Transcription
The tragic history of the Jews as a people wandering the world through centuries of persecution has been equally remarkable for their achievements, perhaps unique for any population of similar size. Even after the modern state of Israel was created in the middle of the 20th century, most of the Jews in the world were still the Jews of the diaspora.
As of 1990, there were approximately 13 million Jews in the world, of whom 90 percent lived in just five countries, with nearly three-quarters living either in the United States or in Israel. There were nearly nine million Jews of the diaspora and almost four million Jews living in their historic homeland of Israel, which contained 31 percent of all the Jews in the world.
Unlike any other people, the Jews of the world are today a smaller population than they were more than half a century ago, before the Holocaust. The Jews of the diaspora have been very thinly spread among the populations of the countries in which they live. Even in the United States, with the largest Jewish population in the world, Jews were only about two percent of the population; yet the only country with a higher percentage was Israel.
The world Jewish population in 1990 was distributed as follows: United States, five million five hundred thirty-five thousand; Israel, three million nine hundred ninety-four thousand seven hundred; Soviet Union, one million one hundred fifty thousand; France, five hundred thirty thousand; Britain, three hundred fifteen thousand; all others, one million three hundred twenty-nine thousand seven hundred. Total: twelve million eight hundred sixty-four thousand seven hundred.
The diaspora of the Jews has been more than simply a worldwide dispersion. Many peoples have been widely dispersed throughout the world, but the bulk of those peoples have usually remained in their respective homelands. What has been historically unique about the Jewish diaspora has been a combination of features, including: one, the vast majority of a whole people living outside their historic homeland; two, the loss of that homeland both demographically and politically to other peoples; and three, an ever-changing pattern of dispersion, with the largest concentration of Jews in the world being at one time in Eastern Europe, at another time in the Islamic countries, and today in the United States.
If the overseas Chinese are numerically the largest of the world's middleman minorities, Jews are the best known in that role. The classic image of the middleman: the Chinese have been called the Jews of Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese, the Jews of West Africa. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice was Jewish. Jewish peddlers, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, merchants, and bankers have historically created an image that still survives, even in countries where contemporary Jews are more likely to be doctors, lawyers, or intellectuals. Their history has been profoundly affected by the fact that so many Jews were middlemen, whatever they may be today.
In ancient times, Jews were neither a race of middlemen nor a people without a country. However, there were Jewish communities far from Israel centuries before Christ. The conquest of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th century BC led to the removal of more than 27,000 Jews, the lost tribes, who disappeared without a trace in the lands of the conquerors. Successive conquerors dispersed more and more Jews over the centuries, whether as prisoners, refugees, or migrants, but these Jews retained their identity and loyalty, exemplified in the phrase, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem."
There were not only mass exodus of Jews, but also mass returns. In the sixth century BC, the Persian conquerors of Babylon permitted its Jewish population to return to their homeland and rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. Although fifty thousand returned, many others remained abroad. But these Jews of the diaspora continued to make financial contributions as well as pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem.
In the first century BC, the Romans captured Jerusalem. They ruled for the next several centuries, despite two massive revolts in the first and second centuries A.D., which led only to the destruction of the temple, the obliteration of Israel as a political entity, and the dispersal of the great majority of the Jewish people. The Jews became, and remained for almost two thousand years, a people without a country. They were a minority everywhere, including the area once known as Israel, but now renamed by the Romans, Syria Palestine.
Even before the obliteration of ancient Israel as a political entity, Jews were widely scattered throughout the Roman Empire. Out of an estimated 8 million Jews in the world at that time, only about 2.5 million lived in Palestine; approximately 4 million lived in the rest of the Roman Empire, and another million in Babylonia. Jews were about ten percent of the total population of the Roman Empire, and they tended to concentrate in urban areas. There were about fifty thousand Jews living in Rome itself, and Jews constituted about forty percent of the population of Alexandria, where they were prominent in the grain export trade, both as ship owners and as sailors.
The range of occupations opened to Jews at this period was greater than in later medieval times. In addition to being merchants, trading domestically and internationally, Jews were also artisans, farmers, and mercenary soldiers. While wealthy Jews attracted attention, most Jews were in fact poor; most earned their livings from manual labor, and some were beggars on the streets in both Rome and Alexandria. Nevertheless, the success of Jewish businessmen, though it advanced the economies in which they settled, provoked envy and hostility among non-Jewish businessmen, mostly pagans rather than Christians.
