History of the Jews in Turkey

Common card · No. 207539

The history of the Jews in Turkey (Turkish: Türk Yahudileri or Türk Musevileri; Hebrew: יְהוּדִים טוּרְקִים, romanized: Yehudim Turkim; Ladino: Djudios Turkos) covers the 2400 years that Jews have lived in what is now Turkey. There have been Jewish communities in Anatolia since at least the beginning of the common era. Anatolia's Jewish population before Ottoman times primarily consisted of Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews, with a handful of dispersed Karaite communities. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many Sephardic Jews from Spain, Portugal and South Italy expelled by the Alhambra Decree found refuge across the Ottoman Empire, including in regions now part of Turkey. This influx played a pivotal role in shaping the predominant identity of Ottoman Jews. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Jewish population in the Ottoman Empire was double (150,000) that of Jews in Poland and Ukraine combined (75,000), far surpassing other Jewish communities to be the largest in...

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