God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  After Portugal, Muslim states in North Africa received the second largest number of Spanish Jews—about 20,000 of the 175,000 who fled. Many of the Jews later forced out of Portugal by King João also escaped to Morocco. In effect, then, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews followed their Muslim neighbors across the Mediterranean to Morocco, where, thanks to the “kindness of the King,” a large Jewish settlement that had long thrived in Fez enthusiastically welcomed the Judeo-Spanish community. Given the zealotry in Spain, the mendacity of King João, and the anti-Jewish politics of most of Europe, Jews were much safer in a Muslim polity than they were in any Christian state.

  As in Portugal, in other Christian domains such as Navarre, Naples, and Marseille, Jews’ first attempts to secure new homes only lengthened their decades of upheaval. In the decades around 1500, Sardinia, Apulia, Calabria, and Naples all expelled their newly arrived Judeo-Spanish refugees and even their older local communities of Jews. Sicily, which was controlled by the Crown of Aragon, expelled its Jewish community—numbering between 25,000 and 30,000—in 1492 as well, as part of Ferdinand and Isabella’s initial decree. Many refugees, from both Spain and Italy, settled in Dubrovnik on the Adriatic—until they were banished once again in 1515. In the desperate search for freedom and safety, these exiles floated on ships around the Mediterranean, moving from one hostile port to another, usually eastward. Many died from accident or disease, while others succumbed to pirates or rapacious ship’s captains.

  The tragic tale of a boatload of Jews escaping persecution in Pesaro, a fishing town on the eastern Italian coast, typified the situation. Driven from the city in 1558, these Jews boarded a ship with promises of being ferried to safety. They sailed first to Dubrovnik, but were barred from the fabled walled city. Unable to find any port that would give them berth, the ship’s captain eventually sold his Jewish passengers into slavery in Apulia, the olive-rich southeastern region of Italy that forms its “heel.” In another example, a group of Judeo-Spanish refugees were forced to flee Naples in 1540 on a ship homeported in Dubrovnik. Once at sea, the captain robbed his vulnerable passengers of their meager possessions and abandoned them in Marseille, from where they were soon forced to flee once more. Luckily for this group, they made it to safety in Ottoman Syria.

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS the only Mediterranean locale where, in the words of one Jewish refugee, “their weary feet could find rest.” Indeed, Sultan Bayezit II, Selim’s father, issued a decree in July 1492, just after Jews started leaving Spain, that welcomed them to his empire. Recognizing how much Jews had contributed to the empire over the centuries, he saw a strategic advantage in welcoming members of the Spanish Jewish diaspora to his domains. In fact, he actively courted Spain’s Jews, going so far as to send ships to the Iberian coastline to bring Jewish refugees to the shores of the Bosphorus. He ordered all his provincial governors to welcome and protect any Jewish refugees who arrived in their territories—and some Jews journeyed as far east as Selim’s Trabzon.

  After his father’s conquest of Constantinople, Bayezit had been an eyewitness to the arrival of Jews from Salonica and other merchant centers who came to take advantage of the opportunities the city offered after the conquest and helped to rebuild it after the enormous destruction wrought by the Ottoman siege. Once settled in the Ottoman capital, these Jews quickly established connections with the ruling elite and merchant classes and developed commercial interests around the Mediterranean, including with their former homes. After 1453, Istanbul was unquestionably the best place in the world for Jews to live; nowhere were Jews as prosperous and free as they were in Istanbul. Immediately after capturing Constantinople, Mehmet made the city’s chief rabbi a member of his imperial council, offering him the same level of administrative power as the empire’s grand mufti. Accordingly, the chief rabbi collected Jewish taxes (including the jizya), appointed rabbis in all the empire’s cities, and generally managed his community’s internal affairs. He also oversaw Jewish civil law courts and the criminal punishment of Ottoman Jews. The Ottoman Empire was, thus, “a paradise for the Jews,” where they could live and trade freely in relative autonomy, with no restrictive sartorial laws and no fear of the regular pogroms that occurred in Europe.

