The Ottoman Caliph welcomes Jewish refugees on their arrival from Spain

In 1492, when Spain’s rulers (Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile) expelled its Jewish population as a result of the Spanish Inquisition and the Alhambra Decree, Sultan Bayazid II sent out the Ottoman Navy under the command of admiral Kemal Reis to evacuate them safely to Ottoman lands. He sent out proclamations throughout the Caliphate that the refugees were to be welcomed. He granted the Jews permission to settle in the Ottoman State and become Ottoman citizens and issued a firman (decree) to the governors of his European provinces to give them a friendly and welcome reception. “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he said to his courtiers, “he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” [The Jewish Encyclopaedia – Vol. 2, Isadore Singer and Cyrus Adler, Funk and Wagnalls, 1912, p. 460]

Bernard Lewis, in his scholarly overview entitled The Jews of Islam, documents how Jews lived, worked and flourished under Ottoman rule. For example, many Jews were experts in medicine:

“The prominence of Jews in the medical profession in Turkey did not begin with the arrival of the Sephardim from Spain and Portugal, but is well attested during the fifteenth century. A Jew from Italy, Giacomo of Gaeta, served as personal physician to Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror…By the sixteenth century there were so many Jewish physicians at the Ottoman court that the records of the palace establishment show two separate corps of physicians, one of Muslims, the other of Jews. It may be assumed that the first treated their patients according to the rules of Galen and Avicenna, the latter according to the European practice of the time…

Besides treating patients, these refugee Jewish doctors from Europe also produced some medical literature, translating medical books into Turkish and even writing a few original works, including what must be one of the earliest treatises on dentistry.” [Lewis, op. cit., p. 130]

Another “Jewish contribution to Ottoman life that we may count as cultural was the introduction of printing. This too was something Jews had brought from Europe. Jews began printing in Istanbul, Salonika, and elsewhere before the end of the fifteenth century.” [Ibid., p. 131]

“The Jewish contribution appears far more important when we turn our attention from cultural to economic life…

From the late fifteenth century both Ottoman and European documents show Jews engaged in commerce, and playing an important, at times even a predominant, role in the textile trade, particularly in woollen cloths. In addition to serving as middlemen between European, local, and Eastern merchants, they also seem to have been the pioneers of an Ottoman textile industry. The records for Salonika and Safed, two important centres of textile manufacture, indicate that these were entirely Jewish in their origins and largely Jewish in their operations. A third textile manufacturing centre, in Istanbul, also seems to have been at least partly Jewish. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Jews were strongly established as traders and manufacturers, and some of them attained great wealth…” [Ibid., pp. 131-132]

At a relatively early date, Jewish merchants from Salonika established a special relationship with the corps of janissaries. The janissaries employed a functionary who had the title of ocak bazirgani, merchant of the corps, and acted as a kind of private enterprise quartermaster. His task was to arrange supplies for the corps of janissaries, and, like so many things in the Ottoman Empire, this office and function became hereditary. Specifically, it became the hereditary possession of a small group of Jewish families in Istanbul and Salonika…A large proportion of the uniforms worn by the janissaries were supplied by the Jewish textile manufacturers of Salonika. On the evidence of Ottoman account books, the amount of woollen cloth delivered to the government purchasing agent in Salonika rose from 96,000 ells (61,280 metres) at the beginning of the sixteenth century to 280,000 ells (178,733 metres) by the end of the century…” [Ibid., p. 133]

“Of special importance in the Ottoman provinces were the ‘men of business’ of the pashas. A pasha appointed to the governorship of a province, on leaving Istanbul to take up his appointment, would normally have with him a ‘man of business’ to handle his affairs, these being beneath the notice and often beyond the competence of any self-respecting pasha. Some of these ‘men of business’ who accompanied the pashas to their provinces were Sephardic Jews. Nuclei of Spanish speaking Jews from the capital emerged in places such as Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad. They had come in the first instance in the suite of the Ottoman pashas who were sent to govern these cities, and joined the small groups of local Jews who were employed in government service.” [Ibid., p. 133-134]

“Another contribution the Jewish newcomers from Europe may have brought to their new masters was in the arts of war. Neither the Turkish nor the Jewish sources have much to say about this, and on the face of it one would not expect the Jews—a very unmilitary element in Renaissance Europe—to have much to offer. They seem, however, to have possessed some skills in weaponry and related technology, and contemporary European Christian travellers speak with bitterness of the gain to Turkey, and the consequent injury to Christendom, resulting from such a transfer of technology. Thus the well known traveller Nicholas de Nicolay who visited Turkey in 1551, writes of the Marranos ‘not long since banished and driven from Spain and Portugal, who, to the great detriment and damage of Christendom, have taught the Turk several inventions, artifices and machines of war, such as how to make artillery, arquebuses, gunpowder, cannonballs and other weapons.’