In the early era of the diaspora, the vicissitudes of the Jews under the Roman Empire or in the contemporary Persian Empire were very different from their troubles in medieval and modern times. Both empires were multi-ethnic and multi-religious; tolerance was a necessity for the survival of the realm. Each of the numerous groups in the Roman Empire was expected to respect the rights of others, the gods of others, and to pay homage both to the political rulers and to the gods of Rome; otherwise they were free to pursue their own religion and their own way of life.
Jews had a special difficulty in fitting into this Roman scheme. While other peoples had their own gods for themselves, the God of the Jews was conceived as the one God of all mankind and of the universe. While this might in one sense suggest the brotherhood of man, in another sense it led to the conclusion that all other religions were false; that it was a sacrilege to accept them in any way, much less pay even formal homage to them. It was this feature of Judaism, and later Christianity, that provoked special political problems for the Jews and later the Christians in the Roman Empire. This view was also characteristic of the third great religion of the Middle East, Islam, which emerged in a still later era.
Pagans were not intolerant of other religions; it was the Judeo-Christian tradition that introduced religious intolerance into the Roman Empire and, through it, into Western civilization. Over the ensuing centuries, no one suffered more as a result than the Jews. Not all anti-Jewish hostility was religiously based; even when it invoked religious feelings, the prime modern examples were the Nazis, who were by no means religious. Hostility among peoples as such goes far back into human history. Hostility between Greeks and Jews, for example, led to violence in many cities during Roman times.
Despite strong measures taken by the Romans to suppress such outbreaks, which were seen as a threat to public order and ultimately to the stability of the empire, by and large the Romans attempted to accommodate the special religious views of the Jews, though particular Roman rulers offended their religion in various ways. Nevertheless, Roman rule was found burdensome in other respects, including taxation, and the Romans could be implacable in vengeance against Jews, as against other peoples. After the second revolt in Jerusalem, vast numbers of Jews were either slaughtered or sold into slavery. But the singling out of Jews for special oppression and violence just for being Jews was something that still lay centuries into the future.
When the last Roman emperor was overthrown in 476 A.D., marking the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages, Jews were widely scattered around the Mediterranean and could be found farther north in Europe as well as farther south in the Arabian Peninsula. Much of this region was destined to be conquered in later centuries by adherents of the new and crusading religion of Islam.
During the Middle Ages, most Jews lived in the Islamic world. That world extended from Spain across North Africa and the Middle East into Central Asia. Moreover, it was an expanding world that would eventually conquer the Balkans in Europe, establish the Mogul Empire in India, and reach Southeast Asia via Arab traders, to make Islam the religion of regions that later became Malaysia. Like Christians and other non-Muslims, Jews in the Islamic lands were legally placed on an inferior plane, but in practice they were treated far better in much of the Muslim world at that time than in the contemporary Christian world. However, the treatment of Jews varied among Islamic countries, as among Christian countries, and in both their treatment changed over time as well.
Throughout the Islamic world, a non-Muslim dared not strike a Muslim, even in self-defense, and merely verbal retaliation was dangerous. Small children threw rocks at Christians or Jews with impunity, a fate not uncommon for Jews in parts of contemporary Christendom; self-protection being forbidden and fatally dangerous. The protection of non-Muslim minorities in Islamic countries depended crucially on the practices of the authorities and the attitudes of the populace. Religious differences provided the basis for hostility to Jews in both the Christian world and the Islamic world, but the wide variations in the actual treatment of Jews within each world did not correspond with religious variations. Certainly, the historic reversal of the positions of the two civilizations over a period of centuries in their respective treatment of Jews cannot readily be attributed to religion. Indeed, slaughters of Jews occurred in North Africa and the Middle East before the rise of either Christianity or Islam.
Among the factors influencing the better treatment of Jews in Muslim lands during the early Middle Ages was that Jews were less conspicuous as only one of a number of non-Muslim minorities in the Islamic world, while they stood out sharply as the only non-Christian people in Christian Europe at a time when religion was an enormous influence. Moreover, the early Islamic world was a confident, dynamic world, a world expanding for a thousand years, winning repeated military victories over European powers, singly or in combination. The Ottoman Empire became the most powerful military force on earth. Nor were all its achievements on the battlefield; the culture of the Islamic world was in many respects more advanced and more sophisticated than that of contemporary Europe, especially in mathematics and philosophy, for example.
In later centuries, when the great tides of history turned in favor of Europe, it was the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world in general that suffered innumerable crushing defeats, saw their conquered territories in Europe lost, and saw Muslims across North Africa and the Middle East become subjugated by Europeans. In this later era of defeat and dangers, the confident cosmopolitanism of the early Ottoman Empire gave way to more bitter reactions to non-Muslims, of whom Jews were the most vulnerable.
