- Murder, forced conversion, expulsion.
Being Jewish in Christian Europe
in the Middle Ages was terrifying.
In the face of this brutality, tens of thousands of Jews
fled Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries
and found a new home that offered safety and opportunity:
The Ottoman Empire.
But over the next few centuries, as European empires
spread across the world and Ottoman power crumbled,
the Jewish safe haven began to collapse
with deadly consequences.
In the 7th Century, Islamic armies began conquering lands
across the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe.
As the Caliphate spread, Muslim leaders faced questions
on what to do with non-Muslims who would not submit
to conversion living within their new borders.
They eventually settled on the Pact of Umar,
which declared Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians dhimmis,
or "People of the Pact."
This status allowed Jews significant autonomy and protection
but demanded a special tax called the jizya,
and established rules that made Jews and other dhimmis
second-class citizens.
In times of economic prosperity,
these rules were often relaxed or ignored,
but they ensured Jews remained second-class citizens
throughout the Muslim world.
Despite the challenges of dhimmi status,
such restrictions were preferable to the massacres
and forced conversions that Jews faced in Europe.
Ashkenazi Jews found safety with the Ottomans
after mass expulsions from Hungary and France
in the 14th century, followed by a wave of Sephardic Jews
from Spain and Portugal
fleeing the Inquisition in the 15th century.
Jewish European immigrants intermingled
with the Romaniote Jews of the former Byzantine Empire
and Mizrahi Jews of the Middle East and North Africa,
who were already living under Ottoman control.
The Sultan scoffed at the Spanish
for expelling the community, saying the king
"has impoverished his own country and enriched mine."
They brought useful skills,
often acting as translators and diplomats.
Ottoman Jews built vast international trade networks,
some even growing rich as they capitalized
on trade through the Silk Road.
Jews also brought skills with medicine and finance,
becoming bankers, doctors, and political advisors.
One Italian Jew even became the personal physician
of the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror.
While many Jews worked closely with Muslims,
others formed semi-independent communities.
After the Ottomans conquered Palestine in 1516
by defeating the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate,
brilliant Kabbalist mystics like Rabbi Isaac Luria
and Rabbi Chaim Vital made their home
in the sacred city of Safed, as did Rabbi Joseph Caro,
the visionary author of the Shulchan Arukh.
Meanwhile, an influx of Sephardic immigration
to the city of Salonika in Ottoman-ruled Greece,
transformed it into the only city in the world
with a Jewish majority at that time.
In fact, by the mid-16th Century,
nearly half of all Jews lived in the Ottoman Empire.
Jews and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire
thrived together during the 15th and 16th Centuries,
but the relatively good times couldn't last.
Starting in 1699, Austrian and Russian conquests
chipped away at Ottoman control while the colonial empires
of Western Europe opened new shipping lanes with America
and East Asia that threatened the primacy of the Silk Road.
These changes plunged many Jewish communities into poverty,
erasing much of the wealth they had built
in more prosperous years.
Meanwhile, as Ottoman Jews found their home
and livelihood under siege, Jews in Europe thrived.
Wealth and medical advancements
enabled the Jewish population of Europe
to nearly triple from 1800 to 1880
while the Ottoman Jewish population stagnated.
As their empire began to crumble,
the Muslim masses turned against non-Muslims,
and local leaders stoked resentment to distract
from their own failings.
In 1840, in Damascus, a Christian monk
and his Muslim servant went missing.
Although still technically part of the Ottoman Empire,
Damascus was temporarily under Egyptian control.
The corrupt, anti-Semitic French consul in Damascus
blamed the Jews, spreading the Christian concept
of blood libel.
He arrested an innocent Jewish barber
and handed him over to the Egyptian governor for torture.
The governor also arrested seven of the richest Jews
in the city and tortured them so brutally that two died.
The complete absence of evidence caused an uproar
in the United States and across Europe, except France.
Egyptian leadership eventually caved
and released the surviving prisoners
just before the Ottomans reconquered Syria.
The Sultan tried to calm tensions by declaring
that blood libel was pure slander.
He went even further in 1856
when he abolished the dhimmi status and declared Jews
equal subjects under the law.
Despite this progress, however, Jews throughout the empire
continued to suffer poverty and violence.
The anger displayed towards Jews in Damascus
spilled into other cities, including Istanbul,
Jerusalem and Rhodes.
One Jew in Beirut said, "we can hardly leave our homes.
"Everybody, great and small alike, attacks us
"and forces their way into our houses."
The Ottomans also struggled to maintain control
of their empire, which led to a power vacuum
that encouraged violence.
Meanwhile, French influence encouraged
European anti-Semitic conspiracies.
A dozen massacres in Ottoman, or formerly Ottoman, lands
killed hundreds of Jews.
While smaller than the pogroms roiling Eastern Europe,
this violence made it clear that the safe haven
of the Ottoman Empire was no longer so safe.
The situation deteriorated so much that in 1891,
in reaction to a new wave of Jewish immigrants
fleeing to what was known as the region of Palestine -
the Land of Israel, the Ottomans took an unprecedented step,
banning Jewish migration to Ottoman lands.
This ban failed to stem the tide of migration
but the message was clear.
The land that saved so many Jews had closed its doors.
Within a couple of decades,
the Ottoman Empire collapsed completely.
Over the first half of the 20th century,
its Jewish population fled to Israel, America and France,
looking to find safety and prosperity.