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We try to see beyond Ashkenazi world and glimpsed into the greater Jewish mosaic. Today, we're really delighted to speak with Professor Yaron Ayalon, associate professor at the College of Charleston. Today, we'll be speaking about his book, The Admin Jews, Leadership, Charity, and Literacy published by Brill in 2025. But welcome, Professor Yaron, and thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Well, rather than me introducing you, it always helps, I think, for you to tell us some key points about what makes you you and the background of the book a little. Sure. So I'm an American Israeli historian of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Jews, and preferably all of these combined.
I've been studying this for about two decades now. I'm now teaching at the College of Charleston. Before that, I thought of a few other institutions. I got my PhD from Princeton in 2009.
And this is my second book about Ottoman Jews, which emerged in part from not even my dissertation work, but ideas I had back then while I was working on my dissertation. And since then, the research has expanded quite a bit. My first book was about natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire. And at the time, I had this fascination with bad stuff that happens to people.
So I wrote the first book. The second book, this one that we're about to discuss, is about the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and my feeling about certain things that we had to correct in the narrative. That was my starting point. Excellent.
So to make sure that we're starting at a good place, let's define some terms. OK? So you mentioned in the book, Ottoman-ism, it's a hardware to say, sorry. So I'm going to give you a list of some words.
And I need you. Maybe we'll just, I'll do Ottoman-ism, and you tell us, so we're all starting at the same place. And then I'll give you a few more terms. Ottoman-ism, it's sort of hard to define.
It's a sense of identity that people shared across the vast domains of the Ottoman Empire, which there weren't that many things that people had in common in Bulgaria and in Syria, but there were a few. OK. So basically what pulled them together. Yeah.
You want to just make sure everybody knows what we're talking about in terms of geography when we're talking about the Ottoman Empire? Yes, absolutely. So the Ottoman Empire started around the year 1300, and it lasted till World War I. But in its high moment, in terms of expansion and territory and all that, it ruled the vast land from really the outskirts of Vienna all the way to what would be today Saudi Arabia, or we could say the Arab Middle East, and then extensive parts of North Africa.
It wasn't always that large. But let's say in the mid-16th century or even the early 17th, that's the size of the empire that we're talking about. OK. And I need to clarify one more thing before we get into this.
The Svardim, Roman Yot, and Mustard Libyan. Mustard al-Boon. Yes. So we are talking about different traditions, different denominations, different prayer styles, different customs, cultures, food.
I mean, in really any aspect that we're looking at it, language, of course, we have sort of different types or different ways of practicing Judaism that are tied to the places where people lived and the different people with whom they shared this life, who were non-Jews, like the people among whom they lived. So when we say Svardim, we generally speak about those who came from Iberia, from Spain and Portugal, and who were expelled from there in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, that's one group. And then the other group you said Mustardiboon, those are what we call Arabized Jews, meaning the Jews who lived among Arabs before the Svardim came into the area we call the Middle East today, meaning Jews who spoke Arabic, whose customs were very similar to the Arabs who were living in the same area. And many of them adopted some Svardi customs, even if not the language, maybe they continue to speak Arabic, but some other customs are prayer style, many of them adopted Svardi prayer styles.
But we still have quite a bit of information about them. They were not entirely assimilated in a way that we can't tell the difference. And Romaniel Jews, the third group you mentioned, these were Jews who lived under the Byzantine Empire. They spoke Greek, their liturgy was often, they had Greek elements in it, and many of them were sort of folded into Sephardic identity, but not entirely.
We still in fact have a few Romaniel congregations that still operate today. Right, and that's an important point, as always, continued although the Mustardiboon kind of did get, we'll talk about that later. Well, Mustardiboon adopted Sephardi customs, but in areas like Iraq and Syria, for example, Arabic prevailed and not so much Latino. And so many of the customs have been preserved through the language that has been preserved.
