scholarly journals Istanbul Judeo-Spanish

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ignacio Hualde ◽  
Mahir Şaul
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Western European ◽  
Spanish Speaking Population

The Judeo-Spanish speaking population of Istanbul is the result of migrations that were due to the edict of expulsion of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. The Ottoman ruler Bayezid II provided a haven to the exiles in his realm, and many came as immigrants to the capital Istanbul and other major port cities in that year. A continuous trickle of immigration of Jews originating in Spain continued after that date, as some of those who had gone to exile in other Mediterranean and Western European countries eventually also decided to resettle in Ottoman cities. Some Spanish-speaking families continued to migrate from the cities of the Italian peninsula to Istanbul and other centers of the Ottoman empire up until the eighteenth century. Another stream included Hispano-Portuguese families, Jews who had resettled in Portugal after the expulsion but were forced to undergo conversion there in 1497, and after a period of clandestine Jewish existence started emigrating to other countries in the sixteenth century. First Bayonne in France, then Amsterdam and other Hanseatic cities became important centers for Hispano-Portuguese families that returned to Judaism, and these maintained relations with, and occasionally sent immigrants to, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman cities.

The Western Sephardic Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 369-389
Author(s):  
Miriam Bodian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Commercial Center ◽  
Sephardic Diaspora

The western Sephardic diaspora was created by descendants of Jews who underwent forced baptism in Portugal in 1497, just a few years after the expulsion from Spain had brought a flood of Jewish exiles across the border. These conversos, many of them crypto-Jews, became known as the “nação” (“nation”), a term that conveyed an ambiguous identity that had made them targets of the Portuguese Inquisition. At first, some immigrated to Iberian colonial lands or fled to Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, some who were active in the expanding Atlantic trade began settling in southwest France as “New Christians.” In the seventeenth century Portuguese ex-conversos were able to build a thriving, openly practicing Jewish community in the Atlantic commercial center of Amsterdam. This became the hub of a diaspora that eventually included the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast of North America. Although some of its traditions have been carefully preserved, by the mid-eighteenth century this once dynamic diaspora had lost much of its commercial and cultural vitality.

The Modernity of Interwar Turkey through the Eyes of Yugoslav Travelers (1923–1939)

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 335-359
Author(s):  
Anđelko Vlašić
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Western European ◽  
Republic Of Turkey ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Newspaper Articles

Abstract The modernization efforts of the early Republic of Turkey were a recurrent theme of books and newspaper articles written by interwar Yugoslav travelers in Turkey. Their views on Turkish modernity were based on a dichotomy between the “old,” “traditional,” and “backward” Ottoman Empire and the “new,” “modern,” and “revolutionary” Turkish Republic. Their comments reveal the Yugoslav public’s self-perception: in their eyes, through its reforms, Turkey was becoming similar to Western European countries, and had reached or even surpassed the civilizational level of Yugoslavia. Thus, the Yugoslav perception of Turks as Europe’s “Other” had changed for the better.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Ian Coller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Military Training ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Distorted Version ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Religious Understanding

This prologue offers a snapshot of what Islam and Muslims meant for the France of the late ancien régime and observes the shifts that were already emerging as 1789 approached. From the end of the fifteenth century until the last quarter of the eighteenth, Islam remained on the fringe of a French consciousness. Islam was principally understood by the ancien régime as a heresy, a distorted version of Christianity. With the global geopolitical shifts of the later eighteenth century, however, these matrices of religious understanding were fundamentally changed. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, France joined a loose alliance with the Ottoman Empire, fostering ongoing contacts in diplomacy, military training, and trade with a Muslim power. Beginning in the 1720s, philosophers began to investigate the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad in new ways that undermined older theological understandings. Trade and diplomacy produced travelers' accounts that shaped the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers. Radical philosophical ideas about Islam came together with diplomatic and commercial knowledge of Muslim societies to produce a sea change in conceptions about Muslims and Islam that would become entangled with the revolutionary transformation.

scholarly journals Flucht hinter den „Osmanischen Vorhang“. Glaubensflüchtlinge in Siebenbürgen

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41
Author(s):  
Ulrich A. Wien
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Hierarchical Control ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Political Exile

