. As a reward, to repopulate the city and develop its economy, he brought in Jewish artisans and money changers from Damascus and Byzantine Adrianople (Edirne) so that it could become the first Ottoman capital, with the ancient Etz ha-Haim synagogue marking the center of the Jewish quarter (Yahudi Mahallesi), established to assure their autonomy in religious and secular matters. In complete contrast to their situation under the Byzantines, Jews entering the Ottoman dominions were allowed to practice whatever profession they wished, to engage in trade and commerce without restriction, and to own landed property and buildings in town and country alike, in return paying a percentage of their revenues to the state as head tax in the traditional Islamic manner, though the Chief Rabbi, the Cantor, and other servants of the synagogues were exempted. At first all the Jews of Bursa were Romaniotes, or Greek-speaking Jews who had escaped from the Byzantines, but later they were joined by Ashkenazis from France and Germany as well as Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, making Bursa into an early model of what was to follow of Jewish life in Salonica and Istanbul.

The Ottoman conquests of Gallipoli (1354) by Orhan’s son Süleyman Pasha, of Ankara (1360) in central Anatolia and of the Byzantine administrative capital of Southeastern Europe, Adrianople, in 1363 by Murad I, also were accomplished with support from the small and impoverished Jewish communities which had lived there under Byzantine persecution. Just as at Bursa, so also at Adrianople, now called Edirne, to restore it economically and make it into the capital of the Ottomans’ European possessions as quickly as possible, the Turkish conquerors repopulated it with large numbers of Jews resettled from the newly conquered lands in Bosnia and Serbia as well as with Ashkenazi refugees from Hungary, southern Germany, Italy, France, Poland and Russia, providing them with substantial tax and other concessions. This transformed Ottoman Edirne quite suddenly into the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time. Its Chief Rabbi (hahambaşi) was appointed to lead all the Jews of Southeastern Europe as the Ottoman conquests continued, and Edirne itself became a major center of Jewish religion and culture.

When the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II Fatih (The Conqueror) captured Constantinople and brought the Byzantine Empire finally to an inglorious end in 1453, his armies broke into the city through one of the Jewish quarters and with the assistance of the local Jewish population who, as at Bursa and Edirne, were overjoyed at the opportunity to throw off their Greek oppressors. So also at Buda and Pest in 1526, on the [27:] island of Rhodes in 1522, at Belgrade (1526), in Azerbaijan (1534), Iraq and Iran (1534-35, 1638). Yemen (1628) and elsewhere, Jews welcomed the conquering forces of Süleyman the Magnificent, and in each case they were rewarded with tax exemptions, concessions for trade and exploitation of minerals, repair or expansion of old synagogues, and even free houses and shops to meet the needs of the increasing Jewish populations.

Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople was not followed by killing and destruction, as Greek nationalists have claimed to the present day in efforts to depict Turks as barbarians, but rather by an effort to rebuild and repopulate the city so that it could become the center of the great multinational empire he was trying to create, extending far beyond the Roman Empire and incorporating all the people of the world as he knew it under the dominion of his Turkish dynasty. Therefore though by Muslim tradition Constantinople should have been looted since it had forcefully resisted Muslim conquest, Mehmed prevented his soldiers from taking any more than nominal revenge during a single day so as to fulfill Islamic tradition in theory while in fact sparing it from destruction so that it could become his capital as soon as possible.

Mehmed II initially established the center of his government on the heights of Old Istanbul, south of the Byzantine Tauri Forum, at what came to be known as the Eski Saray (Old Palace), now the site of Istanbul University and the Süleymaniye mosque complex, but he subsequently created an entirely new palace that became known as the Topkapi Sarayi overlooking the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. During the remaining three decades of his reign (1451-81), he built one hundred ninety new mosques in the city in addition to seventeen converted churches, twenty-four Muslim elementary schools (mektep) and colleges (medrese), thirty-two public baths (hamam), and twelve major commercial and industrial establishments (han) and markets (bazar) centered around the Grand Bazaar (bedestan), which rapidly became the nucleus of the Empire’s commercial activities. Old Istanbul was divided into twelve quarters (nahiye) each centered around a major Muslim mosque and related complexes of schools, hospitals and other charitable institutions supported by foundations (vakif) endowed with substantial portions of the conquered properties so as to support them in perpetuity. The quarters in turn were divided into sub-districts (mahalle) based on smaller mosques, churches and synagogues as well as the tombs and monasteries of the mystic orders.