The history of Jews in medieval Europe took a very different course from the history of Jews in Islamic lands. In the fragmented Europe left after the fall of the Roman Empire, barbarian invaders took over many areas where Jews had lived since ancient times. Like other pagans, these barbarian conquerors were tolerant of religious differences, and Jews were able to survive and, in some places, thrive among them. With the passing centuries, however, the barbarians became Christianized, and that entailed affiliation with an international church dedicated to stamping out deviations from Christian orthodoxy.
Even after the pagans became Christianized, there remained a social toleration and mutual interaction for centuries more, giving little foreshadowing of the persecutions of Jews that would become widespread in Europe during the later Middle Ages. As illiterate people during the widespread ignorance of a dark age, Jews enjoyed a certain prestige among their Christian neighbors. Even Jewish peddlers brought products and ideas from a wider world to the provincial communities of early medieval Europe. Centuries of religious preaching against Jews were required to turn them into pariahs in the popular mind.
Jews, as artisans, peddlers, and merchants, played a role in the revival of European urban communities after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Jews lived in many European cities, including Rome, Frankfurt, and Lyon. Their urban occupations included goldsmiths and physicians, and their rural occupations, owners of farms and vineyards. Jews were in the entourages of aristocrats and supplied them with exotic luxuries from the East. Christians during this era socialized with Jews and dined in their homes, and many converted to Judaism, though few Jews converted to Christianity.
Recognizing the dangers to Christianity and to itself as an institution in such situations, the Catholic Church counter-attacked in various ways, intellectual and political. The net result was a growth of policies, laws, and practices which kept Christians and Jews apart, for bad prosecing by Jews and restricted or harassed them in the practice of their own religion. Ironically, these policies worked so effectively that eventually popular anti-Jewish hostility reached levels that caused a succession of Popes to issue edicts against anti-Jewish violence and libels, the most infamous libel being that Jews killed Christian babies and drank their blood. In an earlier era, the same accusation had been made by pagans against the Christians.
Despite growing restrictions and persecutions, many Jews continued to prosper. Indeed, Jews became preeminent in international trade between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands, partly because both saw them as neutrals in the great Christian-Muslim struggles of that era, allowing them to function economically in both worlds where Christians restricted Muslims and Muslims restricted Christians. These functions as both economic and cultural intermediaries could be carried out because the Jews of Europe had contacts with fellow Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, many of the latter also being merchants.
Part of the exports from Europe to the Islamic world during this era, and for centuries to come, were European slaves. In an era when large land ownership in Europe often meant holding serfs and slaves, Jewish landowners were no exception. Moreover, in their role as international traders in various merchandise, the Jews, like the Arabs in Africa, included slaves among that merchandise. As the Germanic peoples of Western Europe invaded the Slavic lands to the east, they often sold members of the conquered population as slaves to Jews who then resold them elsewhere in the Christian or Islamic world. Jews became major dealers in the European slave trade. As in other trade, the growing spread of Christianity in Europe and its influence on secular law increasingly made it illegal for Jews to own Christian slaves and also increasingly difficult for them to own land. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all banned the holding of their own people as slaves, but all three held other peoples as slaves.
In the Ottoman Empire, Jews continued to function as slave traders for centuries, selling European Christians to Muslims. With castration being forbidden to Muslims, Jews were the principal suppliers of white eunuchs to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, the supply coming largely from the Caucasus region in Europe.
Along with a growing antagonism toward the Jews by Christian religious authorities and those influenced by them, there was a more pragmatic and more ambivalent response to the Jews by rulers of nations. The skills and entrepreneurship of the Jews were important economic contributions to national development, as well as providing contributions more directly to the rulers in loans and taxes. Therefore, rulers often protected Jews from the violence of mobs. At other times, however, rulers found it expedient to use Jews as scapegoats for popular discontents. One symptom of this ambivalence among rulers was that Jews were sometimes expelled and later invited back into the same realm.
