Placing the Jews in Early Modern Texts of Istanbul

8/22/2019 Placing the Jews in Early Modern Texts of Istanbul

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AN OTTOMAN CITY OF STRANGERS: PLACING THE JEWSIN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS

ON ISTANBUL

In 1614, William Davies, a barber surgeon of London, published a narrativeof his Eight Yeeres, and Ten Moneths sufferings as a galley slave, a book thatcould be described as an early modern captivity narrative1. Interestingly the titlealso advertised his Discouering Many Mayne Landes, Ilandes, Riuers, Cities,

and Townes, of the Christians and Infidels, the Condition of the People, andthe Manner of Their Countrey. Some of these descriptions are quite short butstill provide clues to what a travelling (or in this case, captured) member of theEnglish nation should pay attention to while abroad. Davies included in his bookdescriptions of Algier, Tunis, Naples, Malta and Cyprus, with a brief excursionin the lands of the Amazones2. Not only did he describe the buildings, turretsand guns of these cities but placed a variety of peoples in their cityscapes, be theyinhabitants, occasional visitors, majorities or minorities, and provided informa-tion on their living conditions.

Davies mentions in his account of Cyprus that Turks governed the islandand that even if they [Turks] hate a Jew aboue any nation euen as they do thediuel [] yet their liues many Jewes in all parts of the Turkes dominions. TheseLevantine Jews and the material frames of their lives described by English travel-lers is the subject of this article. By way of analyzing how the English travelers

1 Captivity narratives entertained, warned and informed readers of the ordeal of captives andslaves, especially of those who were taken captive by Muslim privateers in the Mediterranean. Oncaptivity narratives, see D.J. VITKUS, Piracy Slavery and Redemption. Barbary Captivity Narratives

from Early Modern England, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001.2W. DAVIES, Trve Relation of the Travailes(1614).

Citt e Storia, VII, 2012, 1, pp. 117-134 2012 Universit Roma Tre-CROMA


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118 EVA JOHANNA HOLMBERG

gazed3 at the synagogues, homes and living conditions of the Jews in Istanbul a

novel perspective is gained both into early modern travellers accounts of Istanbuland into the ways in which they can provide information for students of earlymodern urban history.

Several contemporary travel accounts indicate that it was important forEnglishmen to know about the material frames of life of Jews in foreign lands andtheir cities. Indeed, descriptions of foreign peoples like the Jews were essential in-gredients in such portrayals. In what follows, I will investigate the ways in whichearly modern English writers surveyed the urban dwelling places and houses ofthe Jews in the Ottoman Empire and its capital. It will be asked what kinds ofmeanings English texts assigned to the Jews, their material culture, dwellings andway of life as a minority among the feared and awed Turks. It will be arguedthat Istanbul, the central setting for Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, was usedas an example of how Ottomans treated the minorities in their midst, and thatsuch information interested Englishmen of various professions and backgrounds,not least those who sought to establish trading enclaves in the Ottoman Empire4.

It was well-known that Jews had been expelled from England already in 1290and after that from Spain, Portugal, and France5. As traveller and author FynesMoryson (1566-1630) wrote, Jews are not allowed to buy any lands, howses,or stable inheritances, neither haue they any Coyne of their owne, but vse the

Coynes of Princes where they liue. Despite the expulsion there was much room

3 The literature on the gaze is too extensive to be charted here, for an overview on the gaze, seeR. DUBBINI, Geography of the Gaze. Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe. Translated byL.G. Cochrane, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002; see also Stuart Clarks important cul-tural historical study of early modern vision. S. CLARK, Vanities of the Eye. Vision in Early ModernEuropean Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.

4 Jewish quarters attracted a lot of interest in early modern travellers both in Europe andthe Islamic world. On early modern Jewish quarters in Europe, see D. CALABI-D. NOLDE-R.

WEINSTEIN, The city of Jews in Europe: the conservation and transmission of Jewish culture, inCities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400-1700, edited by D. Calabi-S. Turk Christensen,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 87-113. On the building forms of the Italianghettoes and travellers experience about the Venetian ghetto, see D. CALABI, The City of the Jews,in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, edited by R.C. Davis-B. Ravid, Baltimore and London, The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pp. 31-49; also D. CALABI, The Jews and the City in theMediterranean Area, in Mediterranean Urban Culture 1400-1700, edited by A. Cowan, Exeter,Exeter University Press, 2000, pp. 56-68.

5 For the expulsion and its causes, see R. MUNDILL, Englands Jewish Solution, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1998; on the expulsion and its historiography, see J. SHAPIRO,Shakespeare and the Jews, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 43-45 andA. BALE, The

Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1250-1550, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 2006, p. 16.


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AN OTTOMAN CITY OF STRANGERS 119

for thought and debate about Jews both before and after they officially and open-

ly returned to England in the middle of the seventeenth century

6

. The fate andstatus of contemporary Jews was worth contemplating for travellers, chroniclers,and even playwrights because Jews had endured all kinds of efforts to convert,punish, expel and subordinate them. As a people they were an essential buildingblock for a Christian worldview, a counterpart and point of comparison. Thememories and material remains of Jews were also still present in early modernLondon, reminding Londoners of their past in street names, old buildings andstones, even if Jews no longer officially lived there7.

Looking at the Jews in Istanbul can reveal how and by which methods travel-ling Englishmen conceptualized foreign urban space. This article will thus shedlight on both the ways in which minority space and material culture were as-signed meaning in English texts about Turkey, and provide an English perspec-tive into the early modern cityscape of Istanbul, its streets, buildings and inhab-itants. Among the topics covered will be, first, the means and objectives of theEnglish texts which mention Jews in Istanbul around the turn of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, and, second, the ways in which narrative strategies,traditions of travel writing, and shared cultural knowledge conditioned what wassaid about the Jews and their life in the Ottoman capital.