Abstract The article deals with several periods and phenomena of migration to Transylvania behind the “Ottoman curtain” and its impacts between the first half of the sixteenth to the midst of the eighteenth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century the mental, political and confessional diverted or inhomogeneous frame conditions preordained the region as an area which was open minded for heterogeneous thinking, experiments and individuals or groups. Especially the dominance of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans enabled adopting the reformation without Habsburg renitancy as a laboratory for religious heterogeneity. First, we notice that the later Reformer of Braşov (Johannes Honterus) imported the German Reformation to Transylvania after the end of his political exile in several centres of Reformation. After an expulsion order by the Habsburg King Ferdinand I, the Wittenberg minded reformer Paulus Wiener from Ljubljana (Slovenia) settled in Sibiu and became in 1553 the first superintendent and fortified the reform. Italian deviant preachers travelled through the realm of Queen Isabella Jagiellonica and King/Prince János II Zsigmond Szápolyai. After expulsion from Poland because of antitrinitarian ideas, the court physician Giorgio Biandrata tried to establish an open-minded protestant country. Freedom of preaching the gospel without hierarchical control – perhaps the aim of a Unitarian established regional church in the Principality – opened the border for antitrinitarian thinkers who had flown from Heidelberg, Italy and other parts of Europe. In the seventeenth century – in the 30 years’ war – the Calvinist Gábor Bethlen founded an ambitious university Academy in Alba Iulia and offered resort to Calvinist professors of central Europe. At the same time (1622), the Diet of Transylvania provided refuge to Hutterites (handcrafters called Habaner) from Moravia to settle in Transylvania – interdicting mission. Their Anabaptist behaviour attracted 130 years later some of the “Transmigrants” who were expelled by the counterreformation minded Charles VI and Maria Theresia from Austrian, Styria and Carinthian underground Protestants. About 3000 persons were exact relocated to the “heretic corner” of the conquered province of Transylvania – the former Ottoman vassal – where the Habsburgs had to respect the Basic Constitutional Law (by the Diploma Leopoldinum) including religious freedom of 1595. The religiones receptae were Roman-catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian, but also the “tolerated” Rumanian-orthodox churches. There has to be some research to the question of Ottoman-Christian interplay, motives and strategies of the heteronomy of the estates and the problem whether the non-absolutistic governance and policy was an advantage.

scholarly journals Ayâns in the Ottoman Cyprus in the Second Half of the 18th Century

Belleten ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 72 (264) ◽  
pp. 567-590
Author(s):  
Nuri Çevi̇kel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
History Of

A process of fluctuation was experienced at the expense of the Muslim - non-Muslim reayah living in the Province of Cyprus exclusively in 1750­1800 A.D. In this period, along with the natural calamities like earthquakes, plagues, droughts and the likes, appeared other factors to play a decisive role in the case. One of the most important of them was a progression of "decentralization". It first appeared in the late sixteenth century as a result of inner and outer political, social and economic conditions, developed in the following century and widely spread all over the Ottoman Empire by the second half of the eighteenth century. Consequently, the proccss led the Ottoman central governments to lose or share its authority in provinces with newly emerged local powers called "ayans". To study the repercussions of the process, main subject of this writing, will obviously help someone to understand satisfactorily the history of Cyprus under the Ottoman rule, and grasp the whole picture of the conversions like that "process of decentralization". By this study one can also see determining to what extent and how those changings were tested in provinces is inevitable for clarifying the essence of the transitions which influenced the whole empire.

Eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Hathaway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
East African ◽  
Young Turks

