The Quincentennial of 1492 and Ottoman-Jewish Studies: A Review Essay

Abstract

Ottoman-Jewish Studies: Review Essay 57 THE QUINCENTENNIAL OF 1492 AND OTTOMANJEWISH STUDIES: A REVIEW ESSAY by Daniel Goffman Dan Goffman is an Associate Professor at Ball State University , where he teaches courses in Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Global history. Interested particularly in inter-cultural studies, he is the author ofIsmir and the Levantine World, 1550-1650 (University of Washington Press, 1990) and articles on Jews in the Ottoman Empire and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean. The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, byAvigdor Levy. Princeton, New Jersey: The Darwin Press, Inc. and The Institute of Turkish Studies, Inc., 1992. 192 pp. $19.95 (c); $12.95 (P). The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, by Stanford J. Shaw. New York: New York University Press, 1991. 384 pp. $60.00. Ottomans, Turks and the Jewish Polity: A History of the Jews of Turkey, by Walter Weiker. Lanham, Maryland: University Press ofAmerica, 1992. 386 pp. $47.50. The history of Jewish relations with other peoples and dominant societies is notoriously gloomy. Jewish history texts are strewn with words such as "persecution," "oppression," "dispossession," and "genocide." Terms such as "harmony," "tolerance," and "benevolence" are much rarer. In the modern era, only the United States and the Ottoman Empire have accommodated large numbers ofJews, served as havens during times of persecution elsewhere, and allowed Jews to integrate into their societies. One hundred years ago, the United States began receiving Jews 58 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 fleeing persecution in central and eastern Europe; and five hundred years ago the Ottoman sultan invited Jews who were driven out of Iberia and elsewhere. The Jewish community owes much to each of these entities. While historians readily acknowledge that the United States has served as a Jewish refuge, few have recognized the similar role performed by the Ottoman Empire. In part, this imbalanced view derives from the continuing existence ofthe American state, and, as many believe, its enduring example as a model of pluralism in a twentieth-century world beset with unprecedented instances of ethnic and nationalistic intolerance and bestiality. The United States, it is argued, constitutes a living case study which other peoples seek to emulate and to which desperate, persecuted individuals continue to flee. . The focus on America's role in Jewish history may seem self-evident. Less obvious, however, is why we have overlooked or even shunned the Ottoman case. Until very recently, Jewish historiography has hardly recognized, much less examined, the Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish integration into the Ottoman world. This evasion is difficult to comprehend. Not only did thousands find refuge there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but over the next four hundred years they enjoyed a cultural and economic renaissance that rivaled the great exilic communities of Babylonia and Spain. Why have we been so remiss in acknowledging this long-lived and harmonious association? The answer may lie in the very manner in which modern scholarship of the Jewish community has evolved. The Wissenschaft des ]udentums, with which Yomtov Lipman Zunz in particular is associated, launched the "scientific" study of Jews and Judaism. This methodological school existed within the intellectual framework constructed by Moses Mendelssohn and his followers in the Haskalah; it emulated contemporaneous European historiography and flourished among the EuropeanizedJewish elite oflate-nineteenth-century Germany and France. In the implicit estimation of those associated with the Wissenschaft, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire suffered from at least three disadvantages.. First of all, they resided in and were associated with an empire in the last throes of its existence and on the verge of disintegration; thus Ottoman Jews shared with their fellow subjects the ignominy of insignificance, especially in the estimation of a circle of maskilim desperate for recognition from the ascendant powers of Europe. To bestow attention on a group that appeared to epitomize the downtrodden, ignorant, and moneygrubbing Jewish stereotype could only dishonor the European Jew as he strove for mainstream recognition. Secondly, most of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were Sephardic, and thus in both language and culture Ottoman-Jewisb Studies: Review Essay., 59 alien to the overwhelmingly Ashkenazic elite of western Europe. The establishment of...