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

by Alan Mikhail

Trafficking as it does in tropes that were commonplace in medieval and early modern Europe—the capture of Gentile children and the emphasis on bloodletting—this almost certainly apocryphal story demonstrates that anti-Semitism existed in the Ottoman Empire and often led to anti-Jewish violence, in narrative form and in reality. Unlike in Europe, however, Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not represent a threat so dire that they needed to be excised from the realm. Hyperbolic phantom fears about blood purity, corruption, and deceit—not the real-world politics of military strategy and global territorial conquest—ultimately led to Europe’s expulsion of the Jews. Although occasional outbursts of anti-Jewish violence did occur, the 1490s witnessed a Jewish renaissance in the Ottoman Empire, and, for centuries afterward, the empire remained the center of global Jewish culture.