Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire

I. From Alhambra to the Bosphorus

The expulsion of 1492 was not the first catastrophe to scatter Iberian scholarship. The Almohad persecutions of the twelfth century had already sent grammarians and codices toward Fez, Provence, and Egypt. But 1492 was different in scale: entire communities departed within months, often after ruinous sales of property, and many families were forced to move again when Portugal expelled or baptized its Jews in 1497.

Ottoman lands offered what Christian Iberia had withdrawn: the right to remain Jewish, build synagogues, and maintain rabbinic courts. Sultan Bayezid II is reported in both Jewish and Muslim sources to have welcomed skilled refugees, contrasting Ferdinand’s cruelty with Ottoman pragmatism. Whether every anecdote is literal history, the demographic result is clear: tens of thousands of Sephardim settled in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean within a generation, bringing the curriculum of Andalusian philology with them.

II. Salonica: A Jewish Majority City

Salonica (Thessaloniki) became the emblematic Sephardi-Ottoman center. By the sixteenth century the city was majority Jewish, its streets echoing with Ladino and its synagogues organized by Iberian place of origin, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, Portugal. Refugee congregations preserved distinct liturgical melodies (nusach) while sharing a common commitment to the pointed Masoretic Bible.

Salonica’s yeshivot trained rabbis who read Scripture through the grammars of Kimḥi and the peshat commentaries of Ibn Ezra. Family codices copied in Toledo or Barcelona served as exemplars for new scrolls. Within decades Salonica also housed one of the empire’s most important Hebrew presses, mass-producing Bibles and rabbinic literature that fixed the Spanish commentarial canon for Ottoman Jewry.

“Salonica did not merely shelter exiles; it reconstituted Iberia’s book culture under Ottoman skies, grammar, commentary, and print working as one system.”

III. Istanbul and the Imperial Capital

Istanbul (then still often called Constantinople in Jewish sources) attracted court physicians, financiers, and scholars who needed proximity to imperial patronage. Sephardi refugees joined older Romaniot and Ashkenazi communities, sometimes competing over rabbinic authority and liturgical custom, but converging on the same Tiberian text.

In the capital, exile scholarship met the older networks described in Middle Eastern and MENA notes: Palestinian pointing, Babylonian responsa, Karaite neighbors in the eastern cities. Sephardi grammarians supplied the pedagogical layer, how to teach niqqud, how to resolve ambiguous forms, how to align scroll copying with Maimonides’ legislated standard. Istanbul’s printers and copyists thus became a hinge between Iberian exegesis and the wider Ottoman Jewish world.

IV. Safed and the Land of Israel

Not all Ottoman Sephardim remained in the Balkans. Many settled in the Galilee, especially Safed (Tzfat), which in the sixteenth century became a center of Kabbalistic study as well as halakhic codification. Figures such as Joseph Caro, author of the Shulchan Arukh, and the mystics around Isaac Luria were part of this Sephardi migration.

For biblical scholarship the Safed circle matters because it treated the Masoretic text as simultaneously legal, liturgical, and mystical data. Scribes and correctors (magihim) continued to vet scrolls and codices; printers prepared editions for export across the empire. The land of Israel thus became another node in the post-1492 republic of Hebrew learning, linked by correspondence and family ties to Salonica and Istanbul as well as to older centers in Cairo and Damascus.

V. Printing, Yeshivot, and the Material Text

Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire scaled what Iberian scribes had once copied by hand. Presses in Salonica, Istanbul, and later Izmir issued Pentateuchs, prayer books, and editions of Ibn Ezra and Kimḥi that traveled to North Africa and the eastern provinces. Print did not erase manuscript culture, Torah scrolls still had to be handwritten, but it democratized access to commentaries and grammars that had once been confined to wealthy households.

The Venetian Mikraot Gedolot of Daniel Bomberg (1516–1517) belongs to the same post-expulsion moment, but Ottoman presses ensured that Spanish exegesis remained central in lands under Muslim rule, a counterpoint to the ghettoization of Jewish learning in much of Christian Europe. → Italy note

VI. Minhag Sefarad and the Andalusian Inheritance

Exiles did not only transport books; they transported minhag, customary law and liturgy shaped in Iberia. Minhag Sefarad in Ottoman lands preserved Andalusian pronunciation habits, poetic insertions in the liturgy, and a preference for certain commentaries in public study. Rabbis cited Kimḥi’s Mikhlol as readily as earlier generations had in Barcelona or Lisbon.

The Ottoman Sephardi achievement was continuity under displacement: the same rational grammar that had made the pointed Bible teachable in Córdoba now instructed students who had never seen Spain. That continuity is the final chapter of a longer arc, from Golden Age academies through Almohad flight and the trauma of 1492 to a Mediterranean diaspora that kept the Masoretic text alive in print, chant, and law.

Selected Bibliography