Jews of Turkey: Five Hundred Years from Refuge to Resilience

The Sultan’s Welcome

In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed west, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews who would not convert to Christianity. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Jews left Spain — ending a Jewish presence that had lasted over a thousand years during the Golden Age.

Many of those refugees found their way to the Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bayezid II not only permitted their entry but actively welcomed them. The famous (if possibly apocryphal) quote attributed to Bayezid captures the spirit: “You call Ferdinand a wise king — he who impoverishes his own country and enriches mine?”

The Jews brought skills the Ottomans valued: knowledge of European languages and trade networks, expertise in medicine and printing, and artisanal crafts including textile manufacturing and weapons making. The Ottomans were pragmatic empire-builders. Religious tolerance was not charity — it was policy.

Building a New Home

The Sephardic refugees settled primarily in three Ottoman cities: Constantinople (Istanbul), Thessaloniki (then Ottoman, now Greek), and Izmir (Smyrna). Each developed distinct Jewish communities with their own synagogues, schools, and rabbinic courts.

In Istanbul, the Jews settled in neighborhoods like Balat and Galata along the Golden Horn. They established synagogues named after their cities of origin — the “Kastilya” (Castile) synagogue, the “Aragon” synagogue, the “Katalan” (Catalonia) synagogue — preserving their Spanish regional identities even in exile.

The community thrived. Jewish physicians served in the Ottoman court — including the personal doctors of multiple sultans. Jewish merchants dominated the textile and jewelry trades. The first printing press in the Ottoman Empire was established by Jewish immigrants from Spain in 1493 — just one year after their arrival. They printed in Hebrew, Ladino, and other languages, while the Ottoman authorities, wary of printing in Arabic or Turkish, let them proceed.

Ladino: A Language Preserved

Perhaps the most remarkable cultural achievement of Turkish Jewry was the preservation of Ladino — the Judeo-Spanish language they carried from the Iberian Peninsula. While Spain’s language evolved over five centuries into modern Castilian, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire kept speaking a form of medieval Spanish, enriched with Hebrew prayers, Turkish administrative terms, and Greek everyday words.

Ladino newspapers flourished in Istanbul from the nineteenth century. Ladino literature — poetry, novels, proverbs, and songs — created a rich cultural world. The language was the community’s living connection to its Spanish past, a daily reminder of where they came from even as they put down roots in their new home.

The Dönmeh: A Strange Chapter

One of the strangest episodes in Turkish Jewish history involves the Dönmeh — followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. In 1666, Sabbatai Zevi, a charismatic rabbi from Izmir, proclaimed himself the Messiah and attracted a massive following across the Jewish world. When the Ottoman sultan gave him a choice between death and conversion to Islam, Sabbatai Zevi converted.

Most of his followers abandoned him in disgust. But several thousand families — primarily in Thessaloniki — followed him into Islam, forming a crypto-Jewish community that outwardly practiced Islam while secretly maintaining Sabbatean rituals. These Dönmeh (a Turkish word meaning “converts”) persisted as a distinct social group for centuries. When Thessaloniki became Greek after the Balkan Wars, many Dönmeh moved to Istanbul and other Turkish cities.

The Dönmeh remain a subject of fascination and conspiracy theories in Turkey. Their actual influence on Turkish history — including claims about their role in the Young Turk movement — is debated by scholars.

From Empire to Republic

The transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic in 1923 brought significant changes for the Jewish community. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular revolution abolished the caliphate, adopted the Latin alphabet, and pushed Turkey toward European-style modernization.

Jews, like all minorities, were pressured to “Turkify.” In 1923, a campaign called Vatandaş, Türkçe konuş! (“Citizen, speak Turkish!”) targeted minority languages, including Ladino. Jewish schools began teaching in Turkish. The community gradually shifted from Ladino to Turkish as its primary language.

The early Republican period was mostly tolerant, but there were dark moments. The 1934 Thrace pogroms — violent anti-Jewish riots in Edirne and other towns — drove thousands of Jews from the provinces to Istanbul or abroad. A discriminatory wealth tax (Varlık Vergisi) in 1942 disproportionately targeted minorities, ruining many Jewish businesses and sending those who couldn’t pay to labor camps in eastern Turkey.

The 1955 Istanbul Pogrom

On September 6-7, 1955, organized mobs attacked Greek, Armenian, and Jewish properties in Istanbul in what became known as the Istanbul pogrom (or the September Events). Although primarily directed at Greeks, Jewish businesses, synagogues, and cemeteries were also damaged. The violence, now understood to have been orchestrated by elements within the Turkish government, shattered the community’s sense of security.

Many Jews emigrated in the aftermath — to Israel, to the United States, and to Western Europe. The community, which had numbered about 80,000 at the start of the twentieth century, began a slow decline.

The Community Today

Approximately 15,000 Jews live in Turkey today, almost all in Istanbul, with a tiny community in Izmir. They maintain about twenty active synagogues in Istanbul, including the magnificent Neve Shalom (dedicated in 1951, targeted in a terrorist attack in 1986 and again in 2003) and the historic Ahrida synagogue in Balat (possibly the oldest in the city).

The community operates schools, a hospital (Or-Ahayim), a newspaper (Şalom, published in Turkish with a Ladino supplement), and cultural organizations. The Quincentennial Foundation, established in 1992 to mark five hundred years since the Spanish Jewish arrival, runs a museum and promotes Turkish-Jewish heritage.

Relations with the Turkish state fluctuate with political winds. Turkey recognized Israel in 1949 and maintains diplomatic relations, though they have been strained by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Turkish Jews often find themselves caught between their loyalty to Turkey and their connection to Israel — a familiar diaspora balancing act.

Legacy

The story of Turkish Jewry is a story of refuge, adaptation, and slow decline. For five centuries, the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic provided a home where Jews could live, worship, and preserve their Sephardic heritage. The community produced scholars, physicians, journalists, and industrialists.

But the community has also experienced pogroms, discriminatory taxes, terrorist attacks, and the steady pressure of emigration. Each generation has been smaller than the last. Ladino, once the living tongue of hundreds of thousands, is now spoken fluently by only a few hundred elderly Istanbulites.

What remains is remarkable: a small, resilient community that has maintained its identity through five centuries and five different forms of government — sultanate, constitutional monarchy, single-party republic, military coups, and democratic era. Fifteen thousand strong, they light Shabbat candles in Istanbul, the city that welcomed their ancestors when no one else would.