But how to repopulate this city? It had already been despoiled and depopulated by the Latin crusaders at the start of the thirteenth century, and there were few people and little wealth left by the time the Ottomans arrived. No more than between thirty and fifty thousand people lived in squalor among large gardens and the ruins of what once had been a great metropolis. Mehmed II could not have an empire if his capital lacked [28:] people and economic activity. So in imitation of what had been done earlier at Bursa and Edirne he undertook strenuous efforts to repopulate and rebuild the city as quickly as possible. Initially, he tried to get those Christians who had fled during and immediately preceding the conquest to return, allowing them to reoccupy their houses and practice their trades and religion without hindrance if they arrived within a certain amount of time. He also settled one-fifth of his Christian prisoners and their families along the Golden Horn, providing them with free houses and tax exemptions in return for joining the effort to rebuild the city and beginning to practice their trades, thus allowing them to use their earnings to pay their ransoms. He initiated an effort at forced migration (sürgün) of different elements of the empire, Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, from all the conquered lands to constitute the population of the new Ottoman capital of Istanbul. Sometimes they were brought by force, sometimes by inducements such as free land and tax-free incomes if they developed shops, trades, and commerce. As a further inducement Mehmed II allowed the members of the major religious groups to govern themselves in their own religiously-based communities, or millets, first the Greeks, then the Armenians, and finally the Jews, meaning that they could live under their own leaders in their own way and follow their own religions and customs as they had in the past. This gave Mehmed II another great advantage in conquering and ruling his empire, namely the support of the religious leaders to whom he was giving secular as well as religious authority over their followers, an extent of power they never were able to achieve or exercise in states where they had to share it with temporal rulers. As a result of all these efforts, during the three decades following the Ottoman conquest, Istanbul’s population increased by 1478 to 16,326 households (hane), perhaps as many as 114,248 people, including 5,162 Christian and 1,647 Jewish households respectively, establishing proportions of fifty-eight percent Muslim, thirty-two percent Christian and ten percent Jewish which remained relatively unchanged even as the city’s population grew in later centuries.

But this still left the city relatively empty compared with its heyday half a millennium before at the height of Byzantine power. Mehmed could secure only so many people for his capitol from the conquered lands without depopulating them as well. And in any case he did not trust his new Christian subjects, since they remained strongly anti-Muslim as well as anti-Jewish and, still not reconciled to conquest and rule by Muslims and to the new freedoms given the Jews by the Sultan, were trying to stir Christian Europe to reconquer their lands from the Ottomans by new Crusades as soon as possible, continuing to do so well into the sixteenth century, though with little success.

While many Christian inhabitants of Constantinople had left the city before it was put under siege, and others had fled to Europe during [29:] and immediately after the conquest, the Jews, who welcomed the Turks, remained where they had lived in late Byzantine times, particularly on both sides of the Golden Horn and in what subsequently became Turkish Galata. It was therefore to Jews that Mehmed turned primarily to help revive trade, industry, and commerce in his capital. Not only did they offer the same sort of economic and financial skills which had attracted them to political and even religious leaders in Europe despite great religious prejudice, but they also had no liking for Christian Europe. They were in fact being driven out of Europe and were desperately seeking new homes where they could live and work and prosper. From the start, Mehmed assured the Jews remaining in the city that they would be allowed to practice their religion and occupations freely and without the hindrances to which they had been subjected by the Byzantines. In addition, just three days after the conquest, he sent messages to the Jews of Bursa and other places in Anatolia and to those living in Salonica and Edirne in Europe inviting them to come to Istanbul. As inducements he offered them free property in the northern areas of Balat (Tekfurdaği) and Hasköy as well as the Bahçekapi area where Jewish coppersmiths had lived since Byzantine times, adding exemptions from taxes on their incomes for substantial periods of time as well as permission to build synagogues as needed.