Thank you. So you said before we got into these technical terms that you wanted to spell some of the misunderstandings of Ottoman Jewry. So let's start with one misunderstanding, just to get to what are appetite? Okay, sure, there are a few of these, but the easiest one is the great myth that once the Jews were expelled from Spain, the Ottomans invited the Jews to come and settle.
There's the story of Sultan Bayazita II, who allegedly said that the monarchs of Spain were foolish or idiots or whatever it is that he said, it doesn't matter because he didn't say it. But anyways, allegedly he said that. And therefore- That's a widespread myth, I mean, that's what I'm sure most of the word is, but it never happened. And therefore he invited the Jews to come in and settle in the Ottoman Empire saying, I'm going to enrich my empire with all of those people that this other guy didn't want it.
But it's a myth, it's a myth not only because it's not documented anywhere. The first place is where this is mentioned is like several centuries later and then sort of other historians just repeating this myth without actually checking, going back to check if this guy ever said this thing, but even on a logical level, there would be no need for the Ottomans to invite anyone because the one thing the Ottomans cared about most, more than anything else was money. And when non-Muslims came in and settled in the empire, non-Muslims paid more taxes than Muslims. So the more the merrier, there would not have been a need to do this to invite anyone.
In fact, of course, the Ottomans were really very thankful for the opportunity of the party Jews to come and settle in their empire. Yes, because it enriched their empire. There would not have been a need to do this. Part of this idea of the need to invite comes from our understanding of countries and borders, which is a very modern sort of 19th, 20th century kind of understanding that, well, you have a country, therefore you have a border and you need permission to cross the border, there was no such thing.
Borders were porous. You could just go and settle wherever you wanted it. And in the Ottoman case, just pay your taxes and they didn't really care much about anything else. Let's remember, this is an empire that if you paid your taxes and you did not mess around with the wrong people, you could get away with almost anything.
You could kill your annoying neighbor and they wouldn't care unless your neighbor was connected somehow to the administration. They wouldn't care about it. So long as you paid your taxes on time. It was a very sort of hands-off kind of empire.
So it would absolutely make no sense for them to even discuss permission or non-permission of anyone to settle in their empire. That's just not how the Ottomans operate. Interesting. I'm sure that's gonna go to a lot of salon discussions in different homes.
But we're gonna keep talking about it. I encourage you to read the book because it's definitely analyzed there in more detail. But you talked about the different migrations of the different Jews. Let's talk about now their interactions.
Once they get there, you talk about the Romaniot de Nissamble and Salimika, the parallel the spartium seria who regard themselves as superior to the Mstaribine. And then of course, our Ashkenazi that play in there as well. So let's talk a little bit about the different interactions. So there is still a lot that we don't know.
And in part, we don't know it because a lot of the sources that have survived sort of present one side. And that's really the side, mostly of the safari rabbis. That's 85, 90% of the evidence we have comes from them. So we, I mean, I wish there were texts.
And maybe they're out there and I haven't discovered them yet of Ashkenazi or Moustari-Bun rabbis who wrote about the very negative experience they had with the coming of the safari-Bun. But I haven't seen anything like that. So we don't know. What we do know is that it was a game of numbers.
If you have a community where there's a flood of safari immigrants who come in, who didn't identify as safari at first. And Jonathan Ray has shown this in his own studies, that it took some time until what we call safari identity develop. But anyways, they came with a different identity. Doesn't matter how we call it.
Iberian identity, OK? Identity of the town they came from in Spain. They spoke a different language. They prayed differently.
And when a few of them show up, it's OK. But when you have significantly more of them than of the Jews who were in town before, well, then that's what happens. And we see the Ottoman tax records that initially the Ottomans were able to distinguish between the different groups. Like they actually had different tax brackets.
They would say those who came from this place, those who came from that place. But by the early 17th century, those categories sort of disappear. And it's just Jews. Because I assume that at that point, the Ottomans too couldn't tell the difference.
