The Jews of the Ottoman Empire

The Empire’s Diverse Jewish Populations

The Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire, which numbered several hundred thousand in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was highly diverse. It remained diverse even as the empire lost borderland territories—and some of its Jews—to European powers and nationalist secessions. 

In the northwestern provinces of the empire, as well as in several Ottoman territories that became independent states, such as Serbia and Bulgaria (1878), the dominant group was Ladino-speaking Sephardim. But in the Kingdom of Greece (which had separated from the empire as early as 1827) and in Albania, there remained several pockets of Romaniote Jews—Greek-speaking Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, the descendants of the ancient Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire—who did not assimilate with the Sephardim, descendants of exiles from Spain and Portugal. 

In the Ottoman Empire’s Middle Eastern provinces through the Levant (and reaching, after 1873, to Yemen), most Jews were speakers of Judeo-Arabic in various dialects. Communities in such large cities as Alexandria in Egypt or Aleppo in Syria were joined in the nineteenth century by Ashkenazic immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as by Italian Jews.

Political Rights, Status, and Undivided Loyalty

Across the Ottoman Empire, Jews enjoyed relatively equal access to the expanded political rights offered Ottoman subjects since the reforms of the 1850s. Like the other ethnoreligious communities of the empire, they were also organized as a formally recognized religious community with substantial religious autonomy within the state’s administrative framework. The Ottoman state’s offer of expanded citizenship came as part of a program of defensive reform in the face of European and local challenges, and went hand in hand with growing demands by the state for active loyalty and participation by the diverse communities that made up its population. 

Ottoman administrators’ stance toward Jews and elite strata linked to the state was not free of suspicion, but it more resembled that of the Austrian imperial regime than the Russian. Amid rising and increasingly bloody tensions between the imperial power and various ethno-nationalist movements, particularly in Ottoman southern Europe and Ottoman Armenia, Jews were generally viewed as a quiescent and unthreatening population. In this context, Jewish leaders and intellectuals across the empire eagerly and with genuine feeling cultivated a public culture of undivided loyalty to the Ottoman state and the imperial commonwealth. 

A Stable, Hybrid Identity

Internally, Ottoman Jewish culture was in profound flux, not least because growing numbers both in the Turkish-Balkan and Arab reaches of the empire began to acquire Western education in the dozens and soon hundreds of modern Jewish schools created by Western Jewish philanthropic organizations, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle. 

But neither the state nor the Jews saw internal Westernization as necessarily contradicting Ottomanism (whereas cultivation of Greek, Armenian, or other incipient national cultures was typed as a threat), and Jews thus developed a relatively stable hybrid identity of Ottoman loyalty, traditional religious culture—generally in rapid decline—and orientation toward Western and particularly French modernity which, paradoxically, dominated the burgeoning Ladino-language and (perhaps to a lesser degree) Judeo-Arabic print culture that flourished in this era.