network of communal institutions. The Jewish population of Salonika
became one of the most diverse in the world. By 1553, there were 20,000
Jews in Salonika; by 1650, there were 30,000, comprising half of the total
population. While Ottoman Jewry was an agglomeration of Jews from
various parts of the Jewish world, Sephardic influence increasingly predomi-
nated in most major Jewish communities by the mid-seventeenth century.
Indicative of the Sephardic influence was the widespread use of Ladino
(Judeo-Spanish) in much of the empire, which eclipsed Jewish dialects of
other vernaculars.
The favorable treatment of Jews in the Ottoman Empire extended as far as
Ottoman rule itself. In Iraq, government rule alternated between Persia and
the Ottoman Empire. When under Persian rule, from 1508 to 1534 and
1623 to 1638, Jews in Iraq languished under harsh restrictions. From 1534
to 1623 and from 1638 until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews in Iraq
thrived under Ottoman rule. The Jews of Baghdad, in fact, commemorated
the day that Ottomans recaptured Baghdad from the Persians as a yom nes
(a day of miracles). The local governor appointed the leader of Baghdad Jewry
as the nasi, who was not only the official leader and representative of the Jews
of Iraq, but also in charge of the governor’s treasury. By 1600, 2,500 out of
the 25,000 houses in Baghdad belonged to Jews.
By contrast, in Persia proper the Shi’ite Safavid Dynasty, which ruled from
1502 to 1736, regarded non-Muslims as ritually unclean and tried to limit
contact between Muslims and non-Muslims, with varied success. Exceptional
in this regard was Abbas I at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Abbas
was a social reformer who tried to weaken the influence of the Shi’ite clergy
over Persian politics and society. He encouraged the immigration of foreign
merchants and artisans from Turkey, Armenia, and Greece by granting them
freedom of religion. This period of openness ended with Abbas’s death in
- His successors, notably Abbas II (1642–66), were religious fundamen-
talists who restored the influence of Shi’ite Islam. After 1650, a campaign of
forced conversion began. Reminiscent of what happened in fifteenth-century
Iberia, many of the Jews who were forced to convert were then suspected of
being insincere, and defined as “new Muslims,” leading to the appearance of
crypto-Judaism. In response, in 1661 Abbas II allowed Jews who had been
forcibly converted to return to Judaism, and even relaxed some of the restric-
tions on Jews. In 1670, a European traveler noted that Jews in some Persian
cities congregated in their synagogues on the Sabbath, holidays, and at the
time of the new moon without disturbance.
The contrast between the Ottoman and non-Ottoman parts of Islam, in this
respect, was paralleled by the contrast in the world of Christendom between the
Jews of Italian states and central Europe, on the one hand, and those of Poland.
Some of the Jews who fled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal, as well as some of
the conversoswho left the Iberian Peninsula during the sixteenth century, found
106 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750