Mehmed Il retained the old Islamic prohibition against allowing Christians to build new churches, but placed Jews in a special category above Christian zimmis, enabling them to use legal formalities in order to evade this and other prohibitions imposed on Christians, in this case by allowing them to build synagogues on the foundations of existing houses. This arrangement was preserved throughout Ottoman history by means of orders (irade) issued by later sultans on the basis of this precedent, and it was applied as well to other traditional Islamic clothing and building restrictions imposed on Christians, which for Jews became in fact no more than requirements to secure official permits before such nominally forbidden acts were carried out. Mehmed II moreover placed the Jews in a position where they could dominate his Christian subjects financially and economically in order to make certain that the latter would not use their wealth to undermine the Empire, as they probably intended to do. As a result of these inducements, large numbers of Jews emigrated to Istanbul from Bursa and Edirne in particular.

Even more than the Jews living in the expanding Ottoman Empire itself, Mehmed from the start attempted to encourage the emigration of Jews from Europe. Just as the Jews of England, France, Germany, Spain, and even Poland and Lithuania were being subjected to increasing persecution, blood libels, massacres, and deportations, the Turkish rulers of the expanding Ottoman state actively encouraged them to come and live in the Ottoman Empire under the same conditions of tolerance and [30:] freedom which had favored the lives of Jews in the empires of the Umayyads of Damascus and Abbasids of Baghdad, and more recently in Muslim Spain.

Mehmed himself is said to have issued a proclamation to all Jews:

Who among you of all my people that is with me, may his God be with him, let him ascend to Istanbul the site of my imperial throne. Let him dwell in the best of the land, each beneath his vine and beneath his fig tree, with silver and with gold, with wealth and with cattle. Let him dwell in the land, trade in it, and take possession of it.

The sixteenth-century Jewish historian Elijah Capsali wrote at the time:

In the first year of the Sultan Mehmed, King of Turkey …, the Lord aroused the spirit of the king …, and his voice passed throughout his kingdom and also by proclamation saying: (from Ezra I, 1-3)

‘This is the word of Mehmed King of Turkey, the Lord God of Heaven gave me a kingdom in the land and he commanded me to number his people the seed of Abraham his servant, the sons of Jacob his chosen ones, and to give them sustenance in the land and to provide a safe haven for them. (Based on verses in Ezra and Genesis) Let each one with his God come to Constantinople the seat of my kingdom and sit under his vine and under his fig tree with his gold and silver, property and cattle, settle in the land and trade and become part of it’ (from Genesis 34:10).

The Jews gathered together from all the cities of Turkey both near and far, each man came from his home; and the community gathered in the thousands and ten thousands and God assisted them from heaven while the king gave them good properties and houses full of goods. The Jews dwelled there according to their families and they multiplied exceedingly (Exodus 1:7). From that day hence, from every place that the king conquered wherein there were Jews, he immediately forced them to emigrate (paraphrasing Isaiah 22:17), taking them from there and sending them to Istanbul the seat of his kingdom. And he bore them and carried them all the days of old (Isaiah 63:9).

Because the Jews feared the Lord, He gave them prosperity (based on Exodus 1:21), and in the place wherein formerly in the days of the Byzantine king there were only two or three congregations, the Jews multiplied and increased and became greater in number than forty congregations, and the land did not let them settle together because their property was so great (Genesis 13:6). The congregations of Constantinople were praiseworthy. Torah and wealth and honor increased among the congregations. In the congregations they blessed the Lord, the fountain of Israel (Psalms 68:27), the doer of great [31:] wonders. They opened their mouth in song to heaven and blessed the Lord, all the servants of the Lord who stand in the house of the Lord in the night seasons (Psalms 134:1).

