The Jewish Diaspora

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Ottoman welcome of the exiles

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1500–1600 CESalonika (Thessaloniki) → Constantinople / Istanbul

Why it happened

Spain's 1492 Alhambra Decree, followed by Portugal's forced conversions of 1497, drove Iberian Jews to flee.12 Sultan Bayezid II, seeking to enrich his commercially thin empire, welcomed the exiles.2

The migration

Bayezid II dispatched the Ottoman navy under admiral Kemal Reis to evacuate the refugees safely from Spain,1 reportedly deriding Ferdinand as a ruler 'who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine.'3 Roughly 12,000 Jewish families — about 60,000 people — reached Ottoman territory soon after 1492,2 settling chiefly in Istanbul, Salonika, Edirne, the Peloponnese and Egypt.2 In Salonika the became a majority, 56 percent of the city by 1519,4 reviving it as a textile hub built on Spanish wool-spinning skills.4 In 1493 the brothers David and Samuel ibn Nahmias established a printing press in the empire.5 Jews served the court as physicians and diplomats.2 By 1600 the empire held roughly 150,000 Jews, the world's largest Jewish population,6 cementing it as the principal refuge of Sephardi Jewry.7

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalAmong the populations sampled, Greek and Turkish Jews had the closest genetic distance.8 That affinity is compatible with shared ancestry but does not by itself date their divergence or demonstrate that it resulted specifically from the Ottoman resettlement after 1492.

Sources

  1. BEgger, Vernon O.. 2008. A History of the Muslim World Since 1260: The Making of a Global Community. Prentice Hall
  2. BEncyclopaedia Judaica. 2007. Ottoman Empire. Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.), reproduced by Encyclopedia.com link
  3. BSinger, Isidore, Adler, Cyrus. 1902. Bajazet II. The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Funk & Wagnalls, New York
  4. BVeinstein, Gilles. 1992. Salonique 1850–1918: la « ville des Juifs » et le réveil des Balkans. Éditions Autrement, Paris
  5. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Wikipedia link
  6. BShaw, Stanford J.. 1991. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. New York University Press (repr. Palgrave Macmillan)
  7. BLevy, Avigdor. 1992. The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. The Darwin Press, Princeton, NJ
  8. AAtzmon G, Hao L, Pe'er I, et al.. 2010. Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 850–859. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015