50 · Julia Phillips Cohen
reports from İkdam dated 5, 8, 10, and 13 May 1897 together suggest that sixty-
eight Jewish men from Izmir converted before joining the army during the war.
Tercüman-ı Hakikat, 5 May 1897, and Sabah, 5 May 1897, offer the first examples
of this pattern, citing four and one convert-volunteers in Izmir, respectively.
- Also cited in (AIU) Série Turquie, IC 4, 17 May 1897. Henri Nahum’s
work on the Jews of Izmir alludes to the conversions of young Jewish men at-
tempting to prove their loyalty to the empire, but provides no citation. Nahum,
Juifs de Smyrne, 156. Elsewhere he concludes that cases of out-marriage and
conversion were extremely rare. Ibid., 56. This view of conversion in the late Ot-
toman world departs somewhat from the picture presented in Leah Bornstein-
Makovetsky, “Jewish Converts to Islam and Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
in the Nineteenth Century,” in Minna Rozen, ed., The Last Ottoman Century and
Beyond: The Jews in Turkey and the Balkans (Ramat Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Dias-
pora Center, 2002), 2:83–127 and in Selim Deringil, “‘There Is No Compulsion
in Religion’: On Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire: 1839–
1856,” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 42, no. 3 (July 2000):
547–75. - Shortly before the mass conversions in Izmir described here, El Meseret
published an article describing the economic and social causes of conversion,
particularly the pressure placed on Jewish girls unable to secure a suitable mar-
riage partner within their own community. See El Meseret, 30 April 1897. Vari-
ous Ottoman Jewish charities and philanthropists worked to give dowries to
the Jewish poor in part to counter this trend. For one such case, Anri Niyego,
Haydarpaşa’da Geçen 100 Yılımız (Istanbul: Gözlem Gazetecilik Basın ve Yayın,
1999), 45, discusses the Ottoman Jewish philanthropist Jacques Bey de Leon,
who became known for helping poor Jewish women “in danger of converting.” - La Buena Esperansa, 7 May 1897. The same article cites the Ottoman pa-
pers Ahenk and Hizmet of Izmir as reporting sixteen and sixty-five conversions,
respectively—the latter being the same number reported on 8 May by Sabah. - According to the series of reforms known as the Tanzimat (including the
Gülhane Edict of 1839 and the Imperial Rescript, or the Hatt-ı Hümayun, of
1856), conversion would not have been necessary for military service, which
became open to everyone, at least theoretically. In reality, however, most non-
Muslims did not serve even after this point, but rather paid a military substi-
tution tax known as the bedel-i askeri until universal military conscription was
made obligatory in 1909. On this, see Benbassa and Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry, 69. - Emphasis mine.
- La Buena Esperansa, 7 May 1897.
- Le Journal de Salonique, 31 May 1897.