Jews in the Ottoman Empire

The religious hegemony of the Church of capital of Italy in westwardern Europe was meant to be reinforced by the Inquisition and the formal expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain and Portugal in 1492. This enforced dispersion, or diaspora, of the Jews was not confined to Spain and Portugal but was a pattern that was recurrent through go forth the area that had formerly been under train of the popish and Byzantine empires. As Shaw explains, formal imperial edicts or less(prenominal) formal sanctions against the Jews that began in the fourth century persisted until the pouf subjection of Constantinople in 1453. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, which was Muslim, in the East later on 1453 coincided with the retrenchment of Christian orthodoxy throughout Europe in the West during the same period. As Jews were dispersed away from Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they migrated toward the East. The name given to the patterns of their resettlement in territories under Ottoman control is the ingathering (Shaw 1-25).

The social expression in which Jews functioned as they settled in territories that were under control of the Ottoman Turks appears to have been one of relative emancipation, certainly more emancipation than the Jews experienced in Europe until the period of the paradise there (Sachar 39-40). This can be traced not so such(prenominal) to Ottoman policy per se as to the fact that Ottoman spring of the period was informed

consort to Cohen, some Jews "served in senior administrative positions in 16th-century Jerusalem. roughly possessed capital and real estate and were involved in the city's development" (Cohen 415-16). This supports the view that Jews held a degree of social and scotch status in Ottoman society, including mainstream Islamic society. International Jewish banking had its origins in mercantilism (Sachar 22), and it was connected to what are called the "court Jews," who dual-lane (although for different reasons) with the monarchs for whom they worked and for whom they raised money and munitions a certain species of alienation, loneliness, and isolation from the rest of the population.

The needs of mercantilism, together with the familiar connections of Jews to moneylending, their unique qualification to make connections to influential Jewish communities, or to family members in unknown lands because of the diaspora, and their willingness to adapt their protocols of business activity to Ottoman economic customs, history for the rise of Ottoman economic interests on one relegate and the enrichment of certain Ottoman Jews on the other (Shaw 87-8; 95-6). Shaw cites the deep intricacy of Jewish merchants in international trade negotiations and their role in organizing and sponsoring trade fairs throughout the empire, suggesting that Jewish expertise in this consider accounted for the rationalizing of Ottoman mercantilist practices (Shaw 94-7). Jews appear as well to have been unambiguously positioned as trusted agents in international trade and work because they "knew how to develop and finance products as well as to enthrall and sell them where they could get the highest prices" (Shaw 96)--again, a function partly of their historically transient status in mainstream society. In return, Ottoman power was available to prevent Christian European mercantilist interests from squeezing Jews out of international finance and trade.

According to Campbell, Jewish tradition speaks of the supe
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