The Ottoman rulers actively propagandized throughout Europe to attract Jewish emigrants to their newly expanding state. The most famous “example of this effort was the letter sent in the name of the Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac Tzarfati, who had come to the Ottoman dominions from Germany, apparently just before the conquest of Istanbul, became Chief Rabbi of the second Ottoman capital Edirne (Adrianople), and who some time afterwards wrote his co-religionists in Central Europe, in particular in Swabia, the Rhineland, Steuermark, Moravia, northern France, and Hungary, informing them of the advantages of the sultanate and of its liberal attitude toward Jews.

Several versions of Tzarfati’s letter have survived. The most famous expresses vividly the enthusiasm which he conveyed to the oppressed Jews of Central Europe:

My brothers and my masters, having prayed to God to grant you peace, I wish to relate to you the circumstances under which the young Rabbi Zalman and his companion Rabbi David Cohen came to me. They recounted to me all the ordeals, harsher than death, which our brothers, the sons of Israel who live in Germany, have undergone and still endure; the decisions taken against them, the martyrs, the expulsions, which take place every day and compel them to wander from country to country, from town to town, endlessly, without any place accepting them; for when these unfortunates arrive in a town of refuge hoping to find repose there, they do not find it, and they have so much misfortune that they say: the first town was the most welcoming and the second is more harsh than the first. It is “‘As if a man did flee from the lion and a bear met him; or went into the house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him’ (Amos v 19); also ‘they shall not escape and their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost” (Job xi 20) . . . Now a decree harsher than all the others has been enacted, and no Jew is permitted to embark, and they are lost in a country which has closed the sea routes to them; and they do not know where the wind of persecution will blow them, nor whither they can flee.

These are the circumstances which Rabbi Zalman and Rabbi David recounted to me. When they arrived herein Turkey, a land on which the wrath of God has not weighed heavily, when they saw the peace, the tranquillity and the abundance which holds sway in these lands and when they saw that the distance between Turkey and Jerusalem is short, and may be traversed overland, they were overcome with great [32:] joy and they said: without any doubt if the Jews who live in Germany knew a tenth of the blessings which God has bestowed on His people of Israel in this land, neither snow nor rain, neither day nor night, would be of consequence until they had journeyed here.

They have asked me to write to the exiles, to the Jewish communities which reside in Germany, in the towns of Swabia, of the Rhineland, of Styria, of Moravia and of Hungary, to inform them how agreeable is this country …. When I realized that their desires were disinterested, I decided to acquiesce in their entreaties, for I too would like to give Israel the opportunity of acquiring its just deserts….

Another version of Tzarfati’s appeal was even more emotional:

Your cries and sobs have reached us. We have been told of all the troubles and persecutions which you have to suffer in the German lands …. I hear the lamentation of my brethren …. The barbarous and cruel nation ruthlessly oppresses the faithful children of the chosen people …. The priests and prelates of Rome have risen. They wish to root out the memory of Jacob and erase the name of Israel. They always devise new persecutions. They wish to bring you to the stake …. Listen my brethren, to the counsel I will give you. I too was born in Germany and studied Torah with the German rabbis. I was driven out of my native country and came to the Turkish land, which is blessed by God and filled with all good things. Here I found rest and happiness; Turkey can also become for you the land of peace …. If you who live in Germany knew even a tenth of what God has blessed us with in this land, you would not consider any difficulties; you would set out to come to us …. Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of. We possess great fortunes; much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed with heavy taxes, and our commerce is free and unhindered. Rich are the fruits of the earth. Everything is cheap, and every one of us lives in peace and freedom. Here the Jew is not compelled to wear a yellow hat as a badge of shame, as is the case in Germany, where even wealth and great fortune are a curse for a Jew because he therewith arouses jealousy among the Christians and they devise all kinds of slander against him to rob him of his gold. Arise my brethren, gird up your loins, collect your forces, and come to us. Here you will be free of your enemies, here you will find rest ….

