Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Salonica became the Jewish center of the Ottoman Empire after 1492. At this time, the Spanish Inquisition began in Spain and Portugal and Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or emigrate. Religious persecution caused many Sephardic Jews to immigrate to Salonica and make up a majority of the city's population.
The presence of Sephardim and New Christians along the Malabar coast eventually aroused the ire of the Catholic Church, which then obtained permission from the Portuguese crown to establish the Goan Inquisition against the Sephardic Jews of India. In recent times, principally after 1948, most Eastern Sephardim have relocated to Israel, and ...
Anatolia's Jewish population before Ottoman times primarily consisted of Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews, with a handful of dispersed Karaite communities. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many Sephardic Jews from Spain, Portugal and South Italy expelled by the Alhambra Decree found refuge across the Ottoman Empire , including ...
Ottoman Jews were obliged to pay special "Jewish taxes" to the Ottoman authorities. These taxes included the Cizye, the İspençe, the Haraç, and the Rav akçesi ("rabbi tax"). Sometimes, local rulers would also levy taxes for themselves, in addition to the taxes sent to the central authorities in Constantinople.
In marked contrast to Jews in Europe, Ottoman Jews were allowed to work in any profession and could also enter the Ottoman court. Ottoman Jews in Istanbul excelled in commerce and trade and came to dominate the medical profession. [3] Despite making up only 10% of the city population, Jews constituted 62% of licensed doctors in 1600. [1]
Salomon Rosanes (b. 1862-d.1938) was a historian of Ottoman Jewry and himself a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria. [1] He is the author of Divre yeme Yisrael be-Togarmah (History of the Jews in Turkey), [2] called an "important book" by Avraham Elmaleh in his inaugural Hebrew language essay published in 1919 for the journal Mizarah u-Ma'arav. [3]
Many of the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition settled in the Ottoman Empire, leaving behind, at the wake of Empire, large Sephardic communities in South-East Europe: mainly in Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
In 1720, when they were unable to repay their debts, Arab creditors broke into the synagogue, set it on fire, and destroyed their homes. The Jews fled the city and over the next century, any Jew dressed in Ashkenazi garb was a target of attack. [28] Some of the Ashkenazi Jews who remained began to dress like Sephardic Jews.