Through the lens of a long overlooked Sephardi community, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History rethinks the emergence of Jewish modernity by exploring shifting attitudes towards poverty and charity.
Ottoman Brothers explores Ottoman collective identity, tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together in Palestine following the 1908 revolution.
This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.
Studies of early-modern Islamic cities have stressed the atypical or the idiosyncratic. This bias derives largely from orientalist presumptions that they were in some way substandard or deviant. The first purpose of this volume is to normalize Ottoman cities, to demonstrate how, on the one hand, they resembled cities generally and how, on the other, their specific histories individualized them. The second purpose is to challenge the previous literature and to negotiate an agenda for future study. By considering the narrative histories of Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, the book offers a departure from the piecemeal methods of previous studies, emphasizing their importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and highlighting their essentially Ottoman character. While the essays provide an overall view, each can be approached separately. Their exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned scholarly understanding of these cities will make them essential student reading.
Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It follows the efforts of Sephardi Jews from Salonica to Izmir to Istanbul to become citizens of their state during the final half century of the Ottoman Empire's existence.
This book focuses on central topics, such as the structure of the Jewish community, its organization and institutions and its relations with the state; the place Jews occupied in the Ottoman economy and their interactions with the general society; Jewish scholarship and its contribution to Ottoman and Turkish culture, science, and medicine. Written by leading scholars from Israel, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, these pieces present an unusually broad historical canvas that brings together different perspectives and viewpoints. The book is a major, original contribution to Jewish history as well as to Turkish, Balkan, and Middle East studies.
Olga Borovaya explores the emergence and expansion of print culture in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She provides the first comprehensive study of the three major forms of Ladino literary production—the press, belles lettres, and theater—as a single cultural phenomenon. The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology, Modern Ladino Culture offers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization.
Jewish society in the Ottoman Empire has not been the subject of systematic research. The seventeenth century is the main object of this study, since it was a formative era. For Ottoman Jews, the 'Ottoman century' constituted an era of gradual acculturation to changing reality, parallel to the changing character of the Ottoman state. Continuous changes and developments shaped anew the character of this Jewry, the core of what would later become known as 'Sephardi Jewry'.Yaron Ben-Naeh draws from primary and secondary Hebrew, Ottoman, and European sources, the image of Jewish society in the Ottoman Empire. In the chapters he leads the reader from the overall urban framework to individual aspects. Beginning with the physical environment, he moves on to discuss their relationships with the majority society, followed by a description and analysis of the congregation, its organization and structure, and from there to the character of Ottoman Jewish society and its nuclear cell - the family. Special emphasis is placed throughout the work on the interaction with Muslim society and the resulting acculturation that affected all aspects and all levels of Jewish life in the Empire. In this, the author challenges the widespread view that sees this community as being stagnant and self-segregated, as well as the accepted concept of a traditional Jewish society under Islam.
This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim, which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music. Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.