Despite their use of religious intolerance to stir public feeling against the Jews, various attacks, expulsions, and confiscations had pragmatic goals, including being rid of creditors and the debts owed to them. When King Philip of France expelled the Jews in 1306, the reason given was that they charged excessively high interest rates. However, he did not cancel the debts owed to Jews, but instead set about collecting them for his own treasury. To his disappointment, the king discovered that the money collected in this way was less than the taxes that Jews had been paying. Moreover, when Christian money lenders replaced Jews, complaints arose that Christians charged higher interest rates than the Jews had. The net result was that the Jews were invited back. The same cycle of expulsion followed by an invitation to return appeared in several medieval German cities. There was a more lasting expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 than from France in 1394. Various cities and regions also expelled Jews: Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, and Moravia in 1454, for example.
The series of crusades of Christian Europe against the Muslims in Palestine produced major tragedies for Jews in Europe, as bands of crusaders marched across the continent; unruly elements among them paused to attack Jews. The slaughters of 1096 took 10,000 Jewish lives in Central Europe. Violent attacks on Jews likewise marked later crusades. Popular hostility to Jews again vented itself in the wake of the Black Death, or bubonic plague, of the 14th century, which killed between a fourth and a half of the entire population of Europe. Rumors spread that the Jews had somehow caused the plague, and this set off murderous violence against Jewish inhabitants in hundreds of European cities.
While the ignorance of the masses in Europe during this era was no doubt a factor in such attacks on Jews, it was often the educated clergy who were leaders in whipping up anti-Jewish feeling in the interests of solidifying Christian hegemony, and often it was years before the anti-Judaism of the educated took root in the masses. This pattern was to be repeated in later eras of secular intellectuals who also required long years of determined effort to inculcate anti-Jewish hostility into the masses.
With the passing centuries and growing intolerance, the occupations open to Jews began to narrow, as did their choice of residence or even the clothing they were permitted to wear. Land ownership, military careers, and many occupations represented by the emerging guilds were closed to Jews in many parts of medieval Europe. In many countries, they were left with occupations peripheral to feudal society: peddlers, artisans, or money lenders on a small or large scale. For example, in some places Jews also became rent collectors for noble landlords or tax collectors for governments—roles which added to their unpopularity. Rulers began to require Jews to wear clothes or insignia that distinguished them from Christians. Similar requirements to wear special clothing were imposed on Jews in some Islamic lands to distinguish them from Muslims. Jews in much of Europe were also required to live in separate communities from Christians; sometimes these were walled communities which Jews were forbidden to leave at night—the ghettos, which later in history became a generic term for residential enclaves of other groups around the world.
As the Jews settled for centuries in lands with different races, religions, languages, and cultures, the evolution of Jewish culture reflected these differences in the respective cultures around them, as well as reflecting the opportunities and rights those cultures permitted or denied to Jews. Language was the most obvious example. Jews of the Byzantine Empire typically spoke Greek, while those in Arab lands spoke Arabic, and those in various parts of Europe spoke either the regionally dominant language or a Jewish dialect derived from it, such as Yiddish derived from German, or Ladino from Spanish. Within their own enclaves, Jews typically maintained autonomous institutions, both secular and religious, and were collectively responsible through their leaders to the ruling powers for order and for taxes. The world of the ghettos was, in many countries and for many centuries, a narrow world, largely insulated from the cultural developments of Christian Europe and preoccupied with Jewish traditions and contemporary Jewish problems.
Education remained more common among the Jews than among many of the Christian communities around them, but for most it was an education as circumscribed as the lives they led. Contacts were maintained, at least intermittently, by the more educated classes with other Jewish communities in other lands, though the language barriers that increasingly separated world Jewry were formidable to those who were not multilingual. Commerce likewise connected the Jews in different lands, as the Jews themselves connected in trade countries that were hostile to one another, especially those of Christian Europe and the Islamic world.
One of the major divisions within world Jewry developed between the Ashkenazic Jews of Germany and the Sephardic Jews of Spain, each named for the Hebrew word for their respective countries of residence, though the names stuck long after later migrations took them far from these countries. The late 15th century, for example, saw two mass migrations of historic consequence: Ashkenazic Jews migrating from German lands into Poland, and Sephardic Jews migrating from Spain to the Mediterranean Islamic countries.
Throughout the centuries of the diaspora, whether the circumstances of the Jews in particular lands were good or bad, these circumstances were subject to sudden and drastic change. Centuries of persecution in the Byzantine Empire, for example, were followed by an era of renewed toleration and economic advancement, leading to a prosperous Jewish community in Constantinople. Elsewhere, the sequence was the reverse: from toleration and prosperity to intolerance and spoliation. Spain went through the latter cycle on a large scale more than once.