Writing cities, writing JewsWritings about travel, distant lands and topographies were intended to pro-

vide knowledge and education, but they also acted as moral lessons and offeredpastime pleasure for the interested reader who did not have the possibility orneed to journey abroad. In order to better serve these purposes, travelers often

6 See E. GLASER,Judaism without Jews, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave, 2007; see also D.S.KATZ, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655, Oxford, ClarendonPress, 1982.

7 For example the chronicler John Stow (1525-1625) mentioned in several passages of hismonumental Survey of London (first printed in 1598) that old stones, synagogues and streets ofthe medieval English Jews were still around in the end of the sixteenth century. For Stows textson Jews, see A. BALE, Stows Medievalism and Antique Judaism in Early Modern London , inJohnStow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past, edited by I. Gadd-A. Gillespie, London, TheBritish Library, 2004, pp. 74-80; for Stows and Strypes imagined London, see Imagining Early

Modern London. Perceptions & Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598-1720, edited by J.F.Merritt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001; the literature on the perceptions of earlymodern London is extensive, see for example Material London, ca. 1600, edited by L.C. Orlin,Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000 and Londinopolis. Essays in the Culturaland Social History of Early Modern London, edited by P. Griffiths-M.S.R. Jenner, Manchester,

Manchester University Press, 2000.


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presented themselves as experienced sources of both useful and reliable informa-

tion about foreign lands and peoples, as servants to their countrymen

8

. Englishtravellers often stressed that they had acquired skills which put them in a posi-tion to mediate foreign affairs to their countrymen. Because of their acquiredknowledge and experience they had earned a position as professional observersof others. These Englishmen were factually outsiders, coming from England to aforeign country, but the extent to which they revealed their outsider position de-pended on the length of their stay and the level of their immersion into Ottomanculture9. In their texts they explained the customs, environments, streets andsquares of Istanbul to people who were assumed not to have first-hand knowl-edge about it. As such, they should perhaps be seen more as cultural translatorsand mediators than outsiders10.

The writers of these texts had important shared characteristics: a culturalheritage, usually a religious affiliation to Protestantism, experiences of the sameforeign places and the dangers of travel, and yet they differed in their educa-tion, social status, and individual preconceptions about morality and the pur-pose of their writings. It could be claimed, as Gerald MacLean has suggested,that English Levant travellers were equipped with shared cultural knowledge butthat they also each had their own individual ways of filtering this knowledge fortheir readers, to appropriate and select what was important11. In early modern

8 On the authorial strategies and description of peoples in early modern travel writing, seeJ-P.RUBIS, Travel Writing and Ethnography, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited byP. HULME-T. YOUNGS, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 243.

9 On being in-between worlds, languages, and places, see N.Z. DAVIS, Trickster Travels. ASixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York, Farrar & Giroux, 2006.

10 See P. BURKE, Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe, in Cultural Translation in EarlyModern Europe, edited by P. Burke-R. P-c. Hsia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007,pp. 7-38; also P. BURKE, Lost (and Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators andTranslating in Early Modern Europe, European Review, XV, 2007, 1, pp. 83-94.

11G. MACLEAN, The Rise of Oriental Travel. English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720,Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave, 2004.A classic study on the European ideas and imagesabout the Orient is of course, E. SAID, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (original1978); an excellent overview on theoretical discussion and relevant original sources, for earlymodern European travel, and exploration is Travel Knowledge. European Discoveries in the Early

Modern Period, edited by I. Kamps-J. Singh, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave, 2001. TheEastern Mediterranean world and travel have attracted a vast and growing scholarly attention inrecent years, part of the re-orienting of renaissance studies. For early modern English writingsabout the Levant, see G. MACLEAN, Looking East. English Writing and the Ottoman Empire Before1800, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; see also Re-Orienting the Renaissance.Cultural Exchanges with the East, edited by G. MacLean, Basingstoke & New York, PalgraveMacmillan, 2005; also Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed-

ited by G.V. Stanivukovic, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave, 2007; D. GOFFMANN, The Ottoman


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England, Jews were a favoured topic for inclusion in such educative, entertaining

and useful texts because in contemporary English eyes, Jews were a scatterednation which was dispersed throughout most parts of the world12. Their scat-tered state made them into a useful looking glass13 into the affairs of the world,its moral economies and the functioning of its diverse societies.

Samuel Purchas (1577?-1626), the famous English collector of travel writingsmentioned that Jews were strangers where they dwell, and travellers where theyreside, this position applied to Jews all over the known world14. Purchass com-ment hints that even if Jews were a continuing presence in Europe, they werea nation without a king or country they could properly call their own. Thisstatus of Jews as strangers could not be changed as long as they did not convertfrom their Judaism15.

In the latter part of the sixteenth century it became vital to gain intelligenceand information about Ottoman policies and way of life. Englishmen soughtalliance with the Turks against Spain, and Queen Elizabeth I and the membersof Ottoman court corresponded and exchanged gifts. The Levant Company ofMerchants was founded in 1581 and the first English ambassadors were sent toIstanbul16. Such intelligence and information was gained from newsletters, dip-lomatic dispatches, and private correspondence. There were many kinds of textsthat offered news about foreign affairs. The popular coranto, a translated short

Empire and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.12 William Davies was not the only Briton to mention this, in fact the phrase scattered nation

was mentioned by most commentators of the affairs and status of Jews. I have studied the processof imagining the Jews in early modern England more fully in my new book, E.J. HOLMBERG,Jewsin the Early Modern English Imagination A Scattered Nation, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2012.