Rabbi Elija Capsali relates that Mehmed II’s successor, Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512), who ruled at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, made even more urgent efforts to attract the Jews of Europe into his empire:

[33:] Sultan Bayezid, monarch of Turkey, heard of all the evil that the king of Spain inflicted on the Jews and he heard that they were seeking a refuge and resting place. He took pity on them, wrote letters, and sent emissaries to proclaim throughout his kingdom that none of his city governors be wicked enough to refuse entry to Jews or to expel them. Instead, they were to be given a gracious welcome, and anyone who did not behave in this manner would be put to death …. Thousands and tens of thousands of the deported Jews came to the land of the Turks and filled the land. Then they constructed righteous communities without number in Turkey and generously provided money to ransom captives, and so the children returned to their own country …

As a result of these and other such appeals, large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews who just then were being subjected to tortures, massacres, and expulsions from Bavaria and elsewhere in Central Europe, flooded into Mehmed’s newly-conquered provinces in southeastern Europe, settling at Sofia, Vidin, Plevna, Nicopolis, Salonica and Istanbul, establishing Ashkenazi synagogues and communities which subsequently received hundreds of Jewish refugees from persecution in Hungary and eastern Europe.

Bayezid II is said to have remarked during a conversation in his court: ‘you call Ferdinand a wise king, he who impoverishes his country and enriches our own…’ by expelling the Jews. Despite considerable religious conservatism of his own, Bayezid went on to decree that all Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal should be admitted to his dominions without restriction, and with the same inducements that had been offered during the reign of his predecessor. Ottoman officials were ordered to do everything they could to facilitate the entry of Iberian Jews into Ottoman territory, and strict punishments were provided against all those who mistreated the immigrants or caused them any sort of damage.

So it was not just in 1492, but already starting with the Ottoman conquest of Bursa in northwestern Anatolia in 1324, and particularly after Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, that Jews started flooding into the Ottoman Empire, Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, France, and Hungary, Italian Jews from Sicily, Otranto, and Calabria, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal. And while most of them settled in the major Ottoman centers in Southeastern Europe where there were already flourishing communities of Ottoman Jews, such as Istanbul, Salonica and Edirne, others settled among their co-religionists in Anatolia as well as in the Arab provinces, at Cairo, Damascus, Beirut and Tripoli in particular, as well as in the Holy Land at Safed and Sidon more than at Jerusalem.

It is estimated that as many as 250,000 Jews came from the Iberian [34:] peninsula to the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century, but the exact numbers will probably never be known. Jews at the time saw in the victorious Ottoman armies the punishing rod of God, his iron hand, predestined to carry through the righteous judgment of the Almighty against the enemies of his people and to destroy what they called the ‘kingdom of Edom’, steeped in blood and sin. They declared the Ottoman leaders to be scions of the ‘righteous Cyrus’, the ‘anointed of God’, and firmly believed that at the head of the warlike Ottoman hosts the angel Gabriel himself strode with sword in hand to bring near the ‘end’ and prepare the way for the glorious Messiah.

Some of the new emigrants came directly by sea through the Mediterranean or overland from Central Europe. Some of them came indirectly, stopping off first across the Straits of Gibraltar in North Africa or going overland or by sea to Naples, Genoa or Venice in Italy or to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, where they settled for a time before they were expelled and had to move on to the East. Some of them came in small boats with nothing but the clothes on their backs and had to be helped by the older Ottoman Jewish communities. Many of the wealthier Spanish and Portuguese Jews managed to survive in the West European dominions of the Spanish Habsburgs under Habsburg protection, in return for sizable gifts, before the Inquisition finally caught up with them and forced them onwards, though they still managed to bring a great deal of their wealth.

