God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

The largest Jewish city in the world after 1492—indeed, the only Jewish-majority city for two thousand years—rose in the Ottoman Empire. This was the humming port of Salonica (now the Greek city of Thessaloniki), on the hilly northwest coast of the Aegean Sea. Over the next four centuries, Salonica, “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” became the global center of Jewish