A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453-1566

This volume presents the transformation of the Greek-speaking, Romaniot Jewish community of Byzantine Constantinople into an Ottoman, ethnically diversified immigrant community, showing the influence of the Ottoman conquest on cultural and social values. New and existing sources illuminate a society that was haunted by the dislocation and bereavement of the expulsion from Spain but was nevertheless materialistic and pleasure-seeking, with money and pedigree as supreme values. The society constantly redefined its relationships and boundaries with its former Iberian world and with the Ottoman non-Jewish world around it. The book is important to the study of Istanbul, particularly its Ottoman Jewish community. The chapters on Family Formation and Social Patterns serve family historians studying the early modern period. This second edition contains several pages of corrections and additions.