In this book Walter Weiker explores the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. That expulsion had the immediate consequence of enlarging the Jewish presence in the Ottoman Empire, particularly what is today Turkey and the adjacent areas of the Balkans. Weiker not only provides a full account of the Turkish Jews' intellectual and cultural contributions dating back to the Byzantine Empire and continuing through the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, its rise and decline, and its twentieth century transformation into the Turkish Republic, but he does so from a perspective of Jewish political history.

This book introduces the reader to the past and present of Jewish life in Turkey and to Turkish Jewish diaspora communities in Israel, Europe, Latin America and the United States. It surveys the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, examining the survival of Jewish communities during the dissolution of the empire and their emigration to America, Europe, and Israel. In the cases discussed, members of these communities often sought and seek close connections with Turkey, even if those ‘ties that bind’ are rarely reciprocated by Turkish governments. Contributors also explore Turkish Jewishness today, as it is lived in Israel and Turkey, and as found in ‘places of memory’ in many cities in Turkey, where Jews no longer exist today.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French-Jewish organization founded in 1860, occupies a crucial place in the history of Sephardi communities in the modern period. In the fifty years after its creation, the Alliance established a vast network of schools in the lands of Islam for the purpose of "civilizing" the local Jewish communities and remaking them in the idealized self-image of French Jewry. This study, drawing on the author's extensive research in the archives of the Alliance in Paris, focuses on the work of the Alliance among Turkish Jewry, one of the communities most strongly affected by the organizations' activities. Although the Alliance played a conclusive role in the Westernization of Turkish Jews, it was also the unwitting catalyst for the emrgence of new political movements such as Zionism, which turned away from the Alliance's ideology and ultimately threatened the survival of its schools. This book illuminates an important episode in the history of Sephardi and French Jewries as they interacted through the Alliance Israélite Universelle and draws important conclusions about the transformation of European as well as Middle Eastern Jewries in the modern era.

Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) this book looks at how the late Ottoman era set the stage for the on-going Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It presents an innovative analysis of the struggle in its first years, when Palestine was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it argues that in the late Ottoman era, Jews and Palestinians were already locked in conflict: the new freedoms introduced by the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution exacerbated divisions (rather than serving as a unifying factor). Offering an integrative approach, it considers both communities, together and separately, in order to provide a more sophisticated narrative of how the conflict unfolded in its first years.

This book focuses on central topics, such as the structure of the Jewish community, its organization and institutions and its relations with the state; the place Jews occupied in the Ottoman economy and their interactions with the general society; Jewish scholarship and its contribution to Ottoman and Turkish culture, science, and medicine. Written by leading scholars from Israel, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, these pieces present an unusually broad historical canvas that brings together different perspectives and viewpoints. The book is a major, original contribution to Jewish history as well as to Turkish, Balkan, and Middle East studies.