A large and prosperous Jewish population lived in Spain for centuries before the Visigoths established a kingdom there in the 5th century A.D. In the early Middle Ages in Spain, as in other parts of Europe, Jews were not as limited in their occupations as they became in a later era. In addition to being merchants in both domestic and international trade, Jews also held civil and military offices in the Visigothic government and were large landowners and slave holders.
After the Visigoths began to abandon paganism for Christianity, beginning with the Visigothic King Recared in 589, a new era began. Recared himself did not begin persecuting Jews, nor did his immediate successors, but his religious conversion and that of his kingdom provided a religious basis for severe 7th-century restrictions on Jews by later kings, typically for political reasons or economic gain. Religion was an enabling rather than an impelling force. Most of the Catholic Visigothic kings did not adopt anti-Jewish policies, and even in the late 7th century some Catholic clergy themselves continued the illegal practice of selling Christian slaves to Jews.
Whatever the reasons behind growing restrictions on Jews in Spain, these restrictions became widespread and severe. The death penalty was decreed for Jews who proselytized Christians, and Jews were ordered expelled from government posts where they exercised power over Christians. When Jews were forbidden to hold Christian slaves, this was an economic blow both to slave owners and to land owners, especially since Jewish landowners were also forbidden from hiring Christian employees. After these and other anti-Jewish policies decreed by King Sisebut were applied unevenly across the country, against various resistance, neglect, and evasion by local civil and church authorities, he eventually simply ordered the Jews either convert to Christianity or leave the country. However, Sisebut died in 621 A.D. before this draconian policy could be fully carried out, and his successor reversed Sisebut's anti-Jewish policies in general. But a decade later, these anti-Jewish policies resumed under a new regime. However, their implementation continued to be problematical, as both civil and religious authorities often found it expedient to use the talents of Jews, who sometimes even administered ecclesiastical estates of Catholic clergy. In short, the actual implementation of policy toward the Jews reflected the conflict between the economic usefulness of Jews and their political, social, and religious unpopularity.
Although many Jews remained in Spain and some continued to engage in lucrative but forbidden economic activities at the end of the 7th century, they nevertheless welcomed the Moors who invaded Spain in the early 8th century. The conquering Moors brought to the Jews more than a respite from persecution. The vast Islamic domains of which Spain now became part offered many opportunities for trade, not only within itself but also between itself and Christian Europe. The Jews, widely scattered in both civilizations and yet in contact with fellow Jews living in both Christian and Islamic countries, were in an ideal position to conduct that trade. They became a conduit not only for trade but also for intellectual and cultural interchanges between the two hostile blocks of nations.
The seven centuries of Moorish rule in Spain included three centuries (to 1200 A.D.) which have often been called the golden age of Jews, not only for their economic achievements but also for their intellectual and cultural development. The Islamic world of this era was itself the source of new ideas in science, poetry, and philosophy. A rich Moorish architectural tradition left its monuments across Spain. Many cultural treasures came in the Arabic language, including classics not only from the Middle East and North Africa but also classics of Greek civilization and even from as far away as India, all written in Arabic or translated into Arabic. In this way, a whole new system of numbers originating in India reached Europe and replaced the cumbersome system of Roman numerals. Because these numbers came to Europe by way of the Arabs, they were mistakenly called Arabic numerals. Chess likewise originated in India and reached Europe via the Arab conquerors. Much of the literature that entered Spain in Arabic was re-translated into European languages and became part of the cultural heritage of European civilization. Jews were an important part of this translation process.
Standing at the crossroads of two great civilizations, the Jews were peculiarly well situated to deal in the ideas and cultures of both the Islamic and the Christian worlds, as well as in their material goods, and to advance themselves culturally and materially as well. It was not simply that they received knowledge from different directions, but that these cultural cross-currents also stimulated their own thinking and the development of their own.
Jewish culture, for example, the Islamic world's concern for the purity of the Arabic language stimulated Jews to re-examine Hebrew grammar and style. After many centuries in which Jewish intellectual efforts, as embodied in their writings, concentrated on specifically Jewish matters and virtually ignored science, now, in the wake of Arab science, Jews began to produce numerous scientific works.
During the centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, the most famous Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, was a product of such cultural cross-currents, being familiar with both Greek and Arab philosophers as well as with his own Judaic traditions. At less exalted levels of the Jewish community as well, both Islamic and Christian cultural features influenced the Jewish culture.
