MUSLIMS WERE NOT the only Ottoman subjects who viewed sultans as God-sent messiahs. So, too, did Jews.1 Massacred, forcibly converted, and expelled from every medieval kingdom in Christian Europe, including England, Jews found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Following their forced departure from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, as many as one hundred thousand Spanish and Portuguese Jews, as well as a large number of conversos (Iberian Jews compelled to convert to Catholicism) migrated to the Ottoman Empire. There, conversos found that they were able to return to Judaism, which was a crime punishable by death in Western Europe. Jews were amazed to discover that they were relatively free to openly practice Judaism in the Ottoman Empire, unlike almost anywhere else in contemporary Europe. Thanks in part to the Ottomans, for much of history Jews have had a positive image of Muslims. Equally astounding was the fact that individual Jews rose to important positions at the Ottoman court.
Between 1453 and 1600, Jews served the dynasty as privy physicians, diplomats, translators, advisors, spies, and ladies-in-waiting to the harem and were given licence to conduct trade as international bankers. Prominent Jews included the illustrious physicians and diplomatic agents Joseph (born in 1450 in Granada) and Moses Hamon. The Portuguese converso and international merchant Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi headed one of the greatest family businesses in Western Europe. Forcibly converted to Catholicism and then persecuted for being secret Jews, she and members of her family, including her nephew, João Miguez, migrated to the Ottoman Empire in order to return to their ancestral Judaism, bringing their wealth and connections with them. Miguez, who would become the duke of Naxos, also served the Ottoman court as a diplomatic agent. A relative of Gracia Mendes and Miguez, the Portuguese Jew Don Alvaro Mendes (Salomon ibn Yaesh), would serve as counsellor to Murad III and helped establish close relations between England and the Ottoman Empire, both eager to counter Phillip II of Spain. Physician, advisor, diplomatic agent, and international merchant Salomon ben Natan Eskenazi would become the trusted advisor of Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and official envoy of the sultan to Venice and the Habsburgs.2
The prominence of such Jews at court and the fact that after 1517 the Ottomans controlled the Holy Land meant that Jews could make pilgrimage to or settle in Jerusalem. This raised Jews’ messianic expectations. Used to brutal treatment at the hands of Christians, Jews across the Mediterranean were grateful for this reception and wrote ecstatic accounts of the Ottomans.
Messianic desires and an emotional state of gratefulness compelled Jews in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries to be exceptionally loyal to the Ottoman sultans, who at that time ruled one of the only kingdoms in the world that permitted them to be Jews. This shaped a utopian image of the Ottomans and their sultan. Jews saw the Ottoman sultan as a personification of the empire, depicting him in messianic terms as God’s rod, the one who fulfils God’s plan in the world by smiting the Jews’ Christian oppressors. They also credited him for gathering the Jewish diaspora from across the Mediterranean, conquering Jerusalem, and enabling Jews to settle in the Holy Land. In their view, these all served as signs and wonders, omens for the beginning of the messianic age and the redemption of the Jews.
Rabbi Elijah ben Elkanah Capsali of Candia (Iráklion, on Venetian Crete), wrote ecstatically of Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman I. He saw them as redeemers of the Jews, players in the cosmic drama between the forces of good and evil that preceded the advent of the messiah.3 While Greeks lamented how ‘all things turned to evil. What and how and why? Because of our sins!’, non-Greek Jews had the opposite reaction to the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire.4 The sultans were ‘messengers of God’ who punished ‘wicked’ nations and gathered the exiled Jews.5 Capsali claimed that God had promised Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, ‘a kingdom as hard as iron’. This is a reference to the fourth kingdom of the vision of Daniel in the Bible, the last before the redemption to attack the Jews’ oppressors.6 That is why God brought the Turks from a faraway land, blessed them, and made the Ottomans great and powerful.7 The Turk ‘is the rod’ of God’s wrath with which ‘God punishes the different nations’.8 Having punished Byzantine Constantinople, God made Ottoman Istanbul flourish as a reward to the sultan, who had carried out God’s will.9 Jews looked to Suleiman I with hope, for he was the tenth Ottoman sultan, and, as the Torah predicts, ‘every tenth one shall be holy to God’ and ‘in his days Judah shall be delivered and Israel shall dwell secure’ and ‘a redeemer shall come to Zion’.10
Imbued with such millenarian expectations, Solomon Molho—the former Diego Pires, a Portuguese converso who had returned to Judaism in the Ottoman Empire, where he studied Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism)—proclaimed himself as the messiah around 1525. In Regensburg, Bavaria, he had an audience with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The meeting did not go well, and Molho was turned over to the Inquisition. He was burned at the stake in 1532.
