How Spanish Jews found their second home in the Ottoman Empire?

The Ottoman Empire was a multiethnic, multinational and multireligious country. In this place many Jews who had run away from pogroms found a safe refuge. In the fifteenth century there were not many places where religious minorities could live in peace. The Ottoman Empire was one of those places where there was the tolerance and a relative liberty towards the „infidel” people. They could stay in their own communities and had their own judicature but they had to pay a special tax. Jews often had considerable wealth but if they could hold a high social position they had to convert to Islam.

  A Jewish delegation meets with an Ottoman official.

First traces of the Jewish presence in Asia Minor dated from the fourth century before Christ. This information results from archaeological sites in Sardis, Smyrna (today’s İzmir), Ephesus and Pergamon. Those evidences prove that the community lived in this area as one of the oldest Jewish community in the world. Probably they were brought to this area by Antiochus III. His successor Antiochus IV limited religious liberties. Grecian speaking Jews lived in Balkans and Byzantium area too. Their religious freedom was often limited, and often their position was determined by lord’s whims. During the fourth crusade when the Constantinople was captured, the crusaders had very unfriendly attitude towards Jews in this city. When the Eastern Rome returned to Byzantium, Jews again enjoyed much tolerance. They just had to live in a definite area of the city, because they shouldn’t have been mixed with residents of other religion.

 

When the sultan Orhan captured Bursa city in 1324 and established this city as the capital of his country, Orhan consented to Jews settled in the capital to buy lands and to practice the trade. Sultan gave Jews the assent to build the first synagogue. But a price of this liberty was the additional tax on the non-Muslim people. The tax wasn’t very oppressive and the precious liberty encouraged Jews to settle the Orhan’s country.

 

After the fall of the Constantinople and the conquest of Byzantium’s capital by the 21-year-old sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, he invited the Jewish community to settle in his empire. Constantinople was the apple of his eye. He issued the edict which encouraged Muslims, Jews and Christians to settle in the new capital of the empire. For this reason he restored in Constantinople the function of the Chief Rabbi. All those measures were to lead to the economic development of the city. Mehmed knew that once the capital and resourceful people come to the capital city, it quickly recovers its old glory.

 

Sultan Bayezid II sent Kemal Reis to save the Sephardic Jews of Spain from the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and granted them permission to settle in the Ottoman Empire.

The successor of Mehmed II was Bayezid II. Bayezid is a major figure of my today’s project. Bayezid II admitted Jews expelled from Iberian Peninsula in 1492 because of the activity of the Holy Inquisition. On the 31 ^st of March 1492 Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon signed the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain unless they convert to Roman Catholicism. If they didn’t want to convert, the edict ordered the expulsion of practising Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and their territories and possessions by the 31^st of July of that year. As a result of the Alhambra decree and persec

ution in prior years, over 200,000 Jews converted to Catholicism while between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled, an indeterminate number returning to Spain in the years following the expulsion.

 

The sultan Bayezid sent a fleet for the Spanish Jews, and he ordered his subjects to accept the Jews. In 1497 the successive waves of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula arrived to the Ottoman Empire, this time they escaped Portugal. They became the Ottoman Empire citizens, in return they paid a tax and respected Islam as the state religion. Bayezid claimed that Isabella and Ferdinand’s decision weakened economically their country and reinforced his country.

 

Bayezid II issued the regulation including the threat of the death penalty for everyone who banned Jews’ access to the Ottoman Empire or who treated them badly. Jews from the Iberian Peninsula settled in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), Adrianopole (today’s Edirne), Salonika, Jerusalem, Bursa, Damascus and Anatolian’s city Amasya. Jews came to the Ottoman Empire with their considerable wealth, and, as in the Iberian Peninsula, they dealt with finances and loans. Jews enjoyed the support from important people in the state and a large freedom. They constituted a privileged community as the trade with West European countries is concerned, because they had a capital, they knew languages and they could make their businesses freely behind the empire’s borders. It happened that Jews borrowed money to very important and powerful people in the Ottoman Empire.

 

A big impact on the sultan’s attitude towards Jews was exerted by Moses Capsali, Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire. He was responsible for the appointment of new rabbis, collection of tax and the judiciary in Jewish millets. The sultan respected him for his incorruptibility and sense of justice. According to the legend, one time sultan Bayezid II clothed as an ordinary man attended one of Moses Capsali’s court case. Bayezid was impressed by the attitude of the rabbi. Moses Capsali carried help to Jews who arrived from the Iberian Peninsula. He visited Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, charging taxes to rich Jews and giving this money to necessitous people.

 

Refugees from the Iberian Peninsula significantly contributed to the development of the Ottoman Empire. They brought to the Ottoman Empire new inventions and new craft methods. They contributed to the development of the medicine and to the diplomacy, they often worked as interpreters. In 1493 two Sephardic Jews, Dawid and Samuel ibn Nahmias opened the first printing house in Constantinople. In this place the books in Hebrew were printed. In the fifteenth century the biggest Jewish group in the Ottoman Empire was constituted by Sephardic Jews. Sephardic Jews generally lived in Salonika and they quickly became the majority in the city. In the middle of the sixteenth century the next one group of Jewish people settled in the Ottoman Empire. They arrived from the Kingdom of Bohemia and from the Italian Peninsula. Many of them settled in Izmir.

  Jewish woman. Commissioned by Swedish Ambassador Claes Ralamb. 17th century.

It is worth mentioning that Jews who had to abandon their home, found their second home in the Ottoman Empire as well as in the Kingdom of Poland and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Different religious groups could live next to each other, they could benefit of rights granted them and of their own judiciary. They just had to pay an additional tax and they couldn’t hold high positions in the State. But what was more important, they could freely practice their religion, cultivate their culture and live in peace.