Despite the duration and achievements of Islamic rule in Spain and Portugal, the Moors never fully occupied the Iberian Peninsula. A band of Christian-ruled regions across the northern edge of the country held out and eventually became bases for a long process of Christian reconquest that lasted for centuries. Portugal became independent in the 12th century, and the Christian kingdoms of Spain won major victories in the early 13th century that gave them control of most of their country's territory. But the Moors still retained the Kingdom of Grenada in the south. The military struggle in Spain continued on through most of the 15th century. But as early as the 13th century, Christian-ruled Spain encompassed a majority of Sephardic Jews.
Most of these Jews were in such occupations as craftsmen, shopkeepers, or money lenders, but some reached higher levels as owners of large textile factories in Seville, Cordoba, and Toledo, or as government financial administrators and tax collectors. The Jews excelled in those mundane skills neglected by Castilian society, and this complementarily benefited both economically. However, the prosperity and influence of the Jews were increasingly resented by the Spanish populace, who were held in check only by a strong central government well aware of the benefit it derived from the work of Jews.
When the bubonic plague, or Black Death, that swept across Europe struck Spain, it contributed to a social disruption that undermined the power of the Spanish monarchy. A civil war within Christian Spain from 1369 to 1371 likewise weakened the government's control. During this disruption of order, a wave of anti-Jewish violence swept across the country, culminating in the forced conversion of tens of thousands of Jews in 1391. Neither church nor state was successful in their attempts to control these mob outbreaks or the forced conversions. Many other Jews, not directly coerced, chose on their own to become Christians, as it became increasingly dangerous to be a Jew.
These events had lasting effects on the history of the Jews and on the history of Spain. The ethnically Jewish population was now split religiously three ways: one, those converted Jews who adhered to the Christian religion and who were called Conversos; two, those converts who secretly maintained Jewish religious observances and whom the Spaniards bitterly called Marranos, or swine; and three, those Jews who remained open adherents of Judaism. The interactions among these three groups were to have fateful consequences.
The Conversos, now freed of the discriminatory laws that applied to Jews, became even more prosperous and influential, reaching high positions in church and state alike and even marrying into the Christian aristocracy. Conversos became especially influential in municipal governments. But however much their legal, economic, and social status may have changed, the Conversos still aroused the suspicion and hostility of the populace, just as they had when they were Jews. Bloody outbreaks against Conversos erupted in Toledo in 1448, in Sepulveda in 1468, in Cordoba in 1473, and in Segovia and Hayen in 1474. There was also a widespread questioning of the large role of Conversos in Spanish life and charges that many Conversos were actually Marranos secretly practicing Judaism. The charge of religious apostasy from Christianity brought in the Spanish Inquisition. Though the Inquisition's powers were sweeping and its methods ruthless, still the Conversos' power and influence enabled many to escape with their lives and much of their property.
Attempts to curb the prosperity and influence of the Conversos centered on making a legal distinction between them and people born into the Christian community, the so-called Old Christians. In self-defense, the Conversos insisted on the unity of all Christians, whether by birth or conversion, as against the Jews. Both the logic of the argument and the social exigencies of the times led the Conversos into promoting anti-Jewish beliefs and policies in a country already seething with hostility to Jews.
Although the royal government still needed the skills, talents, and wealth of the Jews while engaged in a military struggle against the Moors, once Grenada fell in 1492, ending Moorish rule in Spain, the Jews became expendable. A royal decree issued that same year expelled all religious Jews from the country. Unlike the expulsions of relatively small populations of Jews from England and France in previous centuries, the number of Jews suddenly forced out of Spain on short notice reached the hundreds of thousands. Wealth that the Jews were forced to leave behind helped finance the other great historic event of that year: the voyage of Columbus that led to the discovery of the Western Hemisphere.
Most of the Sephardic Jews went to the Islamic lands of North Africa and the Middle East, and in particular to the Ottoman Empire. Not all Sephardic Jews settled in the Ottoman Empire, however. Many settled in those European countries noted for their tolerance toward Jews, such as Italy, England, and Holland. The Spanish Jews who settled in Holland helped to make Amsterdam one of the world's great commercial ports and came ultimately to own one-fourth of the shares in the Dutch East India Company.
Existing Jewish communities scattered across the vast Ottoman Empire were not only swamped demographically by the huge influx of Jews from Spain as well as from other parts of Europe, but were also revitalized by these new people who were more advanced in both knowledge and wealth. Sephardic exiles rapidly rose to commercial prominence in the Balkans. The Cosmopolitans, apart from those who settled in Southern France as Marranos, were both more prosperous and more accepted culturally than the poor, alien, and openly Jewish Ashkenazim who settled in Eastern France, which became strongly anti-Jewish. The Sephardic Jews who settled in Algeria became the acknowledged leaders of the Jewish community there and leaders also of the commercial activities of the nation.