Abstract This article surveys the employment of eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire. After placing the use of court eunuchs in a global historical context, the study turns to the earliest eunuchs in Ottoman employ, who were probably Byzantine prisoners of war. By the early fifteenth century, East African harem eunuchs had become an important element of the palace eunuch population, and the article discusses their procurement and castration. The construction of Topkap Palace in newly-conquered Constantinople during the 1450s laid the ground for the dichotomy between African harem eunuchs and white Third Court eunuchs. An equally important watershed occurred in the late sixteenth century, when the Chief Harem Eunuch assumed the supervision of the imperial pious endowments for Mecca and Medina, making him one of the most powerful figures in the empire. By the late seventeenth century, deposed Chief Harem Eunuchs often commanded the eunuchs who guarded the Prophet Muhammads tomb in Medina. The influence of all palace eunuchs decreased during the eighteenth century, as the grand vizier acquired ever more control over the empires administration. Nineteenth-century reforms dealt a permanent blow to the harem eunuchs authority, which ended entirely when the Young Turks disbanded the harem in 1909.Аннотация Статья рассматривает вопрос о привлечении на службу евнухов в Османскои империи. После общего обзора роли придворных евнухов в глобальном историческом контексте, исследование обращается к первым евнухам на османскои службе, которые вероятно были византиискими военнопленными. К началу XV в. восточно-африканские евнухи гарема стали важнои фракциеи среди дворцовых евнухов в статье рассматривается методика их отбора и кастрации. Строительство дворца Топкапы в недавно завоеванном Константинополе в 50-х гг. XV в. положило начало дихотомии между африканскими евнухами Гарема и белыми евнухами Третьего Двора. Не менее важным рубежом становится и конец XVI в., когда старшии евнух Гарема принял на себя обязанности по управлению имперскими благотворительными пожертвованиями в Мекку и Медину, что сделало этого сановника одной из самых могущественных фигур империи. К концу XVII в. низложенные главные евнухи Гарема часто принимали командование над евнухами, охранявшими гробницу Пророка Мухаммеда в Медине. Влияние дворцовых евнухов оказывается ослабленным в XVIII столетии, по мере того как великии визирь получал все большую власть над управлением империи. Реформы XIX столетия нанесли решающии удар по власти евнухов Гарема, которая полностью сошла на нет при расформировании его младотурками в 1909 г.

Trade between Ottoman Empire and Western Europe: the Case of İzmir in the Eighteenth Century

1988 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Frangakis-Syrett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
Import And Export ◽  
Western European ◽  
Financial Transactions ◽  
The City

The main objectives of this article are to delineate the economic activities of the port of İzmir in the eighteenth century and to show that İzmir, during the course of the century, developed into the most important port in the import and export trade of the Ottoman Empire with western Europe. The French, operating out of Marseilles, were the principal trading partners of both İzmir and the Ottoman Empire at the time. Among the other most important western European communities that did business in İzmir were the British and the Dutch. İzmir was also the centre of complex and diverse financial transactions that were as important as trade and sometimes even more. Furthermore, this study shows the key role that non-Muslims played in the economic activities of the city-port. İzmir's close commercial relations with major western European economic centres makes the city-port of great importance for the study of Ottoman economic history in the eighteenth century.

The Word

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Feminine Beauty ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
French And English ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter traces the French and English relationship with the Ottoman Empire and accounts for the introduction of the term “houri” in French in the seventeenth century and English in the eighteenth century. Through surveying sixteenth-century polemics about Islam, seventeenth-century travel writings, and eighteenth-century literature, the chapter argues that French and English writers used the idea of the houri as a source of critique in anti-Islamic polemics and travel writing even while their views of Islam and Islamic empires could be ambivalent. By the eighteenth century, writers also began to employ the term “houri” as a way to describe a model of feminine beauty.

The Contribution of Hebrew Printing Houses and Printers in Istanbul to Ladino Culture and Scholarship

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Rachel Simon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Cultural Leaders

Sephardi printers were pioneers of moveable type in the Islamic world, establishing a Hebrew printing house in Istanbul in 1493. Initially emphasizing classical religious works in Hebrew, since the eighteenth century printers have been instrumental in the development of scholarship, literature, and journalism in the vernacular of most Jews of the western Ottoman Empire: Ladino. Although most Jewish males knew the Hebrew alphabet, they did not understand Hebrew texts. Communal cultural leaders and printers collaborated in order to bring basic Jewish works to the masses in the only language they really knew. While some books in Ladino were printed as early as the sixteenth century, their percentage increased since the second quarter of the eighteenth century, following the printing of Me-’am lo’ez, by Jacob Culi (1730), and the Bible in Ladino translation by Abraham Assa (1739). In the nineteenth century the balance of Ladino printing shifted toward novels, poetry, history, and biography, sciences, and communal and state laws and regulations. Ladino periodicals, which aimed to modernize, educate, and entertain, were of special social and cultural importance, and their printing houses also served as publishers of Ladino books. Thus, from its beginnings as an agent that aimed to “Judaize” the Jews, Ladino publishing in the later period sought to modernize and entertain, while still trying to spread Judaic knowledge.

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