man and Byzantine empires. As Shaw explains, formal imperial edicts or less formal sanctions against the Jews that began in the fourth century persisted until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, which was Muslim, in the East after 1453 coincided with the retrenchment of Christian orthodoxy throughout Europe in the West during the same period. As Jews were dispersed away from Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they migrated toward the East. The name given to the patterns of their resettlement in territories under Ottoman control is the ingathering (Shaw 1-25).
The social structure in which Jews functioned as they settled in territories that were under control of the Ottoman Turks appears to have been one of relative emancipation, certainly more emancipation than the Jews experienced in Europe until the period of the Enlightenment there (Sachar 39-40). This can be traced not so much to Ottoman policy per se as to the fact that Ottoman power of the period was informed by the historical attitudes of Islamic culture to non-Islamic peoples. The foundation of such attitudes is the Koran (Qur'an). It is generally accepted that "Islam reveres the prophets of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, among whom Jesus is included. . . . Of these, Muhammad was the last and greatest" (Campbell 464). This point of view is that Islam is the outgrowth and perfection of all religions that have preceded it, and it is explained by Joseph Campbell in this way:
"The People of the Book," as the Jews are termed in the Koran, are declared to have closed their eyes to the confirmation of their own heritage when they rejected the message of Islam; and the Christians, with their trinitarian doctrines, added gods unto God, misreading the words of their own prophet Jesus, which are to be understood directly in the line of Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and Mohammed (Campbell 422).
According to Campbell, Jewish...