13 See M.J.M. EZELL, Looking Glass Histories, Journal of British Studies, XLIII, 2004, 3, pp.317-338; on imagination and travel writing, seeJ.P.A. SELL, Rhetoric and Wonder in English TravelWriting, 1560-1613, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006; Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century.Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000), editedby M. Pincombe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004; also M.B. CAMPBELL, Wonder & Science. ImaginingWorlds in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1999.

14S. PURCHAS, Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625), I, 67. See the discussion on this in J. SHAPIRO,Shakespeare and the Jews, cit. pp. 175-177, 181-183.

15 On the conceptualisations of Jews as strangers in England, see ivi, pp. 180-185; on beinga stranger and a foreigner in English understandings and regulations, seeJ. SELWOOD, English-Born Reputed Strangers: Birth and Descent in Seventeenth-Century London, Journal of BritishStudies, XLIV, 2005, 4, pp. 728-753; cfr. L.H. YUNGBLUT, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us:Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England, London and New York,Routledge, 1996.

16 For English diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, see G. MACLEAN, The Rise of Oriental

Travel; see also ID., Introduction: Re-Orienting the Renaissance, in Re-Orienting the Renaissance.


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news-pamphlet, told of both human and natural catastrophes, coup detats, and

ways of living abroad

17

. Many of these placed Jews into long lists of the peoplesliving in the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire and indicated that the country wasfull of them. The later more methodically structured travel narratives usuallyclaimed to have been based on personal experience about the Levant, and leftmore room to the author and his self-fashioning18. It should also be rememberedthat the printed form was not the only source of information about Jews and thelands of the Ottomans, because news about wars and natural catastrophes alsocirculated through oral communication. Current topics, including losses of lifeand material goods were referred to in sermons and announced in the streets andmarketplaces19.

There was an ample variety of translated cosmographies and travel books aboutthe Ottoman Empire available by European authors. The Venetian, Genoese andFrench travellers had a much longer circulating- and printing history for nar-ratives about the East than the English20, who started to stabilise their diplo-matic and trading relations in the Levant around 1570s and 1580s, and onlyafter that, to write and publish books about their own experiences. The GermanJohannes Boemuss Omnium gentium moresin its English translation from 1555

17

SeeANON,A Wonderfull and Most Lamentable Declaration (1613); ID.,A Coranto (1622);ID., Briefe Abstracts Ovt of Diverse Letters of Trust (1622). On news books about the OttomanEmpire and the construction of true tales, see J. SCHLECKSTelling True Tales of Islamic Lands(Selinsgrove, 2011). See also The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity inEarly Modern Europe, edited by B. Dooley, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2010; on the circulation of infor-mation and mediation between Venice and Istanbul, see E.N. ROTHMAN, Brokering Empire. Trans-National Subjects between Venice and Istanbul, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 2011.

18 On contemporary advice for travellers and travel writers, see J. HOWELL, Instructions ForForreine Travell (1642); In sixteenth-century England travellers were often accused of lying inpolemical writings, and there was much discussion about whether their fantastic stories shouldbe believed. See S. Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England, Leiden,New York & Kln, Brill, 1995.

19 For the dissemination of oral information and the movement between oral and writtenculture in early modern England, see A. FOX, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700,Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

20 For Venetian travel narratives until the publication of Gian Battista Ramusios (1485-1557)Navigationi ei Viaggi(1550, 1556 and 1559), see D. HOWARD, The Status of the Oriental Travellerin Renaissance Venice, in Re-Orienting the Renaissance, edited by G. Maclean, Basingstoke & New

York, Palgrave, 2005, pp. 29-37; Ethnographic texts engaged with the Ottoman Empire had along tradition in crusade and pilgrimage narratives and natural histories. The older narrative forms

were easily adjusted and appropriated to new uses. See F.T. NOONAN, The Road to Jerusalem.Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press,2007; see also N. BISAHA, Creating East and West. Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks,

Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.


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informed that all this countrie that now is called Turcquie, is not enhabited by

one seuerall nacion, but there be in it Turcques, Grekes, Armenians, Saracenes,Jacobites, Nestorians, Jewes and Christians21. The second book of Nicolas deNicolay (1517-1583), the Quatre premiers livres des navigations(1568), was trans-lated into Italian in 1577 and into English in 1585 by T. Washington as TheNauigations into Turkie. In it, Nicolay had long passages about the Jews, theirnumbers, status, professions and characteristics and, of course, claimed misdeedsand offences22.

Mapping the Ottoman JewsWhat sort of information about Ottoman city life and Jews can then be

gleaned from English texts? How were the subject matters selected by the writ-ers, and what kind of impressions about Ottoman Istanbul and its inhabitantsemerge from them? A place where a writer gave out some information about theway, or ideal way, he had gathered his information was the preface or epistlededicatory. This was also the place where travellers announced why they wantedto write about Turkey, how they had earned their knowledge the hard way, andwho they wanted to thank for patronage, past, present and future.

Henry Blount (1602-1682) wanted to emphasise in the beginning of his AVoyage Into the Levant(1636) that he had only relied on information either gath-

ered with his own eyes and ears, or by discussing with the foreigners personally.If one wanted to be useful to ones countrymen23 and provide truthful knowledgeto his readers, a writer should not blind himself with book-knowledge24. This wassomething new, since most writers made references to classical authors, the Bibleand earlier writings, with or without annotations, to enhance their authorityand show their learning25. Blount thought that in addition to extensive book-

21BOEMIUS, The Fardle of Facions (1555), sig. P4v; on cosmographies and Boemus way oforganising his book place by place in order and the great popularity of his book, see M. MCLEAN,The Cosmographia of Sebastian Mnster. Describing the World in the Reformation, Aldershot,

Ashgate, 2007, pp. 98-100.22 N. DE NICOLAY, The Navigations into Turkie (1585), 130v-131r. Nicolay had travelled in

1551 as a French envoy to the Turkey of Sleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566).23 English women remained silent on the subject before the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu

in the eighteenth century. See G. MACLEAN, The Rise of Oriental Travel, cit., pp. 221-225.24 See H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant(1636), pp. 2-4.25 On marginal notes and annotation, see W.W.E. SLIGHTS, Managing Readers. Printed

Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2001; alsoA. GRAFTON, Discitur Ut Agatur: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy, inAnnotation and Its Texts,edited by S.A. Barney, New York-Oxford, Publications of the University of California, 1991, pp.

