For over a thousand years, Jews lived not in the shadows of the Muslim world — but at the top of it. Bankers to empires. Doctors to Sultans. Soem of the wealthiest and most influential family dynasties in the Islamic world. This is the story Zionist propaganda has buried — a millennium of Jewish prosperity, cultural flourishing, and statecraft inside the Islamic world.
Sources:
Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1994)
Avigdor Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Darwin Press, 1992)
Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (NYU Press, 1991)
Esther Benbassa & Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (UC Press, 2000)
Joseph Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique (on the Jewish community of Salonica)
Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance (1763)
Isaac Sarfati letter (1454), reproduced in various Ottoman Jewish history compilations
Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy and general Sephardic diaspora scholarship
Camondo family archive / The Camondos by Leora Auslander (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
Ottoman census and demographic records (various, cited in Shaw above)
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You probably heard this story from Zionists. Jews in the Muslim world
suffered a thousand years of oppression, persecution, and forced conversion to Islam.
Let's take a closer look at that story. Let's start at the beginning with the first years of
Muslim rule in Jerusalem. The city was virtually 100% Christian when the Arabs conquered it.
Muslims brought Jews back to Jerusalem for the first time in centuries, and by the 1840s,
Jews were the largest single group in Jerusalem, more than either Muslims or Christians.
Now, if everyone was forced to convert to Islam, how is it possible that Muslims,
after a thousand years, were a minority in the third holiest city in Islam?
Then let's look at some of the other major Ottoman cities.
Salonika was one of the most important port cities in the Ottoman Empire,
the seventh largest Ottoman city, and a city that had been majority Jewish for 300 years.
The city closed Saturdays because Jewish merchants managed the docks.
They were leaders in banking, tobacco, and the maritime trade.
Three centuries of economic dominance, blessed by the Muslim imperial authorities.
Baghdad was the commercial and cultural capital of Mesopotamia, and by some estimates,
almost 40% Jewish. A community that traced its roots back to Babylon. Baghdadi Jews were
merchants, bankers, and traders operating at the top echelons of the economy of the Islamic world.
In the imperial capital, Istanbul, Jews were about 10% of the population,
but held a majority of the licensed medical positions in the city.
For 400 years, the sultans trusted Jewish doctors with their lives.
The chief surgeon of the imperial medical hospital in Istanbul was a Jew.
In 1492, Christian Spain expelled or killed every Jew who refused to convert.
More than 100,000 were suddenly stateless,
stripped of everything they had built over 700 years in Muslim Spain.
The Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, welcomed the refugees.
They settled in the Ottoman Empire's primary trading hubs.
The sultan provided financial aid to get them established.
He threatened punishment for any Ottoman official who treated them harshly.
No European-style ghettos, no refugee camps.
The commando Spanish Jews settled in Istanbul became the empire's private bankers,
financing its wars. One of the wealthiest families in the Ottoman Empire.
Abraham Solomon Commando received the Medal of Honor for financing the Ottoman Empire
during the Crimean War. Upon his death in Paris in 1873, he was buried in Istanbul
as per his wishes. His funeral was a state ceremony with the imperial palace banned.
The Alatinis, Spanish Jews who settled in Salinica, built the largest industrial complex
in the empire. When the sultan was deposed in 1909, he was exiled to their villa.
The Alatinis, along with the other elite Sephardic families of Salinica, like the Modiano
and Morpurgo, were among the wealthiest in the empire.
The Jews of Salinica declared in 1550,
The Turks do not let us suffer any evil or oppression.
The Valeros, Spanish Jews who moved from Istanbul to Jerusalem,
founded the city's first bank and managed the Rothschild fortune in the Holy Land.
In 1454, Rabbi Isaac Sephardi, a German Jew who had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, wrote,
Turkey is a land where nothing is lacking. Is it not better for you to live under Muslims
than under Christians? Here every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and fig tree.
The famous French philosopher Voltaire, in his 1763 treatise on tolerance,
praised the Ottomans. The sultan governs and peace 20 million people of different religions.
The empire is full of Christians and Jews. The annals of Turkey do not record any revolt
instigated by any of these religions. The Sephardic Jews came with nothing.
The Islamic society that gave them refuge made it possible for them to build generational wealth
over 300 years and go from penniless to some of the wealthiest family dynasties on earth.
Was it all unicorns and rainbows? No. There were corrupt oppressive officials and rulers
and wars and periods of social unrest that sparked sectarian violence. But compare that
to a thousand years of Jewish life in Europe. More than a thousand cases of entire Jewish
populations being expelled from cities, states and provinces. The Spanish Alhambra decree,
an inquisition which forced the conversion, execution or exile of more than 150,000 Jews.
Anti-Jewish pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands. The Russian Tsars pale of the
settlement. And finally Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. As Rabbi Itzhak Sephardi
wrote in his letter in 1454, is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians?
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