Obviously, the Jews themselves could tell the difference where they came from. But in the end, what we're seeing is because this is such a mass migration, the experience overall is an experience of sort of not really clashing, but assimilation of different cultures, where, again, which way it went depended on local circumstances. So the reason why we don't know this for sure, but the reason why in Syria and Iraq, we get Arabic preserved, we assume is because the Empire administration of the land was still done in Arabic, meaning even Ottoman officials who were sent to administer those areas had to know Arabic. They couldn't really, I mean, yes, some of them were Turks, but then they learned Arabic.
You couldn't really get anything done. Because of the way that society was structured, we have families of notables, meaning that those long established large families that controlled a lot of the social aspects. This is among Muslims, not among Jews. But because these guys were so influential, the Ottomans had to understand and function in Arabic.
So the entire administration of those lands was done in Arabic. And therefore, it just made sense, even for those Jews who came in to pick up Arabic at some point. And this is as far as we can take this explanation for why anything Spanish doesn't take hold. It takes hold a little bit.
We see it here and there in the sources, some words in Spanish and Latino are mentioned. But in the end, we're talking about a society that functioned in Arabic. And so there are local differences between different places in the empire. And that's just part of the overall experience of migration and resettlement.
Interesting. And we talked, you just mentioned that some of them did keep a Latino, but when you go to Syria and Iraq, there wasn't, there was almost non-existence. So I think that's an honor. I would just add that Latino itself is the way we talk about.
And I'm not a linguist. I'm not an expert. But my understanding is that this, too, is a language that develops essentially as part of the Ottoman Safari experience, because before that, we have different dialects and different types of Jewish Spanish, if you wish. So yeah, that too develops as part of this Ottoman experience.
Right. And to me, it's brilliant to watch the evolution here. So thank you for adding to that. And one of the things you say that adds to it, and I guess that's building on your previous book, are the climate and natural conditions that ends even political and economic stability.
So since it's a pet peeve of yours, let's talk about that a bit. Yeah, sure. So I haven't invented this notion that we have to look at climatic issues to understand human history. Many great historians have done this before me.
And even in the Ottoman context, a few people have started this before I did. They include Samwe, Al-Amis-Ail, and there were a few others. So we know that the Ottomans were very concerned about climatic changes and the environment in general. And they were concerned about it, again, because they cared about preserving their authority and they cared about money.
And you can't have prosperity when the climate is acting up. So we know that the 16th century was a time, especially the first half of the 16th century, was a time of great convenience overall. I'll say that. In general, historians like to talk about the Little Ice Age as this period of the cooling of the Earth that lasts from, let's say, around 1300 to something like the 1750s.
But in the middle of that period, that is, between, let's say, let's just say the first half of the 16th century. There was a gradual warming of temperatures. And then it reverses again and things become the first half of the 17th century or the last two or three decades of the 16th. Everything becomes cooler again.
But in this period, let's say, 1,550 and 65. The climate is in such a better position, meaning temperatures are convenient. It's not too hot. It's not too cold.
It rains in the winter or it's nose where it needs to snow. The summers are fairly dry. Everything is good for growing crops, for example. And so we see a period of tremendous growth, economic.
We see a period of political stability. And we actually can look at this. There is even a period of quite a long stretch in the mid-16th century, where all the way from the West in Portugal, all the way to the East in China, it's the same rulers. There is no regime change.
There is no even transition of power. There's nothing. It's just the same people. And when we have good climate and we get political stability, that's better news for minorities.
It's better news for people who aren't rich and connected. But it's even better news for religious or social minorities. And that explains why this was a fairly good moment for Jews, even though it started off really badly with them being kicked out of Spain in Portugal. But they arrived in the Ottoman Empire at a great time.
And most of this wonderful period, they're under the rule of Suleiman, who is considered to have been a great Sultan overall. Why do you say considered to have been? Considered to have been. I mean, yes, I think the evidence points to that issue, but to that assessment.
But I'm sure some people who are negatively affected by his regime might have disagreed. But it was not a liberal democracy, obviously. So we just have to keep that in mind. So yeah, I mean, this was overall a really good time.
If Jews already had to be kicked out of one place, be uprooted and then find a new home, this was probably the best time before the 20th century, I suppose. This was the best time to do that. So that's that. And then we get to the 17th century.