108-129.


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knowledge, Christian zealousness blinded many travellers particularly in their

portrayals of Jews. He intended to do things differently and was to believe onlyhis own experience and eyes gazing at the Jews:

The chiefe Sect whereof I desired to be enformed was the Iewes; whose moderne condi-tion is more condemned then understood by Christian-Writers, and therefore by themdelivered with such a zealous ignorance, as never gave me satisfaction26.

The level of an English travellers use of book-knowledge is not always eas-ily deduced because many ideas about the Ottomans, Jews, and the East wereembedded in early modern European culture, and had such deep roots, thatthe separation of the bran from the flour is not easy. Jews were by no means

to be found in every book about Turkey. For example the great treatise aboutwars and power-struggles by the historian Richard Knolles (c. 1545-1610), Thegenerall historie of the Turkes(1603) was more about action in the battlefield andcourt intrigues27. Merchants and diplomats in turn often had their money tiedto Ottoman affairs in a very concrete way. This explains why they wrote abouthouses, merchandize, war and battles, interest rates, fires and earthquakes. Theirstanding and possessions were tied to Ottoman politics, material culture anddaily life through numerous threads, and this showed in their texts.

The texts about Turkey and its capital were thus not at all monolithic, but

rather a multi-vocal collection of texts framed with the help of classical and me-dieval narrative traditions and filled with passages where writers voiced their ex-perience and authority on the subject. This did not include giving hints aboutprofitable business ventures, since these were passed in more secretive ways28.Most of the writers viewed Jews and Turks in tandem, conceptualising, survey-ing, and placing them both in Istanbul, or as the English still preferred to call it,Constantinople.

26 H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant, cit., p. 113.27R. KNOLLES, The generall historie of the Turkes(1603).28 It has been argued that the status of travel writing was lower than history, chronicles, and

cosmographical treatises and natural histories. In the seventeenth centuries these different bookscame to have more and more common ground, and for example Samuel Purchas edited collectionof travel narratives, the multivolume Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625), like his 1613 history of all reli-gions, places etc. the Purchas His Pilgrimagewas heavily annotated and used ample source materialboth manuscript and printed in Latin and other European vernaculars. Purchas continued thecollecting work started in England by Richard Hakluyt, whose collection of manuscripts and let-ters, passed to his hands after Hakluyts death. On Hakluyt, see P.C. MANCALL, Hakluyts Promise.

An Elizabethans Obsession for an English America, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007; onPurchas, see The Purchas Handbook. Studies of the Life, Times and Writings of Samuel Purchas,

1577-1626,vols. I-II. Edited by L.E. Pennington, Aldershot, Ashgate, The Hakluyt Society, 1996.


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Jewish quarters

Minna Rozen has hypothesised that after the Ottoman conquest Jews wererelocated from their former quarters razed to the ground by Turks during thesiege in 1453, supposedly entering the city through it. Jews had lived aroundthe so called Jews gate located near what subsequently became the grounds ofthe Topkapi palace. There had been Jewish residents also in Pera/Galata, KasimPaa, and Hasky29. Pera was the older Greek name for Galata, meaning roughlybeyond referring to the other side of the Golden Horn. The English used bothnames in their texts30.

If narratives about the Ottoman Empire were divided into separate chap-ters quite methodically, the different aspects of Ottoman culture arms, dress,religious and social customs, and different peoples who lived in given cities took centre stage instead of their urban settings. Usually Istanbul was allotted aseparate chapter which discussed its sights, markets, and inhabitants31. Istanbulseemed to be a difficult city to divide into quarters for the majority and minori-ties, because people moved and were ordered to move from place to place. Jewshad lived in several quarters of the city already in Byzantine times, and it wasrather difficult to locate them in specific neighbourhoods after the Ottoman con-quest. In Byzantine Constantinople Jews lived in Pera/Galata, on the other sideof the Golden Horn, easily comparable to Trastevere in medieval Rome, which

was similarly located on the other side of a dividing water-way and hosted a com-munity of foreign merchants. The location of a big-enough harbour could alsohelp to explain their settling in Galata32.

The travel account of Benjamin of Tudela (narrating a journey the Spanishrabbi had made already in 1160) was still included in Purchas His Pilgrimesin1625. In his account Jews were portrayed suffering under the Greek yoke, bitterlyhated and excluded from the Byzantine city by armes of waters in Pera/Galata.The editor Samuel Purchas added a note in the margin where he mentioned thatTurks and Tartars had greatly changed the face of the earth after Benjamins

29M. ROZEN,A History of the Jewish Community, Leiden, Brill, 2002, pp. 5-7, 14-15.30 On the names, see ivi, pp. 5-6.31 A good example of travel writing methods is the manual of Albrecht Meyer. SeeA. MEYER,

Certaine briefe, and speciall instructions(1589), sig. A2-A3.32 Richard Krautheimer has proposed that Constantine the Great had translated many charac-

teristics of Rome to his new capital on the Bosphorus. R. KRAUTHEIMER, Three Christian Capitals:Topography and Politics, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1983, pp. 46-47; M. ROZEN,A Historyof the Jewish Community, cit., pp. 2-5; E.R. DURSTELER, Venetians in Constantinople. Nation,Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2006.


