Jews enjoyed a level of prosperity under the relatively benign six centuries of Ottoman rule
The Jewish community across the vast Ottoman Empire fared relatively well, especially compared to other-less fortunate Diaspora communities. Jews were relegated to “dhimmi” status, with various discriminatory laws limiting their participation in civil society and commerce, and they were required to pay the jizya, a high tax levied on non-Muslims in the empire. But they still enjoyed a level of prosperity under the relatively benign six centuries of Ottoman rule.
The Ottoman Empire saw a large influx of Spanish and Portuguese Jews following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the last decade of the 15th century. By the end of the 16th century, the Ottoman Jewish population was the largest in the world. The Ottoman government granted the Jewish community — as it did to other monotheistic minorities — a measure of legal and religious autonomy, with its own courts, under a recognized chacham bashi (chief rabbi).
By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was a backward, non-industrialized society facing economic decline and rising nationalism, known to the great European powers as “the sick man of Europe.” The sweeping tanzimat reforms of the 1840s and ’50s, which attempted to modernize the Ottoman economy and society, included the Imperial Reform Edict of 1856, granting equality and citizenship to subjects of all religions, and abolishing the hated jizya tax. An 1865 reform gave the Jewish community more autonomy in the form of a constitution and a Jewish national assembly.
With the rise of Sultan Abdul Hamid II to the throne in 1876, these reforms took a decidedly different turn. He continued to modernize the state bureaucracy, education, and industry, investing heavily in an expansion of the Ottoman railway system. But as a staunch Islamist and absolutist monarch, he slowed and even reversed some of the political and religious reforms of the previous decades. His rule, which lasted more than three decades, was the last to exert absolute authority in an increasingly fractured and weakened empire.
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