And this has been extensively covered in the literature, not just about the Ottoman Empire, but in general, the story rough period because of diseases and wars and climate. And historians have already established that these were all connected to one another. Failing crops, wars, one feeds the other. So at that period, it was also very rough on Jews in the Ottoman Empire as well.
And I talked about that in the book too. Excellent. And so the book, let's talk about the layout of the book now, itself, because we kind of jumped into it. But the name of the book is Leadership Charity and Literacy.
So tell us how the book is laid out. Well, first of all, we have to recognize the titles of books are often provided by a... It's sort of a layout of the narrative as I see it with those points that I feel need to be addressed such as some of those myths that we've mentioned before. And then there are three chapters that deal with those issues that appear in the title.
So it's leadership and leadership includes a communal organization. And that leads to the question of how does the charity defend, how communities function as sort of a relief agency or their sort of significant role that they played in the lives of everyone? Because let's remember, this is a time before state institutions like Social Security. You could be rich one day and lose everything the next day just because the breadwinner and the family died of play.
So yes, so how a community could support you, that was a significant part of the experience. And then we get to the issue of literacy and education. And the sort of overarching theme in all of these is that we see a gradual process from the early 16th century to the late 18th of rabbis who initially see themselves as the governors of their communities, the people whose word is binding, that they can essentially tell people what to do and they do it, that maybe yes, they get appointed by a community to lead them, but once they've been appointed, it's for life and they get to call the shots and everything else has to do exactly what they say. And this probably was never like that, but at least the rabbis perceived it to be that way.
And as we progress throughout those two and a half centuries or three centuries, we see an erosion in the status of rabbis that even they themselves admit. So with charity, for example, we see that there are non-communal or extra-communal initiatives to provide similar services to what the community does. But once you do that, you're no longer under obligation to do things as the rabbis tell you to do. Or when it comes to education, the emergence of initiatives that are outside of the community, like educating kids at someone's house, for example, or renting and the availability of books that allowed people to access information without having to go to the rabbi and ask for that information.
So all of these processes, these developments lead to an erosion, not in the role of the community of people, but really in the role of rabbis who are gradually replaced by lay leaders. And my claim is also that the lay leaders were always, even at the high point of rabbis, the lay leaders were always the stronger politically in those communities. They just become even more strong as the time progresses. So that's overall the story of this book.
Right, so let's talk a little bit about those Parnasim or lay leaders. And I'm sure anybody who's done any type of background knows that there's the ha-ha-ha-ha, the ha-ha-ha-ha, but you kind of dispel some of those as well. So let's talk about one of the misunderstandings of those titles or how they came to play. Yeah, sure.
So first of all, in terms of titles, we have a bunch of titles that keep being thrown out throughout the literature. In the end, this is not a top-down society with very clearly defined titles. That's just not how it goes. So we have titles like Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha to do it.
They all don't tell us much about who the person was except that that person was somewhat of some evidence. We don't really have official positions. There were some exceptions. We know that, in Ismirah in the 17th century, we have a system of appointing someone to actually be the leading rabbi of the community, but overall, these are exceptions.
And most of the time, throughout Ottoman Jewish History, that's just not what we get. So that's one area. And that kind of leadership is something that's really a function of individuals. They're charisma, they're standing, they're intellectual eminence.
Yeah, that's really how that worked. And we don't really have an official appointment of a Chief Rabbi until 1835. And even that is done by the Ottomans themselves. And yes, those Chief Rabbis did play a significant role in various events in the Ottoman Jewish community, but that already lies outside of the scope of my book in part because it's the 19th century and that has been covered quite a bit by others.
Thank you. So now let's move over to charity. Right, we went from leadership, now we're going into charity as we broke down the book. And you mentioned on page 145 that Jewish practices of charity presented a middle ground between European and Ottoman Islamic models.
Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah, sure. So what I mean by this is that Jews did not live in a vacuum. They lived among the people that were the majority most of the time, whether it was European Christians in Europe or Muslims in the Ottoman Empire.
