Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

islamizing istanbul 89

owned by Muslims in these districts. For example, the members of a Spanish

congregation—Gedalya son of Menahem, Musa son of Avraham, and Mena-

hem son of Avraham—who rented rooms near Balkapanı had to turn over the

property to a Muslim trustee. Likewise, the Portuguese Jew Yasef son of Yako

had to relinquish the rented land on which stood a Jewish apartment, and

another Portuguese Jew, Ishak son of Avraham, who also resided in a Jewish

apartment, had to abandon any claim to the rooms in which he lived.^40

Most Jews found themselves banished from the peninsula of Istanbul

and sent across the Golden Horn to Hasköy after they fi rst lost their homes

and synagogues to fi re, and then had to evacuate their property so that the

valide sultan’s mosque could be built. Hasköy’s Jewish population nearly dou-

bled, from eleven to over twenty neighborhoods. There were so many Jews in

Hasköy—an estimated eleven thousand following the banishment of the Jews

of Eminönü—that Evliya Çelebi wrote, “Hasköy is as brimful of Jews as are the

cities of Salonica and Safed.”^41 These displacements completely transformed

Istanbul Jewry. Romaniot and Karaite Jews from displaced independent Anato-

lian and Rumelian congregations settled along the Golden Horn and Bosporus

and were absorbed by congregations of Jews who had migrated from Iberia.^42

These events would help predispose Istanbul Jewry to await a savior who would

relieve them of their suffering.

Ottoman narratives concerning the construction of the valide sultan’s im-

perial mosque complex illustrate her concern with Jews. Ottoman historians,

writers, and palace preachers cursed Jews for residing around the foundations

of the mosque and viewed the destruction of Jewish homes as divine punish-

ment. Referring to the foundations of the original, though incomplete, mosque,

Silahdar explained, “It was not suitable for the religion and kingdom of the em-

peror for the mosque to lie destroyed in a dunghill in the midst of numerous

Jewish neighborhoods.”^43 Kurdish Preacher Mustafa explains:

That abandoned and ruined mosque remained amidst the Jews. Just

as the darkness of infi delity cloaks their religion, so, too, did they

hide the aforementioned mosque’s base and foundations with sticks

and straws to such a degree that no one knew that it was a foundation

of a mosque. By chance one day in the year seventy-one [AH 1071 ], by

divine wisdom an immense fi re and burning fl ame appeared around

the aforementioned mosque’s foundations and burned most places

in the well-protected city of Istanbul. Some Friday mosques and

small mosques also became burned and demolished.^44

Evliya Çelebi, who had a predisposition against Jews, whom he considered fa-

natical in their adherence to their own customs and their refusal to mingle