Although the Spanish government had confiscated the wealth of the Sephardic Jews, they could not confiscate the skills and traits that created that wealth in the first place and would create it again in many other nations, as far away as the Caribbean. As of the late 15th century, the Ottoman Empire offered far greater tolerance and far more opportunities than the Jews were likely to find in most other places, Christian or Islamic, at that juncture. The Ottoman Empire was the most powerful military force in an expanding Islamic world and more powerful than any European nation or empire.
The Ottoman Turks climaxed their rise from a nomadic people to a world power by their invasion of the Byzantine Empire and capture of its capital, Constantinople, in 1453, renamed Istanbul. This city now became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. As conquerors of a large, racially and religiously diverse region, the Ottoman Turks ruled with tolerance and shrewdness. The welcome they offered to Jews exiled from Spain reflected that shrewdness. Among the skills that the Sephardim brought to the Ottoman Empire was a knowledge of the military technology of the West and a knowledge of Western languages and Western politics. All this was valuable to the Ottoman rulers in their centuries-long hostilities against Christian Europe.
The Ottoman Empire much preferred Jews to Christians in sensitive positions; for example, Jews were sometimes sent abroad as interpreters for Ottoman envoys and even as unofficial emissaries themselves. Moreover, unlike the larger Christian minority within the Ottoman Empire, the Jews were under no cloud of suspicion of being sympathetic to the Christian nations after the persecutions they had suffered there. Indeed, the Ottoman rulers followed a policy of moving Jews into recently conquered Christian cities, whether because these cities were depopulated or as a counterweight to potentially disloyal Christian inhabitants. Jews in the Ottoman Empire were encouraged, or even ordered, to move into Istanbul, where they were 11% of the city's population by 1477. After the later arrival of Spanish and Italian exiles, the Jewish population of Istanbul grew to be several times as large by 1535. Though the migration of many other groups to Istanbul makes it uncertain how much the relative proportions may have changed, the same policy was later applied to the strategic port of Salonika, which had a negligible Jewish population in 1519 but became more than two-thirds Jewish in less than a century.
Jews in the Ottoman Empire were allowed to engage in a much wider range of economic activities than in much of contemporary Europe; indeed, their particular skills were more widely needed. Jewish peddlers were common in towns like Gallipoli and Salonika and in the villages in their vicinity. Often these peddlers dealt in barter. At the other end of the economic scale, Jews were also prominent in international trade, particularly with countries where other Jews engaged in international trade. Thus, Jews played an important role in the Ottoman trade with Italy, but not in its trade with the Persian Gulf region or with India. The principal commodities traded by Ottoman Jews, both domestically and internationally, were textiles, clothing, threads, and leathers. Having been active in the textile industry of Spain, Jews were among the pioneers of the textile industry in the Ottoman Empire and supplied a large proportion of the uniforms worn by the military corps of the Janissaries. Jews were so common in the customs service that many of the Ottoman customs receipts of that era were written in Hebrew.
In the medical profession, in this earlier and more tolerant era, Jews in the Islamic world worked as colleagues of Muslim or Christian physicians. The Muslim world, once in advance of Europe in science and medicine, had fallen behind by the time the Jewish refugees from Spain, Italy, and other parts of Europe began arriving in large numbers during the 15th century as bearers of medical skills now more advanced than those of the Islamic world. Jews became prominent as physicians, including some who became physicians to Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. By the early 16th century, the palace medical staff consisted of 41 Jews and 21 Muslims. With the passage of time, however, the source of the Jews' superiority—their knowledge of Western medicine—declined as they lost touch with ongoing medical developments in the West. As second and third generations of Sephardic Jews fell behind in medicine, they were replaced by Western-educated Greeks. In general, Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, such as Greeks and Armenians, kept in touch with Christian Europe, often sending their children there to be educated. Ottoman Christians were therefore more abreast of Western progress and retained their facility with Western languages and their contacts in Western countries. As the Western knowledge and connections of the Ottoman Jews became obsolete over time, they began to be displaced by Christians in field after field. Not only were Jewish doctors replaced by better-qualified Greeks, Jewish merchants likewise saw their share of the empire's international trade dwindled to the vanishing point in competition with Christians. Armenian merchants, ship owners, entrepreneurs, and bankers played an increasing role in the Ottoman Empire at the expense of Jews. From the late 18th century, even in the theater, an early Jewish predominance eventually gave way to Armenian predominance.