And their practices of charity were obviously came from the Jewish tradition. They came from mostly from my monadies. He was the guy who really defined how Jewish charity should work in practice. Yes, those things appear in the Talmud, but my monadies was the one who put everything in order and really explained to us, okay, well, here are these principles from the Talmud, how do they actually work?
And he's the one who put it together in an entire section devoted to this issue. Many of those practices, we have parabels for them in the Islamic world, but also in Christian Europe. So I talked about that in the book a little bit. Not to say that Jews were not original or that Jews didn't care about charity as much as others, but just to show that the existence of any communal support system was something that Jews did not invent.
And they, or maybe they didn't invent it once upon a time and others took it from them and then Jews took it again from the others. But the bottom line is that what we see Jews doing in the Ottoman Empire is parallel in many ways to charity among Muslims. Yes, there are differences, but parallel and what we see Jews doing in Europe is parallel to many practices among European Christians. And yeah, that's just how it is.
We have to look at the examples from those other traditions because those examples teach us about how humans in general perceive this idea of helping and supporting the poor and the weak, and elements in society that they perceive that needed to be supported. And it's most of the time the same type of elements like widows and orphans, which we see in Christian, Muslim and Jewish society. So yeah, I think when we talk about how communities function in terms of poverty and charity, we have to look at the parallels from other traditions because they're more similar than they were dissimilar, I guess. Yeah, and to be fair, the similarities also come from the cross-cultural influences.
If you're talking about Maimonides, he was part of the Islamic world. I mean, that was so... And he knew that world quite well, it's what alien to it. Yeah, that's right.
And do you imagine that there were the Ottomans enjoyed some of the minorities because of the extra taxes? So there were, you mentioned two, sorry, four different taxes, two state imposed and two to fund the community. So how does that play? And you mentioned a minute ago, a few minutes ago that it was not really imposed, but yet it was imposed.
Can you explain a little bit about those four different types? Well, I'll be honest that I don't remember exactly the type of taxes that I wrote in my own book, but I will say that there were taxes that were imposed by the Ottoman state, and those were imposed some on everyone, some only on non-Muslims. And then there are those taxes that are imposed by the religious community itself. And this raises the question, if I live in a mixed neighborhood with other Muslims, for example, and they don't have those additional taxes, what incentive do I have to pay more money than they do?
I'm already paying the state more money because I'm not Muslim. Why would I, in addition to that, want to also support my community? And in the book, I deal with this question. I think it's a very important question because the community was technically a voluntary association, but we know that it wasn't really voluntary.
People were dependent on it in a way that they couldn't just say, you know what, I'm bitching the community and I never want to show up at the synagogue. Yes, not everyone was devout and religious and went to the synagogue every day. There were, there was a whole class of merchants, for example, that traveled around and didn't show up all the time, but they did show up in key moments. They did contribute.
They probably paid more than they were expected to pay. And so that's how they were part of the community. And there was this understanding that you can't really avoid that and you also don't want to avoid it. It's not a question of, do you like praying or do you believe in something or all the questions that we raised perhaps today about this.
It was just from a practical standpoint. First of all, you had to pay your taxes through your communal leaders who would then pass them on to the Ottomans. You didn't have another choice. That's how it worked.
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You could decide, you know, I don't like the leaders of this congregation. I'm moving to another one. That was okay. You were still part of the greater Jewish community in that town though.
So in that sense, that wasn't volunteer. Right. Which I think is one of the reasons I like the word bittkenesic instead of synagogue because it's a gathering place. It's a place where you kind of have interactions and it's a home.
And we see that you mentioned that there are regional homes as well and the city homes and the rabbis would receive responses from not only their community, but their region more. Although there were some that went to some of the great rabbis of the time, but in general, you asked the question to the rabbi of your region or your community. And most of the time not in writing. So we don't like most of our assumption is that most of those questions that people asked, they're lost.
