402 fred astren
(Twersky, 1980: 196–198). The Jews of Provence, in whose rabbinate Maimonides
had high hopes in the era of Almohad persecution, were well established and would
survive until almost the end of the fifteenth century. There Maimonides’ works, both
halakhic and philosophical, would be commented upon, debated, and even burned by
opponents in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
As in antiquity, migration could create new Jewish communities, such as the early
medieval emigration of Jews from Iraq and Iran to Egypt and North Africa. The
greatest migration, which entirely reshaped the Jewish Mediterranean, stemmed from
persecution of Iberian Jews in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which culmi-
nated in the expulsion order of 1492. Iberian Jews emigrated everywhere, but primar-
ily to North Africa, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, where their Sephardic tradition
overwhelmed local Jewish communities.
In the Ottoman Empire, by dint of sheer numbers the new Sephardic immigrants
came to dominate the local Jews, whom they named Romaniotes, or derisively, gregos
(“Greeks”). Salonika and Safed became major Jewish centers connected with textile
manufacturing and trade, while Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, had a significant
increase in Jewish population, partly due to Ottoman forced resettlement and partly
due to Jewish immigration from Italy, Ashkenaz, and elsewhere. In effect, a new
Jewish community constituted itself under the wings of Ottoman expansion and eco-
nomic boom, where before only small Romaniote and Karaite communities had
existed in completely different circumstances under the later Byzantines. To the
Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II (d. 1512) or his courtiers is attributed the famous com-
ment on King Ferdinand of Spain after the expulsion of Jews, “Can you call such a
king wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching my king-
dom” (Fine, 1984: 1).
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Jews emerged as major industrialists,
bankers, tax collectors, purveyors to the government, and merchants. Jews capitalized
on connections between the Jewish communities of Italy and the Netherlands to
import new textile technologies and align the Ottoman textile trade with global com-
merce. At the same time, Ottoman unwillingness to engage directly in commerce with
the Italians led to Jews displacing Italians in the textile trade. The repercussions were
felt in Italy, where in the sixteenth century Italian principalities competed in order to
establish Jewish trading communities that might enhance commercial relations with
the Ottomans (Ravid, 1991). Recalling earlier extra-Mediterranean lines of connec-
tivity exploited by the Radhā ̄niyya and Geniza merchants, Ottoman Jewish trade net-
works extended into the Black Sea, the Balkans, Russia, Persia, and the Indian Ocean
(Goffman, 2002).
The conditions for Jews rose and fell in parallel with the health of the empire. Until
the seventeenth century, Jewish immigration from Europe continued, and Ottoman
Jewish trade capitalized on both internal and European demand for a variety of goods.
As global trade changed in the seventeenth century, Jews were displaced by Armenians,
Greeks, and by the Europeans themselves, who began to establish a range of horizon-
tal and vertical relationships with economic and political partners all across the
Mediterranean. Even as the important Jewish centers at Salonika and Istanbul began
to decline, circumstances offered opportunities for Izmir and western Anatolia to
participate in new global economic patterns. For a brief time, Jewish merchants there
capitalized on trade with the Dutch and English, and later the French and Venetians,