In addition to ousting Jews from various commercial and professional positions through the competition of superior skills, Christian minorities also actively promoted hostility to the Jews in Christian Europe and in the Islamic world, bringing to the latter the old claim that Jews killed children and drank their blood. As the Jews of the Ottoman Empire declined both economically and demographically, their growing poverty was reflected in very low levels of education, and growing persecutions added to their demoralization. The new intellectual currents of European civilization in the era of the French Revolution made no such impact among Ottoman Jews as among Greeks and Armenians. Jews in the Ottoman Empire remained isolated even from contemporary intellectual currents among the Jews of Europe.
As the position of the Jews was declining within the Ottoman Empire, so the empire itself was declining relative to its chief rival, Christian Europe. This represented a drastic reversal of international power, and its domestic repercussions had grim implications for non-Muslim minorities. After centuries of territorial expansion, the Ottoman Turks began to experience setbacks and then defeats. In its era of ascendancy, the Ottoman Empire repeatedly inflicted crushing military defeats on the Europeans, conquered Greece and the Balkans, and by 1529 were besieging Vienna. Only with the help of other European powers, who feared that the Turks would overrun the continent, was the fall of Vienna averted, and only barely averted at that.
Centuries of expansion of the Islamic world in all directions gave the Ottoman Turks not only confidence in themselves and in their mission but also contempt for the infidels of Europe, whom they so long surpassed in science and medicine as well as on the battlefield and whom they continually enslaved in great numbers for centuries. Ottoman rulers and even Ottoman scholars had no interest in European culture and often lacked very basic knowledge of the continent and its inhabitants beyond those with whom they had common frontiers. In short, Europe was regarded as beneath their notice, even though Ottoman scholars produced serious studies of India, China, and other foreign countries. With this attitude of utter disdain toward Europe, it was a special shock for the Ottoman Empire to begin to encounter a series of major military defeats from European powers using more advanced weapons and techniques of war. The year 1571 saw the loss of Ottoman control of the Mediterranean in a decisive naval battle against a combined Papal, Spanish, and Venetian fleet. On land, it was 1664 when the Hapsburg Empire inflicted the first major defeat suffered by the Ottoman Empire in a pitched battle. In 1683, when the Ottomans returned to besiege Vienna, they were not only resisted but routed, despite having numerical superiority. It marked a historic turning point in the relationship between the two empires and more broadly between Christian Europe and the Islamic world.
The degree of tolerance toward non-Muslim minorities within the Ottoman Empire during its long era of ascendancy was no longer maintained as the Ottomans began to experience the shocks of military defeat and of uprisings among European subject peoples, together with European subjugation of Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East, threatening the very survival of the empire. In this beleaguered and embittered atmosphere, non-Muslims in general were viewed less charitably and more suspiciously as weak links or potential traitors. Legal restrictions against the activities of non-Muslims that had been only loosely or intermittently applied during the more cosmopolitan era of Ottoman expansion now began to be applied more rigorously. While Christians were more suspect than Jews, it was the Jews who were more vulnerable, both because they were less numerous and because they had no foreign homeland whose influence could be used in their behalf. In addition to official discrimination, Jews, like other non-Muslims, were subject to being harassed with impunity by Muslims, including children, who could throw rocks at them, spit on them, or hit them, secure in the knowledge that no retaliation was possible under pain of death.
These developments were not peculiar to the Ottoman Empire but were widespread throughout the Islamic world and were worse in many other parts of that world. In parts of Morocco, Jews were required to go barefoot when they ventured outside their own enclave, and an 18th-century Jewish visitor to Morocco described his co-religionists there as oppressed, miserable creatures, having neither the mouth to answer an Arab or the cheek to raise their head. Jews were even pulled out of their synagogues on their Sabbath to do forced labor as late as the 19th century. In Cairo, even the lowliest Arab did not hesitate to beat a Jew for such trivial things as daring to pass a Muslim on the right. In Yemen, Jews were required to clean the public latrines, and Jewish orphans were taken away to be raised as Muslims. Ironically, Jews living in parts of North Africa and the Middle East after European imperial powers conquered these areas now found themselves better off than under their former Muslim rulers, even though many of their ancestors had fled European persecution to find more security in the Islamic lands.
Over the centuries, Europe had changed as the Islamic world had changed. Under pressure from European powers, the Ottoman Empire began to reform and modernize, ultimately granting equal citizenship to all in 1869, regardless of religion. But by then, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire had fallen far behind the Jews in other parts of the world.