  In 1454, Isaac Sarfati, a Jew of French descent born in Germany, wrote a letter from Istanbul to the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, Swabia, Moravia, Styria, and Hungary. Having recently arrived in Istanbul, he contrasted his experiences with his earlier life in Germany, which he called the “great torture chamber,” and encouraged his fellow Jews to abandon Europe for the Ottoman capital. Many did so, swelling the city’s German Jewish population by thousands. Thus, even before 1492, the Ottoman Empire had already earned a deserved reputation among Europe’s Jews as a place of refuge and prosperity. When Spain scattered its Jews, it was not surprising that many headed for the Ottoman Empire.

  Beyond safety and an opportunity to rebuild their lives, many refugees believed that moving to the Ottoman Empire portended the fulfillment of God’s divine plan to gather all of the world’s Jews in Jerusalem. The fifteenth-century rabbi Moses Capsali—a scholar who was born in Crete, studied in Germany, arrived in Istanbul around the time of the conquest, and eventually became chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire—had this to say: “our righteous Messiah will come . . . because ever since the expulsion from Spain, God has started to gather the exiled from Israel and Judea in the lands of the dispersion and he is assembling them from the four corners of the earth.” In the final analysis, however, most Jewish refugees settled in the Ottoman Empire for reasons of security rather than scripture.

  From an Ottoman perspective, Jewish immigration proved very advantageous. First, although the Spanish refugees were generally not as wealthy as the Jewish merchants who came to Istanbul from Salonica in 1453, many maintained strong familial connections throughout the Mediterranean region, which afforded important trading opportunities and allowed the Ottomans to bypass the usurious Italian merchant families who still dominated trade in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In a commercial hub like Trabzon, for instance, the opportunity to replace Italian Christian merchants with Ottoman Jewish traders bolstered Ottoman enthusiasm for Jewish immigration. Spanish Jews joined older Jewish merchant communities in Trabzon, helping to expand their commercial enterprises to the west. Spain’s Jews came to influence other economic sectors across the empire as well. In Ottoman Bulgaria, for example, Sephardic Jews became important in the tanning industry. In North Africa, they cornered the markets in gold- and silversmithing; in Palestine, silk production; and in Istanbul, banking. Given this vast infusion of economic power at Spain’s expense, Bayezit was said to utter, “You call Ferdinand a wise king, he who impoverishes his country and enriches our own!”

  The Sephardim also greatly aided the Ottomans’ diplomatic agenda throughout the Mediterranean. Spanish Jews’ linguistic skills and their familiarity with the tessellated principalities of Europe made them key brokers for the Ottomans in their dealings with other states. Perhaps even more important, though, European politicians generally preferred to deal with Jewish Ottoman diplomats. Even though they were representing an enemy Muslim state, Christian Europeans viewed them as less untrustworthy than Muslims and, because religion and politics were so intertwined in the early modern world, the fact that Jews were not representing a Jewish state aided the perception that they were honest brokers. Throughout the sixteenth century, Jewish diplomats helped the Ottomans reach several vital trade agreements, with France for example. This so-called shuttle diplomacy also furthered the Sephardic community’s interests. Ottoman Jewish diplomats often smuggled crypto-Jews—conversos who had converted in name only—from Iberia to the Ottoman Empire. Beyond such daring clandestine operations, Jewish diplomacy allowed Ottoman Jews to maintain ties with family members and business partners throughout the Mediterranean.

  Spain’s Jews also brought to the Ottoman Empire much useful technical knowledge. In the early fifteenth century, a European observer of
the empire’s Sephardim noted: “Not long since banished and driven from Spain and Portugal, who, to the great detriment and damage of Christendom, have [they] taught the Turk several inventions, artifices and machines of war, such as how to make artillery, arquebuses, gunpowder, cannonballs and other weapons.” The Ottomans had long employed artillery in war, but the Sephardim taught them new techniques in munitions and gunmaking. Indeed, during his conquest of the Mamluk Empire in 1516 and 1517, Selim took with him to Syria and Cairo a group of Jewish gunpowder makers to help with ballistics.