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travels, but because he sought to accumulate knowledge, the world was mapped

in his collection not only spatially but also temporally

33

.Early seventeenth-century English texts about the city were often quite vagueabout its Jewish locations, mentioning their houses, shops and synagogues hereand there. Some writers connected the Jews to Pera and some to Constantinopleproper, on the southern side of the Golden Horn. Thomas Coryate mentionedthat there were Jews both in Pera and Constantinople and that he had himselfvisited their homes and synagogues34. Traveller and poet George Sandys (1578-1644) wrote that of their former habitations in Pera, the Jews nowadays onlyhad their shops left. Sandys thought that although there was a considerable com-munity of Jews in the city, he could omit them from his relation because themore proper place to discuss Jews was in the context of Jerusalem and the landof Iewrie:

Constantinople is said to contayne seuen hundred thousand persons: halfe of themTurkes, and other halfe Iewes and Christians, and those for the generall Grecians. ButPera hath three Christians for one Mahometan: for no Iew dwels in Pera, though theyhaue their shops there. We omit to speake of the Iewes vntill we come into Iewrie; and nowwill bend our discourse to the Grecians: a nation no lesse scattered then they, but infinitelymore populous35.

The Levant Company merchant John Sanderson36 wrote that his entire rela-

tion of the city of Constantinople relied on a pamphlet he had received from aJewish friend, a Doctor Iew Poet yet in some points he stressed that he had seena specific event with his own eyes37. While Sandys omitted Jews from his accountof Istanbul, Sanderson trusted both a Jewish source and his own eyes and HenryBlount stated that every piece of information he had either seen with his owneyes or gathered in conversation with strangers38. These conflicting views mightbe explained by the well-known fact that the Ottoman capital hosted several

33BENJAMINOF TUDELA, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II, 1437, 1442.34T. CORYATE, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II: 1826.35G. SANDYS, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II: 1299.36 The papers left behind by John Sanderson (cc. 1561-1627), the BL Lansdowne MS

241, include drawings, lists and numbers/statistics about Istanbul. There was also a map ofConstantinople where was marked a I. Giehud Capasi (Yehud Qapusi), the Jewes Gate, fortherabout they dwell. Sanderson estimated the Jewish population of Istanbul to be at least150.000 (of the total population of 1.231.207).

37 SANDERSON, in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) II:1620. in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625),Sandersons travels in the Holy Land were verified by his fellow caravan travelers, Jews, a testi-mony that several Englishmen at the time, his editor Samuel Purchas included, may have found oflittle value or credibility. See SANDERSON, The Travels of John Sanderson 1582-1602 (1931): 80, 83.

38H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant, cit., p. 113.


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Jewish congregations from different lands which had either moved to the city

after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal or arrived there from Germany,Hungary or other places, and their origins might have confused the observers.Tax registers from the seventeenth century show that Jews were indeed scatteredamong several neighbourhoods within the city, and not tied to dwell in only oneof them39.

Jewish presence also marked and gave meaning to places inhabited by oth-ers than Jews. This is consistent with the fact that cities and even entire empirescould be characterised by referring to their presence40. In English accounts aboutVenice, the Jewish presence seemed to take part in creating an air of a cosmopo-lis, and emporium of different nations, trade, and a diversity of manners andreligions. As the diarist and virtuoso John Evelyn (1620-1706) characterised, hewas surprizd with the strange variety of the severall Nations which we every daymet with in the Streetes & Piazza of Jewes, Turks, Armenians, Persians, Moores,Greekes, Sclavonians, some with their Targets & boucklers, & all in their nativefashions, negotiating in this famous Emporium, which is allways crouded withstrangers41. The strangers made Venice into an emporium. A similar effect wasachieved by characterising the diversity of peoples in Istanbul42.

Port cities and great trading centres were marked by hustle and bustle, noise,smells, but also positive characteristics like riches and other forms of material

wellbeing. Istanbul was endowed with several signs of cosmopolitanism, bythe sounds emanating from the minarets, synagogues and the shouting of mer-chants in the market places43. The Scot William Lithgow remarked that in

39 U. HEYD, The Jewish Communities of Istanbul in the Seventeenth Century, Oriens, VI,1953, 2, pp. 309-310; for a comparable perspective on Ottoman forms of coexistence, see E.R.DURSTELER, Venetians in Constantinople.

40 In anti-Catholic propaganda, Papal Rome was often said to be filled with prostitutes, Jewsand rogues. See S. WARNEKE, Images of the Educational Traveller; Venice and Rome were famousfor their prostitutes, see E.S. COHEN, Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the Cityscape of Late-Sixteenth-Century Rome, Renaissance Studies, XII, 1998, 3, pp. 392-409; also, D. SALKELD,Alien Desires:Travellers and Sexuality in Early Modern London, in Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe,edited by T. Betteridge, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 35-51.

41 On Venice as an emporium, see J. EVELYN, The Diary of John Evelyn Vol. II (1620-1649)(2000, p. 449).

42 On cosmopolitanism, see M. JACOB, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylavia Press, 2006. AlsoK. NEWMAN, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris, Princeton & Oxford, PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007.

43 See Emily Cockaynes study on such signs of urbanity in early modern England. EmilyCockayne, Hubbub. Filth, Noise & Stench in England, New Haven & London, Yale University

Press, 2007; on sensory experience in early modern cities, see The City and the Senses. Urban


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Constantinople, and all other places of Turky, I euer saw three Sabboths together,

in one weeke: The Friday for the Turkes, the Saturday for Iewes, and the Sundayfor Christians.Istanbul was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries considered by many

Europeans to be a city filled with all kinds of strangers. As Edhem Eldem hasobserved, Greeks as well as Western European Christians still considered it to bea conquered city tragically lost to the Turks. After Mehmed the Conqueror hadfamously invaded Constantinople in 1453, the Turks had repopulated their newcapital with immigrants forced to move to the city from provinces44. The peopleof the Book living under the so-called dhimmaor zimmet(protection) of Islamhad to pay a tax and their status as a protected minority was regulated by numer-ous means45. Zimmis could for example not exercise authority over Muslims, buyland, or have bigger houses than Muslims. They had to adopt clothing whichidentified their religion, could not ride a horse, carry a sword, or own Muslimslaves46.