A Spanish visitor, writing a few years later, says much the same thing: ‘Here at Constantinople are many Jews, descendants of those whom the Catholic King Don Ferdinand ordered to be driven forth of Spain, and would that it had pleased God that they be drowned in the sea in coming hither! For they taught our enemies the most of what they know of the villanies of war, such as the use of brass ordnance and of firelocks.’ These and similar statements by other travellers, some of whom accuse the Jews of instructing the Turks in the mounting of field ordnance, probably exaggerate the Jewish contribution to an art in which the Turks were already highly proficient, and no doubt reflect the views of anxious as well as hostile observers. However, the Jewish role in the transfer of knowledge in weaponry, as in printing and medicine, may have been of some significance.

A question of obvious importance concerns the Turkish attitude towards the Jews. How did the Turks regard their Jews? How did they see the place of Jews in the life of the Ottoman Empire? Jewish reports on Turkish behaviour and Turkish attitudes are almost uniformly favourable. Perhaps the earliest statement on this subject is the famous Edirne letter, probably written some time in the first half of the fifteenth century by a writer who describes himself as a French Jew born in Germany and settled in Edirne [in northwestern Turkey]. In this letter he invites his coreligionists to leave the torments they are enduring in Christendom and to seek safety and prosperity in Turkey:

 ‘I have heard the afflictions, more bitter than death, that have befallen our brethren in Germany – of the tyrannical laws, the compulsory baptisms and the banishments, which are of daily occurrence. I am told that when they flee from one place a yet harder fate befalls them in another … on all sides I learn of anguish of soul and torment of body; of daily executions levied by merciless oppressors. The clergy and the monks, false priests that they are, rise up against the unhappy people of God … for this reason they have made a law that every Jew found upon a Christian ship bound for the East shall be flung into the sea. Alas! How evil are the people of God in Germany entreated; how sad is their strength departed! They are driven hither and thither, and they are pursued even unto death … Brothers and teachers, friends and acquaintances! I, [Rabbi] Isaac Zarfati, though I spring from a French stock, yet I was born in Germany, and sat there at the feet of my esteemed teachers. I proclaim to you that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking, and where, if you will, all shall yet be well with you … Is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians? Here every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and fig tree. Here you are allowed to wear the most precious garments. In Christendom, on the contrary, you dare not even venture to clothe your children in red or in blue, according to our taste, without exposing them to the insult of being beaten black and blue, or kicked green and red, and therefore are ye condemned to go about meanly clad in sad coloured raiment … and now, seeing all these things, O Israel, wherefore sleepest thou? Arise! And leave this accursed land forever!’

More than a century later Samuel Usque, a Portuguese Jew who wrote a famous book called The Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, expresses a similar view. Usque sets forth these consolations in two categories, the one human, the other divine. Among the human consolations the ‘most signal is great Turkey, a broad and spacious sea which God opened with the rod of His mercy as He opened the Red Sea at the time of the exodus … here the gates of liberty are always open for the observance of Judaism.’ This must have come as a considerable surprise to a traveller from sixteenth-century Portugal.

Certainly, great numbers of Jews from Europe found a refuge from persecution in Turkey, and a few of them, in the fifteenth and still more in the sixteenth centuries, rose to greatness. Among such were the famous Dona Gracia Mendes and her nephew João Miques, better known as Don Joseph Nasi. Portuguese Marranos, they established an international banking and trading house that for a while, in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, played a role of some importance in the affairs of the empire. It was thanks to the influence of such figures that the sultans were on occasion willing to extend their protection not only to Jews in their own realms, but even to their Jewish subjects and protégés abroad.  A noteworthy example was the Ancona incident of 1556. This seaport, which formed part of the states of the church, was an important centre of the eastern trade, and had attracted a number of former Marranos who now openly reverted to Judaism. Pope Paul IV, who reorganized the Inquisition and gave it a new militancy, found this intolerable. The Jews were arrested, their property seized, and their lives declared forfeit unless they repented and returned to Christianity. Only the direct intervention of Sultan Süleyman secured a reprieve – and then only for those who had come from Turkey and could thus claim Turkish protection. The remaining accused, who had never left Christendom and who refused to recant, were duly burned at the stake.” [Ibid., pp. 134-137]