The purpose of this research is to examine the reorganization of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire after the formal expulsion of Jews from Western Europe in 1492. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which Jewish populations were organized under Ottoman authority and then to discuss the means by which patterns of organization were accomplished.
The context in which the reorganization of the Jews under the authority of the Ottoman Empire took place was the decisive expulsion of Jews from Christian Spain in 1492. The fusion of church and state from the time of Constantine's conversion, through the Middle Ages, and well into the Renaissance entailed declaration of Christian faith as requirement of full citizenship. The organization had its origins as much in what the Jew historically had not been, or had been perceived as not being, which was European or indeed in some respects even human, but certainly not entirely integrated with the dominant culture. Partly by Jewish and partly by non-Jewish choice, Jews had been very much set apart from the rest of the communities in which their culture was not dominant. A concept of Jewish self-government, independence, close community ties, and self-sufficiency emerged in Western Europe as a consequence of this isolation, but in its pernicious form it manifest as the Judengasse, or walled ghetto (Sachar 3). From the point of view of Christians ruling the communities, ghettoes were meant less to allow autonomous Jewish activity than to confine the Jews and prevent interchange between Jews and Gentiles.
The religious hegemony of the Church of Rome in Western Europe was meant to be reinforced by the Inquisition and the formal expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain and Portugal in 1492. This enforced dispersion, or diaspora, of the Jews was not confined to Spain and Portugal but was a pattern that was repeated throughout the area that had formerly been under control of the Ro...