Jewish Houses and Synagogues as Signs of FreedomThe Jewish synagogue seemed to be the most important reason for visiting

a Jewish quarter and several Englishmen wrote about their visits inside in or-der to see Jewish worship, festivals and circumcisions. Such visitations were ex-

pected from travellers, and there is also evidence of Turks and even Jews visitingChristian churches in turn47. The Jews of Turkey had synagogues in many cities,and at least the travellers George Sandys, William Biddulph, Thomas Coryate,James Howell, and Henry Blount mentioned these in their texts48. A synagogue

Culture Since 1500, edited by A. Cowan & J. Steward, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007.44E. ELDEM, Foreigners at the Threshold of Felicity: the reception of foreigners in Ottoman Istanbul,

in Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400-1700, edited by D. Calabi-S.T. Christensen,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 114-117; on foreigners and strangers inthe early modern Mediterranean cities, see A. COWAN, Foreigners and the City: The Case of theImmigrant Merchant, inMediterranean Urban Culture 1400- 1700, edited by A. Cowan, Exeter,Exeter University Press, 2000, pp. 45-55.

45 See M. ROZEN,A History of the Jewish Community, cit.46 All these regulations were not strictly followed: for example the prohibition to restore and

rebuild houses of worship was overlooked if these had been ruined by fire or attacks. On the zimmiand their differentiation from non-Muslims, see ivi, pp. 16-34.

47 See E.C. DURSTELER, Neighbors: Venetians and Ottomans in Early Modern Galata, in

Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by J.P.Helfers, Turnhout, Brepols, 2005, pp. 42-47.

48See G. SANDYS, in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) II, 1281; W. BIDDULPH, in Purchas HisPilgrimes(1625) II, 1350; T. CORYATE, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II, 1824-1825;J. HOWELL,

Epistolae Ho-Elianae(1645), sect. 6. 27; H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant, cit., pp. 115-116.


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was often considered by travellers to be a granted privilege and a sign of tolera-

tion. It was also often the only Jewish building mentioned in a narrative, a chiefsight to be seen49.Despite the fact that the buildings and presence of Jews were seen as signs of

freedom of a city, many English travellers seemed to find the Jewish buildingssomewhat ordinary and plain in their appearance and hardly anyone praised thesynagogues or houses for their outer or inner beauty or gave them strikingly posi-tive attributes. Perhaps there had already been enough churches, monuments andpalaces to comment on and see on their route to Istanbul? It could also be thatthe Jewish places were not that different from the ones already seen.

On occasion texts might refer to anonymous Jewish houses and shops inIstanbul, and even more rarely, the houses were said to have a Jewish owner orinhabitant, whose name was mentioned. This happened in Thomas Coryatesaccount in his Coryats Crudities(1611). Coryate wrote that he had had an oppor-tunity to visit the house of a Jew called Amis, who interestingly had been bornin London, officially a city where there were no Jews. Amis now lived in Galata,and Coryate was invited to his house for breakfast and then to see the circumci-sion, a ritual he had wanted to witness already in Venice:

The seuenth of August being Saturday, my courteous friend Master William Pearch beingdesirous to gratifie mee in a matter for the which I had often before sollicited him, inuited

mee and Master William Ford, Preacher to our Nation, to the house of a certaine EnglishIew, called Amis, borne in the Crootched Friers in London, who hath two sisters more ofhis owne Iewish Religion, Commorant in Galata, who were likewise borne in the sameplace; to this mans house I say wee came, the foresaid day about nine of the clocke in themorning to see a matter, which in my former trauells I wished to haue seene, especiallyin Venice, but neuer till then had the opportunitie to attaine vnto, namely a circumci-sion. It was done in a priuate house, according to the custome of the Iewes resident inConstantinople, and not in a Synagogue as it is with the Iewes in other Countries50.

Amis, born in Crootched Friers was said to be commorant in Galata, themost multi-ethnic and lively part of the city. To be a commorant somewhereimplied that a person was a dweller, not necessarily rooted or originally from aplace. A trader, like Amis, could have his shop and lodging in Galata but still notconsidered to belongthere. This and the indication that Amis had wandered farfrom his birthplace was in line with seeing Jews as a scattered nation51. The fact

49 For example, see L. ALDERSEY, in Principall Navigations(1589), 179; T. CORYATE, CoryatsCrudities(1611), 231.

50T. CORYATE, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II, 1824-1825.51 The interesting detail about Amis being born in London must have disturbed those who still

believed England to be totally devoid of Jews, although Thomas Coryate was not alone in ques-


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that Coryate was able to enter a Jewish home was considered worthy of mention.

It indicated that the traveller had connections, which made the doors open forhim. Travellers indeed used various methods to enter places and buildings: theypaid entrance fees, had letters of recommendation and introduced associates tostrangers who turned to if not friends then at least acquaintances52.

Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English travellers had already vis-ited the Italian ghettoes with their synagogues and Jewish houses on their way tothe Levant. These European urban frames of Jewish life were thus a natural pointof comparison for Jewish living arrangements in Turkey. The Italian ghetto wasa closed urban space, and considered to be a form of imprisonment; the writersseemed to look for identical or at least similar subjugation from Ottoman cities,and were not able to find them53. William Davies mentioned that the Turks puteven the Catholics to shame in this regard, because they hated and oppressed theJews more than the Pope himself, who allowed Jews to dwell in Rome in orderto satisfy his greed for money. Others had more difficulties in finding evidenceof such oppression54.

