When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Empire took in tens of thousands of them. For the next four centuries Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne were among the great centers of the Sephardi world, where Judeo-Spanish was spoken in the street, printed in books and sung in the synagogue. This page covers the Jews of Turkey from antiquity to the small community of today. For Salonica and Rhodes, see Greek Jews; for Sarajevo, Sofia and Monastir, see Balkan Jews; for the wider Ottoman story, see Eastern Sephardim.
Origins
Jews lived in Anatolia long before the Ottomans. The historian Josephus records that the Seleucid king Antiochus III settled 2,000 Jewish families in Lydia and Phrygia in the late 3rd century BCE, and Jewish communities appear across Asia Minor in the Roman period. Under Byzantine rule these Greek-speaking Jews became the Romaniotes, the same community found in Greece.
The Ottomans took Bursa in 1324, and its Etz ha-Hayim synagogue is the first linked to Ottoman rule. After Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he moved Jewish communities from across his lands into the capital to repopulate it. Romaniote Jews remembered this forced move as an exile of their own.
The Sephardi connection
Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) admitted the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and later refugees from Portugal and Italy. Many settled in Constantinople, which by the 16th century had about 30,000 Jews and 44 synagogues, most of them congregations named for their towns of origin. Others went to Salonica, Edirne, Bursa, Manisa and later Izmir. Within a few generations the newcomers’ Judeo-Spanish and Sephardi rite became the norm for Ottoman Jewry as a whole.
- Gracia Mendes Nasi. The Portuguese converso banker Doña Gracia arrived in Constantinople in 1553, returned openly to Judaism, and used her fortune to support synagogues, schools and refugees. In 1558 she obtained a lease on Tiberias, which her nephew Joseph Nasi helped rebuild.
- Communal leadership. The Ottoman state dealt with the Jews through their own leaders. The office of Hakham Bashi, or chief rabbi, became the community’s official representative to the government.
- Izmir. Izmir grew into a major port in the 17th century, and its synagogue courtyards still survive around Havra Sokak.
- Sabbatai Zevi. Born in Izmir in 1626, he proclaimed himself the messiah in 1665 and converted to Islam in Edirne in 1666, a shock that divided Sephardi communities for generations. See the Sabbatean crisis.
The welcome of 1492 became a founding story for Turkish Jews, celebrated at the Quincentennial in 1992. Historians such as Marc David Baer have since examined how that story has been used in Turkish and Jewish politics, and the community’s later history was not always as welcoming.
Modern era and departure
The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened French-language schools across the empire in the late 19th century, and the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923, made Turkish the language of public life.
- 1934. Anti-Jewish riots in Thrace drove the Jews out of Edirne and the towns of the Dardanelles.
- 1942. The Varlık Vergisi, a wealth tax that fell mainly on non-Muslims, ruined many Jewish businesses; those who could not pay were sent to labor camps.
- 1944. On Rhodes, Turkish consul Selahattin Ülkümen saved about 50 Jews from deportation by claiming them as Turkish citizens or their relatives. Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in 1989.
- 1948–1951. 34,547 Jews emigrated to Israel, nearly 40% of the community.
- 1955. The Istanbul pogrom of September 6–7 targeted mainly Greeks but also destroyed Jewish and Armenian homes and shops.
- 1986 and 2003. Gunmen killed 22 worshippers at Istanbul’s Neve Shalom synagogue on September 6, 1986. In November 2003, truck bombs at Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues killed 20 people.
Religious life
Turkish Jews follow the Ottoman Sephardi rite, with Hebrew as the language of prayer. In 1730 Rabbi Yaakov Culi published the first volume of the Me’am Lo’ez in Constantinople, a Bible commentary in Judeo-Spanish that became the most widely read book in Sephardi homes. Ottoman Jews also sang maftirim, Hebrew hymns set to Ottoman classical music, especially in Edirne and Istanbul.
The Ahrida Synagogue in Balat, founded in the early 15th century by Jews from Ohrid, still holds services. Its prayer platform is shaped like the prow of a ship, which tradition links to Noah’s Ark or to the ships that carried the exiles of 1492.
Language, music and food
Judeo-Spanish was the home language of most Turkish Jews into the 20th century, written in Hebrew letters and later in Latin script. Today Turkish is the everyday language, and the weekly newspaper Şalom keeps a Judeo-Spanish supplement, El Amaneser. The kitchen includes borekas and bulemas (filled pastries), fritada (vegetable bake), albondigas de prasa (leek patties) and sutlach (rice pudding). See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
About 15,000 Jews live in Turkey (2024 estimate), most of them in Istanbul, with a smaller community in Izmir. The Chief Rabbinate of Turkey and the Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews are both in Istanbul. Most Jews of Turkish origin now live in Israel.
Notable people
- Haim Nahum 1872–1960 · Manisa Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire from 1909, later chief rabbi of Egypt.
- Avram Galanté 1873–1961 · Bodrum Historian of Turkish Jewry, Istanbul University professor and member of parliament, 1943–1946.
- Dario Moreno 1921–1968 · Aydın Singer and actor, a star in France in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Jak Kamhi 1925–2020 · Istanbul Founder of Profilo and longtime chairman of the Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews.
- İshak Alaton 1927–2016 · Istanbul Industrialist, co-founder of Alarko in 1954.
- Moris Farhi 1935–2019 · Ankara Novelist, author of Young Turk.
Sources and further reading
- Avigdor Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Darwin Press, 1992).
- Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Macmillan, 1991).
- Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana University Press, 2020).
- Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (University of California Press, 2000).
- “History of the Jews in Turkey”, Wikipedia.
- “Selahattin Ülkümen”, Wikipedia.
- Sergio DellaPergola, core Jewish population estimates for 2024, as tabulated by the Jewish Virtual Library.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