  Along with guns, the Jews brought new medical expertise. One family in particular distinguished itself; Spanish refugee Joseph Hamon became the chief palace physician for both Bayezit and Selim, and, after his death in 1518, his son Moses took over as Selim’s and then Suleyman’s doctor. So trusted was Moses Hamon that he served the sultans in other capacities as well, such as helping to negotiate Suleyman’s peace treaty with Venice in 1540. He also pressed the sultan’s court on matters of interest to Ottoman Jewry, helping, for example, to secure an imperial decree condemning a blood libel accusation in Amasya in 1545 and founding several schools in Salonica and other cities. He would eventually lose some favor because of a dispute over the best treatment for gout; Moses recommended rubbing the sultan’s legs with opium, but other imperial physicians viewed this as only a temporary alleviation of pain and not a true cure. Despite this row, Moses remained a trusted medical adviser, passing on the position to his son.

  In 1493, the Sephardim established a Hebrew printing press in Istanbul, almost fifty years after Gutenberg’s, and soon thereafter one in Salonica as well. The first Hebrew-language printed books had appeared in Italy in the 1470s, and the technology had quickly spread to congregations in Spain and Portugal. Istanbul’s Hebrew press was the first printing press in any language in the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, Salonica would become the global center of Jewish print culture, underpinning the city’s thriving intellectual and religious life. The most ambitious project of the Salonica press was to print the entire Talmud, an undertaking that required years of fundraising and five years just to typeset. Very few complete Talmuds existed in the sixteenth century, and merely owning one heightened a congregation’s distinction. Jewish communities around the world soon looked to Salonica for intellectual, cultural, and economic leadership. For example, when Rome’s only Talmud was publicly burned during a wave of anti-Jewish rioting in 1552, the Ottoman city’s press printed its replacement.

  Numbers attest to the success of Jewish life in the post-1492 Ottoman Empire. In 1430, Salonica, the “Jerusalem of the Balkans,” had about 2,500 Jewish families. By 1519, that number had grown to 4,000. In 1553, a German traveler estimated that there were 20,000 Jewish males in the city. If we assume that each of these men had a family of five (a conservative estimate), then the Jewish population would have been 100,000—dwarfing the city’s Muslim or Greek population and representing nearly 40 percent of the Ottoman Empire’s Jewish population of 250,000. Other anecdotal evidence relates that, for example, Salonica ground to a halt on the Sabbath.

  In many ways, Salonica became a microcosm of the immense diversity of global Jewish life. Greek-speaking Jews; Jews from Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary; Turkish and Arab Jews; Sephardim; and exiles from Italy and France all shared Salonica’s streets, where one could hear Greek, Turkish, Yiddish, German, Arabic, and increasingly Ladino throughout the city. Eventually, Ladino—a mix of Old Spanish and Romance and Semitic languages, written in the Hebrew script—would triumph as Salonica’s lingua franca. Although sharing a common faith, each of these émigré groups observed distinct sets of traditions and customs. As one of Salonica’s rabbis wrote of the city’s Jews, “each congregation appears to be an independent city.” Dozens of different synagogues and competing interpretations of Judaism—as well as the city’s diverse communities of Muslims and Christians—helped to forge Salonica’s urban topography, creating social and artistic mélanges and exotic and piquant cuisines that would make Salonica a center of cosmopolitan life for centuries. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Salonica distinguished itself as the only place in the world where a Syrian Jew could wear a tailored Italian suit, eat souvlaki, and play backgammon with a Jew from Spain, all while speaking Hungarian.

  Human nature being what it is, all was not perfect, of course. Problems inexorably arose due to the comingling of these diverse communities, leading to conflicts among Jews themselves, on subjects such as inter-community marriages and Sabbath practices, as well as between Jews and non-Jews. The Spanish Jews posed a particularly knotty problem. Rabbis debated how to determine the “Jewishness” of Jews who had converted to Christianity but now claimed to be Jews again. How would the Jewish law courts of Salonica rule, for example, on matters of inheritance or divorce for two conversos married by Christian rite? Was this even a legal marriage? One rabbi would regard conversion to have been a temporary survival strategy; another would consider it genuine and now being repudiated. Some rabbis insisted that there had to be consequences for giving up one’s Judaism, whatever the reason had been.