As messianic views continued to be kindled, subsequent Jewish writers expressed ecstatic gratefulness to the sultans. One of them was Portuguese converso Samuel Usque. Usque, an ardent follower of Solomon Molho, believed his group’s suffering marked the end of history. The great comfort was that all these travails were foretold by the prophets, and that as the prophecies of evil were verified, so should Jews trust that the prophecies of good would also be fulfilled. Writing to fellow exiles, he argued that conversos suffered because the millennium was at hand, after which a new age would dawn and their misfortunes would end.11 Like the nations around them, Jews, he argued, had sinned and become idolatrous. For this they had been punished by God. If they repented, God would forgive them. If they returned to Judaism and God, their misfortunes would end. Usque interpreted the expulsions from Christian Europe as fulfilments of biblical prophecies, which meant that once all the conversos returned to Judaism, redemption of the Jews would be at hand.12
Usque argued that the Ottoman Empire was the greatest consolation for the persecution of Jewry.13 He compared the Ottoman Empire to the Red Sea, across which the Israelites had fled to safety from the pharaohs of Egypt. According to him, the Ottoman Empire ‘is like a broad and expansive sea which our Lord has opened with the rod of His mercy, as Moses did for you in the Exodus from Egypt, so that the swells of your present misfortunes, which relentlessly pursue you in all the kingdoms of Europe like the infinite multitude of Egyptians, might cease and be consumed by it’. In the Ottoman Empire ‘the gates of liberty are always wide open for you that you may fully practice your Judaism’.14 Jews were allowed to embrace their former faith and abandon the rites they had been forced to adopt.
Other writers continued the inter-Jewish dialogue, praising the Ottomans in emotional, messianic terms. Joseph ben Joshua ha-Kohen was born in France, the son of expelled Castilian Spanish Jews. His family was subsequently expelled from Provence, and he spent most of his life in Genoa, where he also faced expulsion decrees. He aimed to prove that Christians were being punished by the Ottomans for the calamities to which they subjected Jews and that redemption was at hand.15 He described Mehmed II as ‘a scourge and breaker of the uncircumcised’ [the Christians].16 In describing Suleiman I’s reign, ha-Kohen argued that the messianic age was approaching and that the Ottoman and Habsburg dynasties represented the forces of good and evil. The world war between these empires meant that the prophecy of Ezekiel—in which the enemies of the Jews would be defeated and the Temple restored—was being realised.
For ha-Kohen, God had awakened the sultan’s soul to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, predicting the messiah would come in his lifetime. Suleiman I rebuilt the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The walls include Jaffa and Damascus Gates, as well as the sealed Golden Gate, or Gate of Mercy, located on the eastern side of the Temple Mount. According to Jews, this was the door through which the messiah would come. According to Christians, the messiah had already come through this door in the person of Jesus.
Along with these Mediterranean Jews, Ottoman Jews such as Samuel de Medina—chief rabbi of Salonica, Macedonia, and scion of a Castilian family—also believed God caused Mehmed II to besiege Istanbul and allowed him to capture it.
In messianic expectation, Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi settled former conversos returned to Judaism in the Holy Land. She paid for the construction of public works, housing, and a synagogue in Tiberias. She had mulberry trees planted to jump-start the silk industry and imported merino sheep to be raised for their high-quality wool. Gracia Mendes planned to move to Tiberias, close to the main Kabbalist centre of Safed, due to feverish expectations about the onset of the messianic era, but she passed away in 1569 before doing so.17
Her nephew João Miguez played a more significant role in the Ottoman Empire. Having worked as Gracia Mendes’s agent and representative in Western Europe, Miguez migrated to Istanbul and returned to Judaism, becoming known as Don Joseph Nasi.18 Unlike his aunt, Joseph Nasi was able to enter royal circles, specifically that of Prince Selim, who became Selim II upon Suleiman I’s death in 1566.
During Selim II’s reign (1566–1574), Joseph Nasi, whose commercial agents in Western Europe proved useful for gathering intelligence for the Ottomans, quickly rose at court as an advisor and diplomat. Throughout the 1560s, he negotiated treaties with Poland, the Habsburgs, and France, and promoted rebellions by Protestants in the Netherlands and by Moriscos—Spanish Muslims converted to Catholicism—in Spain. He allegedly convinced the sultan to launch the successful conquest of Venetian Cyprus in 1571. In return, he was named duke of Naxos and the rest of the Cyclades, a group of recently annexed former Venetian islands in the south Aegean Sea. His wife, Gracia Jr., was named the duchess of Naxos.19 He was granted extensive tax farms, as well as the monopoly on the regional wine trade. Contemporary Western European accounts of this Jewish man’s alleged desire to be ‘king of Cyprus’ made him the scapegoat for Ottoman failures during the Age of Discovery. But the fact that other Europeans considered the Ottomans a decisive sea power during the era is significant. For the Age of Discovery was also a time of critical successes for the Ottoman Empire.