Beloved Ottomania - the Jewish heaven in Türkiye

[wm]

For over four centuries Turkey had been regarded as a friend of the Jews.
Her warm hospitality, extended to the refugees from Spain at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, left an indelible impression. The Spanish Jews found in Turkey not only a haven but freedom and prosperity.

Some, such as Don Joseph Nasi and Solomon Ashkenazi, rose to the highest positions in the state hierarchy. Under the millet system Ottoman Jewry enjoyed a wide measure of autonomy and the Chief Rabbi, the Chatham Bashi, was entitled to exercise authority in both religious and civil matters.
His decrees were sanctioned by the government and became law.

In Palestine the Ottoman rulers treated the Jews as tolerantly and benevolently as elsewhere. Selim I's conquest of Syria and Palestine in 1517 marked a new era in the history of the country, which was to remain under Ottoman rule for four hundred years.
The native Jews hailed Selim's victory enthusiastically. They had long been dissatisfied with the inefficient Mamluk regime and had good reason to believe that incorporation into the Ottoman Empire and direct contact with its Jewish inhabitants, the most influential and numerous at that time in the world, would open new vistas. They were not disappointed.

Following the example set by Selim I, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66) and Selim II (1566-74) allowed the Jews to move freely into the Holy Land and settle wherever they liked. The Jewish population, which in past centuries had been severely decimated by recurrent political and natural catastrophes, was now augmented by successive waves of immigration, mainly of the Sephardi extraction.
Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 1897-1918 by Isaiah Friedman

[wm]

Ashkenazi Jews also found a haven in the Ottoman Empire. These included Jews expelled from Hungary in 1376, from France in 1394, from Sicily, Bavaria and from Venetian-ruled Salonika. In fact, shortly before the fall of Constantinople, the Turks actively encouraged Jewish immigration from Europe by offering the same conditions of tolerance that Jews had formerly enjoyed in the Abbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Egypt and Muslim Spain.

As at Bursa, Jews helped the Turks everywhere to liberate them from their Greek Christian oppressors. In most cases they were rewarded with tax exemptions, trade concessions, mineral rights, and even with free housing and shops.

From the sixteenth century onwards, Ottoman rule spread to Arab and other Muslim lands, where the resident Jewish communities also welcomed the victorious Turkish armies. Suleiman the Magnificent, for example, gave tremendous encouragement to its Jewish community when he first entered Baghdad in triumph, accompanied by his Jewish physician and confidante and other Jewish scholars.

Under the benevolent sway of the Grand Turk, Sephardi refugees from Spain and Portugal joined existing Jewish communities all over the Ottoman Empire. They settled around the shores of the Mediterranean, penetrating up through the Balkans towards central Europe, and eventually across Turkey to Baghdad and beyond. Usually superior in education and culture to the Jews in whose midst they settled, they at first preserved a separate identity and formed themselves into a kind of aristocracy. In time though, they either absorbed the older-established Jews or else merged with them.

The Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire was also enriched by a steady stream of Marranos who fled eastwards from the fifteenth century onwards, bringing considerable capital with them. Rhodes, conquered by the Turks in 1522, became the main transit destination for New Christians seeking to return openly to Judaism. Other very wealthy individuals, who later commanded much influence at the Sultan's court, came directly —usually through Italy.
The Rise, Decline and Attempted Regeneration of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire by Lucien Gubbay

[wm]

While historians readily acknowledge that the United States has served as a Jewish refuge, few have recognized the similar role performed by the Ottoman Empire. In part, this imbalanced view derives from the continuing existence of the American state, and, as many believe, its enduring example as a model of pluralism in a twentieth-century world beset with unprecedented instances of ethnic and nationalistic intolerance and bestiality.

The United States, it is argued, constitutes a living case study which other peoples seek to emulate and to which desperate, persecuted individuals continue to flee. The focus on America's role in Jewish history may seem self-evident. Less obvious, however, is why we have overlooked or even shunned the Ottoman case.

Until very recently, Jewish historiography has hardly recognized, much less examined, the Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish integration into the Ottoman world. This evasion is difficult to comprehend. Not only did thousands find refuge there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but over the next four hundred years they enjoyed a cultural and economic renaissance that rivaled the great exilic communities of Babylonia and Spain.
THE QUINCENTENNIAL OF 1492 AND OTTOMAN-JEWISH STUDIES by Daniel Goffman

[wm]

"CAN SUCH a king be called wise and intelligent, one who impoverishes his country and enriches my kingdom?" Such is the question, or rather the exclamation, attributed to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512) about his contemporary, King Ferdinand of Spain, who together with Queen Isabella in 1492 decreed the expulsion, on pain of death, of all Spain's Jews who would not convert to Christianity.

Many who fled, or their descendants, ultimately found refuge in various parts of the Ottoman Empire. On Bayezid's instructions, they were welcomed, and those most enterprising and best qualified reestablished livelihoods that greatly benefitted their new country as well as themselves.
Some recent writing has rather anachronistically praised Bayezid as an almost prophetic embodiment of late 20th-century humanitarian ideals. Bayezid's real virtue is not diminished by admitting that his favorable attitude to the Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal was in no small measure motivated also by his conviction that these newcomers would have the same commercial skills as the indigenous Greek-speaking ("Romaniot") Jews of his Empire and that important economic benefits would inevitably accrue to his realm.

His reward was a long-lasting economic boom, and his new subjects found that they could flourish both economically and as a religious and social community in relative peace and security. In their new home they continued to call themselves Sephardim ("Spaniards" in Hebrew and in their vernacular Judeo-Spanish), as they still do to the present.
Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Some Recent Historiography by Eleazar Florence Birnbaum

[wm]

Into the 20th century, Sephardi Jews by and large regarded the Ottoman Empire with a great deal of gratitude and affection as their historical savior. The Ottoman Sultan BayezidII's open-arms policy toward the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish refugees in the 15th century was an integral part of Ottoman Sephardi collective memory, so much so that early-20th-century attempts by the Spanish government to renew its ties with Sephardi Jews were met with public scorn and disdain.

In addition, economic, social, and political competition from the Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the 19th century had pushed the Jewish communities of the empire from their earlier privileged position. The consequence of this competition, argues the historian Hasan Kayalt, was that "the Jews saw the best protection of their interests in making common cause with the Muslim elements within a secular and constitutional Ottoman state."

Both historic and socioeconomic factors easily translated into enthusiastic support for the July 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and the approximately 400,000 Jews of the empire were consistently among the most loyal supporters of the new regime.
The Young Turk Revolution promised sweeping political and social reforms, modernization, and universal rights. Among other things, the 1876 Ottoman constitution was reactivated; parliamentary elections were held; and equality among the religious communities was reaffirmed.

Although the Ottoman sultan had at least twice previously declared equality among his subjects, those declarations had done little to dent the hierarchical confessionalism—or "institutionalized difference'—that existed between Muslims and non-Muslims. Now, for the first time, citizenship rights matched this latest formulation, and there is extensive evidence indicating that a notion of Ottoman nationalism that transcended religious or ethnic variables was envisioned and articulated on the grassroots level.
The Struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palestine's Sephardi Jews, 1908-13 by Michelle U. Campos

[wm]

Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records, and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding — particularly of females of slavic origin — in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modem period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways.

I dealt with two of them: The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children; the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community.
These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata.
Blond, Tall, with Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership of Slaves in the Ottoman Empire by Yaron Ben-Naeh