  Jewish man in Salonica

  When more mundane disputes emerged over property, crime, or even custom, the empire’s Jews usually resorted to Islamic law courts. For example, newly arrived Sephardim observed far more lax kosher meat laws than Salonica’s indigenous Jewish community. This was largely a function of their old need to be flexible in order to maintain their religious practices under the harsh restrictions of Catholic Spain. In Salonica, however, which kosher observances should be upheld? Unable to resolve this difference of interpretation among themselves, Salonica’s Jews took the issue to the city’s Islamic court. Any case involving a Muslim, whether a mixed marriage or a criminal proceeding, had to be adjudicated in an Islamic court, but in cases involving only non-Muslims, Jews and Christians could choose to go to their own community’s religious law courts instead. Since Muslims could only use Islamic courts, the empire’s non-Muslims thus enjoyed more legal options.

  Although Salonica was the preferred destination for Spain’s Jewish exiles, Jewish populations elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean burgeoned as well. In Istanbul, the number of Jewish households rose from 1,647 in 1477 to 8,070 in 1535, an increase of nearly 500 percent. (In 1638, the number was reported to be 11,000.) By the end of the sixteenth century, twice as many Jews as Greeks lived in Istanbul, comprising as much as one-fifth of the city’s total population. Many of Spain’s Jews also went to Cairo, which became an important center of Sephardic religious training, as did the comparatively minor towns of Safed and Jerusalem, both in Palestine. Safed alone boasted twenty-one synagogues and eighteen Talmudic colleges.

  THEOLOGICAL, DEMOGRAPHIC, AND POLITICAL factors explain the profound difference between the treatment of Jews in Europe and their treatment in the Ottoman Empire. Within Christian theology, Jews stood as deniers of Christ’s message, as well as his assassins. They adhered to the laws of the Old Testament rather than to those of the new kingdom that Christians believed Christ brought to earth. Lovers of the flesh, they rejected the spirit. No authoritative Christian text attempts to reconcile Jews within the faith. As for Islam, as the last of the Abrahamic faiths it is absent from the Bible, so scripture provided no guidance on how Christians should treat Muslims. In the realm of Christian doctrine, then, Jews rejected and killed Christ, while Muslims did not even exist.

  Islam, the latecomer, had to address and adapt itself to the other two religions. Islam understands itself as the culmination of the monotheistic traditions, tracing its lineage from Judaism and Christianity and seriously engaging with them as parts of its own family tree. Abraham, Isaac, Moses, and Jesus are all prophets within Islam and accorded reverence and devotion. Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an stipulates how adherents of other religions should be treated, and how a Muslim leader should rule over non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians—who, as People of the Book, are accorded an elevated status over other non-Muslims. Since Isl
am grew as a minority faith surrounded by Judaism and Christianity, it had to work within existing parameters. Muslims—political rulers and all others—are duty-bound to protect Jews and Christians and to allow them freedom of worship and practice, although in times of war, of course, Muslims could kill Christian and Jewish combatants, enslave them, and attempt to convert them. However, this fundamental, indeed foundational, difference between Islam and Christianity forever shaped how the two religions, and the states that ruled in their names, dealt with nonadherents, both doctrinally and politically.

  For more than two hundred years, Muslim sultans were members of a religious minority, ruling over a majority Greek Orthodox population. Only after Selim’s conquests of 1516 and 1517 did Muslims come to represent the majority of the population of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, before those years, it was crucial that the numerically dominant Christian subject population accept and support Muslim rule. Europe’s Christian rulers never faced such an imperative, as they always shared the same faith as the majority of their subjects. As, gradually, the Ottomans replaced the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, they won over the conquered Christians with various inducements: security, fewer taxes, basic autonomy. Had they imposed harsh taxes or discriminatory laws, or tried to forcibly convert Christians to Islam, they likely would have faced stiff resistance, which would have spelled disaster for the empire. In Europe, where the demographic dynamics were almost completely reversed, rulers had no need to placate their minority populations; if Jews and Muslims revolted or refused to pay taxes, they would pose no catastrophic risk to a Christian polity.