Even Davies could not explain away the fact that the Jews of Istanbul were notghettoized as they were in Italy. This already hinted at a greater level of freedomin the Ottoman Empire. Some texts mentioned the fair and rich shops and influ-ence in the Ottoman power houses as physicians and counsellors as evidence of

Jewish privileges55; some had to add, however, that despite their freedoms andriches, the Jews were still greatly hated because of their religion or other reasons.This hatred could be ignited in times of war, political turmoil or during natu-ral catastrophes and power struggles. The easy explanation, easily connected toall kinds of Jewish suffering was for Englishmen and others that Jews were, yetagain, punished by God for their sins committed in the past56. It could also be

tioning the efficacy of the expulsion of 1290. For similar rumours and hints of Jewish presence inthe British Isles during the so called middle period 1290-1656, seeJ. SHAPIRO, Shakespeare andthe Jews, cit., pp. 68-69.

52 On such early modern friendships between diplomats and merchants, see E.R. DURSTELER,Neighbors, cit., pp. 35-41.

53 See D. CALABI-D. NOLDE-R. WEINSTEIN, The city of Jews, cit., pp. 87-113; D. CALABI, TheCity of the Jews, cit. pp. 31-49; also ID., The Jews and the City in the Mediterranean Area, cit.,pp. 56-68.

54 SeeW. DAVIES, Trve Relation of the Travailes, cit., sig. E1.55 For Jews in powerful positions, see N. DE NICOLAY, The Navigations into Turkie, cit., 93r-

93v;W. BIDDULPHet al., The Travels of Foure English Men (1612): 63; H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Intothe Levant, cit., pp. 114-115; F. MORYSON, Unpublished chapters of Fynes Morysons Itinerary, cit.,p. 489.

56J. HOWELL, Epistle Dedicatory, in B.-GURION, The Wonderful, and most deplorable History of


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assigned to their vulnerable status as a minority. As such, Jews were quite under-

standably said to be easy preys to those who had the power in their hands

57

.

Material Signs of Jewish SlaverySome Englishmen mentioned that Jewish homes in Istanbul were rather like

fortifications, with walls, cellars and low doors, because the Turks had, duringoutbreaks of hatred, set their houses on fire, looted them, raped their women or,as was mentioned by Henry Blount, used them as stables:

the Iewes and Christians have here [Istanbul] the doores of their houses little above threefoot high, which they told me was, that, the Turkes might not bring in their Horses, whoelse would use them for Stables in their travell; which I noted for a signe of greater slavery

then in other places58.

Blounts passage provides information about Jewish slavery under the Turks,but it also explains how Jewish houses, and those of Christians, were somehowdifferent from the rest. He did not give out more information about how Jewishhomes could be identified from others, in addition to the height of their doors59.

A short book calledA Wonderfull and most Lamentable Declaration (1613) con-tained news about fires, storms, winds, thunders, lightnings and all sorts of tur-moil caused either by man or the elements. It also had a briefe Relation of a greatfire, which upon the fourteenth of Iune hapned in the Citty of Constantinople,and burnt fiue thousand houses which reveals that minorities were the mainsufferers of this fire, who during the great tumult and uprore were robbed andransacked by the Janissaries:

At least fiue thousand houses burnt, and that the great losse thereby sustained, amountethvnto more then a Million of Gold: and that the said fire was the cause of a great tu-mult and uprore made therein at the same time; for that the Ianizaries vnder pretence ofquenching the fire robbed and ransacked the Iewes, Greekes, and Armenians houses, whotherevpon making resistance against the Turkes, in the contention betweene them theyslew one of the Iannisaries, for the which the next day after, they wer fined to pay ten

thousand Cechinies, there-with to content and please the principall Visiere Nazut; whichnotwithstanding knowing a certaine Iew in Constantinople to be exceeding rich, hee

the Latter Times of the Jews(1652): sig. A3v- A4. For a similar view on contemporary Jewish suf-fering, and hatred felt towards them, see P. DANGHIERA, The laste booke of Peter Martyr(1555), p.286;W. DAVIES, Trve Relation of the Travailes, cit., sig. D3v-D4;J. HOWELL, Epistolae Ho-Elianae(1645), sect. 6. 24-25.

57 It has been argued by Eric Dursteler, that histories of the European-Ottoman relations havetended to stress violence and conflict despite the fact that there were long periods of peaceful co-existence. See E.R. DURSTELER, Venetians in Constantinople, cit., pp. 6-9.

58H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant, cit., p. 17.59Ibidem.


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caused him to be accused by false witnesses, that he was the man that slew the Iannisarie,and for the same, condemned him to die, and all his goods to be confiscated, which put

the rest of the Iewes and Merchants in Constantinople in great feare and much perplex-ity60.

If the above text presented Jews as unfortunate sufferers of a tumultuous situ-ation which was taken advantage of by the Janissaries, Thomas Coryate presentedthese members of the Ottoman infantry as the usual culprits of havoc in the capi-tal. He explained that Jews feared the Janissaries and because of this had madetheir homes into strongholds with vaults underneath:

For indeed it doth happen that Ianizaries doe of purpose set Houses on fire, euen to thegreat endangering of the Citie for prey and spoyle sake, especially the houses of Iewes.For which cause the Iewes within these few yeares, haue both made their Houses strongerthen they were wont to be, and also haue made Vaults vnder their Houses, in to whichthey may conueigh their Goods, whensoeuer there chanceth any sodaine Fire61.