More Jews were included in the Empire by the Ottoman conquests during the sixteenth century. Selim I's (1512-20) conquest of the old Islamic provinces of the Middle East, Syria, Eretz Israel, and Egypt, brought with them the old-established Jewish communities of Jerusalem and Safed, Damascus and Antioch, Cairo and Alexandria, including many who had only recently fled from the Spain and Portugal, often coming through Cyprus on their way to the East. Selim continued the policy begun by Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror of deporting (sürgün) segments of the conquered population to Istanbul to assure the obedience and good behavior of those left behind. In order to strengthen the economy of the Ottoman capital at the same time, most of these were chosen from among the most experienced Jewish craftsmen and merchants of Cairo and Alexandria, who went most willingly to join their co-religionists in the capital of this new and rapidly expanding empire. Insofar as those left in Egypt were concerned, Selim continued the late Mamluk practice of appointing a leading Jewish merchant, Abraham Castro, as negid, to lead the Jewish community of Egypt, but starting late in the sixteenth century this office was eliminated, and Egypt’s Jews thereafter were led by Jewish representatives sent from Istanbul with the title of Çelebi, while Jewish bankers were appointed to direct Egypt’s mint as well as to act as chief money changers (Sarraf Başi) and bankers for the Ottoman [35:] governors. Egyptian Jewry prospered so much that, within a short time, a substantial proportion of the emigrants to the Ottoman Empire from North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and Central Europe, found their way to Cairo and Alexandria rather than to Istanbul, Salonica, or elsewhere in Southeastern Europe or Anatolia. Kanuni Süleyman’s (1520-66) conquests of Serbia (1521) and Hungary (1526) rescued thousands of Jews who had been subjected to persecution under Habsburg influence, many of whom, at the invitation of the Sultan in his Ferman de los Alemanes, immediately migrated southward to Edirne and Istanbul in particular, greatly expanding their Ashkenazi populations. At the same time Jews both from Central Europe and from Spain migrated to Bosnia starting in the middle of the sixteenth century, settling first in its major cities Sarajevo (Bosna Saray) and Travnik, and later spreading into the smaller towns, Tuzla, Banja Luka, and Zenica as well as to Mostar, capital of Herzegovina. Süleyman’s subsequent conquest of Iraq and parts of the Caucasus added the ancient eastern Jewish colonies of Baghdad as well as many Jews who had fled from Byzantine persecution north of the Black Sea, only to be persecuted by the Shia Safavids who had conquered the eastern part of the province.

Nor were the anti-Semitic persecutions in Christian Europe and the resulting flood of emigration into Ottoman territory ended by the exile from Spain in 1492. The acquisition of Apulia by the Papacy in 1537 led to a new wave of Jewish emigration into Ottoman territory from Italy, while anti-Semitic riots and legislation enacted by the Diet of Bohemia in 1542 caused more Jewish emigration from Central Europe, partly to Poland but much more to the Ottoman possessions. In 1555 Papal demands for substantial new taxes from the Jews in return for continued possession of their synagogues, subsequent orders concentrating them in newly-formed ghettos along the Tiber in Rome, forbidding them any exit during nights and on Sundays and Christian holidays and requiring them to wear distinctive clothing, stimulated similar anti-Semitic legislation in much of Italy. As a result, thousands more Jews sailed eastward through the Mediterranean to Ottoman territory during the remainder of the century.

So whether in the fourteenth century or the sixteenth, Jews rich and poor continued to come into the Ottoman dominions in large numbers from all over Christian Europe, settling in all parts of the sultans’ empire, in modern Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Egypt, and in Anatolia at Bursa, Gallipoli, Manisa, Izmir, Tokat, and Amasya. Some settled on the eastern Mediterranean islands of Cyprus, Patras and Corfu. But most frequently they settled in the places that became the centers of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, in the capital Istanbul, in eastern Thrace at Edirne, along the shores of the Aegean at Salonica, or Thessaloniki, and in the Holy Land, especially at Safed, in total numbers [36:] estimated anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 people, compared to little more than 30,000 Jewish refugees in Poland and Lithuania at the end of the fifteenth century, and 75,000 in the mid-sixteenth. This made the Ottoman Jewish community not only the largest but also the most prosperous Jewish community in the world at the time, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period which constituted the Golden Age of Ottoman Jewry.