Why Our Association Bears the Name of a Fifteenth-Century Rabbi

Yitzhak Sarfati was chief rabbi of Edirne, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. His surname reveals his origin, because Sarfati means roughly "the Frenchman" in Hebrew and was used for families that came from western Europe. His family came from the German-speaking world, while he himself grew up in the Ottoman Empire and so knew both worlds. That is exactly what made him the ideal sender of the letter he addressed, around the middle of the fifteenth century, to Jewish communities in Germany, Hungary, Moravia and Styria. The situation there was catastrophic: expulsions from cities, forced levies, ritual murder legends and pogroms defined daily life. Sarfati wrote not as a theologian but as someone with a practical alternative to offer.

What the Letter Said

The content can be summed up in a few sentences, even if the language of the original is more flowery. Sarfati described the Ottoman Empire as a land where nothing was lacking, where Jews could practice their trades, own houses and maintain synagogues. He pointed out that the road to the Holy Land lay open through Ottoman territory, which for many devout families was the deciding argument. And he asked the uncomfortable question of why anyone would stay in lands where they were treated like cattle when another path was possible. Historians argue over how many people actually set out because of this letter, since migration always has several causes. What is undisputed is that the text circulated, was copied and stayed in memory across generations.

For us, the letter matters for another reason. It reverses the usual line of sight. In German memory culture, Turkey is mostly the country of origin of labor migration from 1961, and Jews appear as the persecuted in Europe. Here we have a constellation in which people flee German cities and find protection in Anatolia and the Balkans. When we tell this in schools, it usually goes quiet. This reversal is not a rhetorical trick, but simply what the sources say.

1492 and the Centuries After

Four decades after Sarfati's letter, the great movement came. In 1492 the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jews from Spain, and Portugal soon followed. Sultan Bayezid II sent ships and took in the exiles, supposedly with the mocking remark that the Spanish king was impoverishing his own country and enriching his. Whether he really said it, nobody knows. What is certain is that Sephardic communities formed in Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa, Safed and also on Rhodes, and they helped shape the economic life and scholarship of the empire for centuries. They brought the printing press, medical knowledge and trade networks. Their language, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, was spoken in families into the twentieth century, and it lives on to this day in a few magazines and radio programs.

Not a Paradise, but a Different Frame

At this point, honesty matters more than a pretty story. The Ottoman Empire was not a society of equal rights. Jews and Christians counted as protected communities, paid a separate poll tax, were subject to dress codes and could not always testify against Muslims in court. Their communities handled family law, education and taxes internally, which meant autonomy but also special status. Measured by today's standards, you find discrimination. Compared with the Europe of the same era, you find legal security, opportunities to earn a living and the absence of systematic expulsions. Both findings are true at once, and we present them together at our events.

Just as little do we leave out what happened in the twentieth century. The pogroms in Thrace in 1934, the 1942 wealth tax known as Varlık Vergisi that ruined non-Muslims economically, and the riots in Istanbul in 1955 are part of the history of the Republic. After 1948 a large share of Turkey's Jews emigrated to Israel, and today about fifteen thousand still live in Turkey, most of them in Istanbul. The attack on the Neve Shalom synagogue in 1986 and the attacks of 2003 left deep marks. When we speak of Turkish-Jewish friendship, we do not mean an unbroken idyll but a relationship with fractures that has held nonetheless.

From Edirne to Rhodes

The line from Sarfati to Selahattin Ülkümen is no construction. The community whose members Ülkümen issued Turkish papers in 1944 was precisely the Sephardic community that had grown on Rhodes in the wake of 1492. Many families there spoke Ladino, many had Ottoman ancestors, and some had lost their citizenship only after 1923. Without the story of reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the legal handle on which Ülkümen built his argument would not have existed at all. Four hundred and fifty years later, an invitation letter became an argument for rescue. This connection is the reason both names appear on our letterhead and not just one. How the community on Rhodes came to an end, you can read under Rhodes 1944.

That leaves the question of what to do with such an old story today. We do not use it as proof that everything will turn out well. We use it as evidence that the relationship between Muslims and Jews does not begin in 1948 or 1967, and that it has very different chapters. Anyone who knows only the last few decades takes conflict for the normal state. Anyone who surveys six centuries sees cycles, room to maneuver and people who made a choice. That takes nothing away from current problems, but it changes the tone in which they are discussed. How we pass this tone on in schools and congregations is described under Dialogue and Education.