Such treatment of Jews served English writers to underline the cruelty ofTurks and the delicate status of all minorities in Ottoman Empire and its capital.James Howell, who also wanted to indicate just how much the Turks hated theJews, told a terrible story about Jews being so afraid of Turks that they could noteven enter their own homes if a Turk had left his shoes outside. This was a signthat the intruder was raping a Jewish woman inside:

they [Jews] are the most hatefull race of men upon earth; insomuch, that in Turkie wherethey are most valued, if a Musulman com to any of their houses, and leave his Shooesat the door, the Jew dare not com in all the while, till the Turk hath don what he would

with his Wife62.

These writings about Jews and their homes being ransacked, robbed and theirwomen raped and killed could be said to reveal anxiety and fears but not neces-sarily one that the English would admit to feel towards the Turks. These seemrather to be cautionary tales advising to tread carefully when in Ottoman landsand cities, and moral objections to the bad treatment of Ottoman subjects. A

traveller could never be too cautious when dealing with Turks, who were regu-larly presented as easily angered, capable of cruel executions and corporal punish-ments and endowed with a powerful army63.

60ANON,A Wonderfull and most Lamentable Declaration (1613), 8.61T. CORYATE, in Purchas His Pilgrimes(1625) II, 1822.62J. HOWELL, Epistolae Ho-Elianae(1645), sect. 6. 24-25.63 The images of cruel Turks do not of course tell the whole story of Anglo-Ottoman inter-

action, about the ongoing exchange of goods and ideas. It is important, as mentioned by EricDursteler to look more closely at the sources. They offer more nuances than has been studied

before. See E.R. DURSTELER, Venetians in Constantinople, cit., pp. 8-9. For Englishmen and Islam


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Such advice does not exactly paint an accurate picture of the flexible ways the

visitors and inhabitants of the city could interact peacefully with each other. TheEnglish texts about Ottoman Jews almost never go into detail about the longhistory of peaceful coexistence and trading partnerships or give much evidenceof their every day life in Istanbul. Jews were more often described when theirtreatment was scandalous or cruel or considered to be unfair to Christians. Thesuffering of Jews was also used to move Christian readers to pity and compassion.When things went wrong and life and supplies were lost, it was also a much morepressing matter to write about.

ConclusionsEnglish travel accounts in general seem to hint that the status of Jews and oth-

er minorities could be deduced from their buildings and other material belong-ings, including private houses, synagogues and shops, and the goods kept andguarded inside them. The possessions of minorities indicated either a tolerated oroppressed position in a given society, and helped to characterize the atmosphereand level of freedoms in foreign urban centres.

The status of Jews in Ottoman society or elsewhere could be read from theway their buildings rose from the ground, and from the manner in which theireveryday life was framed and regulated in Ottoman cities. If the buildings of

Jews were fair and numerous and scattered around the city, this indicated a greattolerance of Jews and their way of life. If their neighbourhoods were enclosed bywalls, foul smells and dampness, Jews were seen as subjugated, either sufferingfrom oppressive policies of rulers or from their eternal curse and punishment byGod64. This seems an understandable logic in early modern culture, where hier-archies were maintained and constructed by way of outward show, that is, byclothing bodies differently according to their status, by presenting stately bodiesin processions and coronations, and by other means of display and performanceof hierarchy in urban settings65.

and the depiction of Turks, see N. MATAR, Islam in Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress,1998; ID., Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, New York & Chichester,Columbia University Press, 1999; also D.L. VITKUS, Turning Turk. English Theater and the

Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave, 2003.64 In his account of Adrianople, Henry Blount mentioned that there yet remaine the walles of

the old Towne, which now containe the fourth, and worst part, inhabited by Zinganaes, Christians,Iewes, and others esteemed as refuse people. See H. BLOUNT,A Voyage Into the Levant,cit., p. 23.

65 On the meaning of processions in renaissance cities, see F. NEVOLA, Lieto e trionphanteper la citt: Experiencing a mid-fifteenth-century imperial triumph along Sienas Strada Romana,

Renaissance Studies, XVII, 2003, 4, pp. 581-606; on early modern displays of identity, see


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It seemed that the Jews were set by the English writers in the narratives about

Istanbul to serve other ends than provide any detailed topographical informa-tion. The ways in which Jews with their homes and synagogues were placed intoits streets and different districts helped the writers to make Ottoman culture withits policies and practices understandable as an entity; thus Jews were added intogreater stories about Ottoman severity towards minorities, and about wars andfires in the city. Interestingly more details of Jews were given when things wentwrong and goods, homes and lives were lost.

Despite the tragic nature of many of these texts, Jews could also be used toindicate the cosmopolitan nature of the Ottoman capital, when listing its inhab-itants of many different nationalities and creeds. Among the several strangersliving in Istanbul, Jews were also becoming attractions in their own right andtravellers wanted to cross their thresholds and see their synagogue worship andimportant rituals in action. Their homes, shops and synagogues started to form adistinctive and even fashionable part of an English Levantine travellers itinerary.

Jews were described as visible and important parts of Istanbul or every othercity they inhabited. Travel writers who at least ideally had to pay close attentionto administration, social organization and politics of the countries they visitedincluded Jews in their larger narratives, which were intended to give general in-formation about the Ottomans, not Jews. Such texts, whether long or short, can

reveal to us, that buildings and material culture were closely tied and used toindicate the status of Jews as an Ottoman minority. Sometimes the English hadto twist their larger cultural narratives quite a lot to force Jews into them, intobeing the most hated people on earth and still having economic success and con-nections to the high and mighty in the Ottoman Empire. The strangers wherethey dwell and travellers where they reside mentioned by Samuel Purchas werefittingly set into a place where there was much trade, enabling travellers to pre-sent Istanbul as a lively multi-ethnic urban space.

Eva Johanna Holmberg

V. GROEBNER, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe.

Translated by M. Kyburz-J. Peck, New York, Zone Books, 2007.

Documents

Placing the Jews in Early Modern Texts of Istanbul