We're not going to see them. What we see in those response collections are those that got reserved. My assumption is that the majority of what was asked at the time was not was not preserved. So you're assuming also that most of it was asked because you talk about also the lay leaders of scholars as I went on.
And that's like today, many people will just open a tax or open Google or some of those searches. Well, that's part of the process that I talk about is that when the books become more available, people tend to ask less because they can open the books and ask. But I still think that the majority, at least till the end of the period that I cover in the book, till the end of the 18th century, the majority of people would not do that. Yes, books were more accessible and rabbis were concerned about not having as many people dependent on them, but there were still enough people who would send in questions.
My sense is that many of those questions were asked in person. So we don't have any record of them. And that some were perhaps sent in, but they never found themselves into a response collection that then got edited and printed. So we also don't know about that.
But that was the practice. People needed guidance and they would ask. And sometimes the guidance was asked of a local, not very significant rabbi who maybe put them in writing, but it was never published. So maybe there's a manuscript of it somewhere.
And I give a few examples in the book for these of manuscripts that we were able to find. There were a few of them actually at the Hebrew, I mean, at the National Library of Israel. But if you think about this, even someone who put it in writing in a manuscript and it never got published, so this answer only served the person who asked the question. It never got to serve anyone else, right?
Because the book was never disseminated. Whereas if you look at the works of, you know, the great, more famous rabbis like Yosifka or Kline Benvenisti or like those people, obviously their works got disseminated and printed or Moshe and Isoen, Yosif, Mitilani, their works got disseminated, people read them and sure, those are the easier responses to get to. But we assume, at least I assume that there's a whole other level of those questions and answers that we just don't have access to and we're never going to have access to. And maybe some of that will also tell more of the female story, which is where I certainly think so, because we do know that we have questions either coming in directly from women or that involve women in some way or another.
So we can easily assume that there was a lot more of that that we just can't see right now. And when you're talking about different types of texts, and maybe this is where you get some of your facts as well, I don't know, you mentioned that there were non-urban sources as well in terms of texts that started to come out. Yeah, but not very many. At least not in the period that I'm looking into.
In the 19th century, sure, there are a few texts of written by Jews who lived or passed through the Ottoman Empire that were not rabbinical texts. But they are not, I did not find them to be very helpful, in part because they venture into the realm of fantasy. And the most famous case of these is the chronicle of Eliaocop Salih, which who was a rabbi, but he didn't write that chronicle as a rabbi, although I guess you could probably never disassociate yourself. But anyways, he wrote this as a history, but it's full of fantastic inventions of stuff that clearly never happened.
So it's not very much used to us. And we have another chronicle of Josef Sambalu. Again, a lot of stuff there is just, we clearly know that it didn't happen that way. So we have to be very careful.
In my view, those works weren't very useful, and I didn't make much use of them in trying to document the history of undocumented. Perhaps we will find more in the future. I'm not sure. I think that they created this fantasy genre there.
But I understand, separate from this. So thank you. I think you definitely helped us readjust the way we're viewing the Ottoman Empire in general, and the type of interactions that there were. And there's much more in the book, obviously.
We just had to find a few points. At the new books network, we always, oh, sorry. You all have to go and read the book. That's the point.
Right. So this is not inside of the book. At the new books network, we always like to know what you're working on now. So what can we expect to see from you next?
Well, that's a great question. I actually have one big project plan that sort of emanated from this, and that is something to do with Ottoman Jews and emotions. So emotions history is a big sort of subfield of historical inquiry. And has been for the last 20 years or so.
But not much has been done in the context of either Jews or anything Middle Eastern. There's a little bit, but maybe not a lot. So I have some ideas. I have an article about this coming out.
So I've done some preliminary work there. And we'll see how that develops. But I think this is probably where the next project is going. That sounds fascinating.
I am so excited to read about that. I am not exposed to that field. So thank you. We definitely look forward to hearing that.
And for people to read the book, we have been speaking with Professor Yellen Ayalon about his book, Ottoman Jewelry, Leadership, Charity, and Literacy, published by Brill. It has been a true pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Have a wonderful rest of your day.