In 1492 Spain ordered its Jews to convert or leave. Tens of thousands went into exile, and many found refuge in a Muslim empire. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, and later Ottoman tradition credited him with mocking the Spanish king for impoverishing his own realm while enriching the sultan's; the remark is probably legend, but the welcome was real. Sephardic Jews brought skills in trade, medicine and printing, and set up some of the first printing presses in Istanbul. The episode is often cited as proof of Ottoman tolerance. It is real evidence, but understanding it requires a closer look at how the empire treated difference.

Protected but unequal

Islamic law classed Christians and Jews as dhimmis, protected "people of the book." They could worship, own property, run their own communal affairs and keep their own family law. In return they accepted Muslim rule and a set of restrictions. Non-Muslim men paid a special head tax, the jizya, and at various times non-Muslims faced rules on clothing, on riding horses, on bearing arms and on building or repairing churches. Their testimony counted for less than a Muslim's against a Muslim in court. Dhimmi status offered protection and toleration, not equality. By the standards of an age when many European states expelled or forcibly converted religious minorities, that was generous. By the standard of equal rights for every person, it was a ranked order with Muslims on top.

The millet debate

Older textbooks describe a tidy "millet system": the empire divided into religious nations, Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish, each governed by its own religious head from the time of Mehmed II. Since the 1980s, historians such as Benjamin Braude have questioned this picture. Many historians now argue that a formal, empire-wide millet system took shape mainly in the nineteenth century. Earlier arrangements were looser and more local, worked out between communities, officials and religious leaders case by case. The older picture was projected backward, partly by nineteenth-century reformers and community leaders who had their own reasons to describe a long tradition.

A mixed society

Everyday life in Ottoman cities mixed peoples constantly. Muslim, Christian and Jewish neighborhoods lay side by side; guilds sometimes included members of different faiths; and merchants of all communities traded in the same markets. New social spaces appeared. Coffee arrived from Yemen, and coffeehouses spread in Istanbul in the sixteenth century, and some sultans tried to close them as centers of gossip and dissent. Murad IV, in the 1630s, went further and banned tobacco as well, reportedly patrolling the streets in disguise to enforce it.

Women, property and charity

Islamic law gave women the right to own and inherit property, though usually a smaller share than male relatives. Ottoman women could own property and often founded charitable endowments called waqfs. A waqf set aside land or income forever to support a mosque, school, fountain, soup kitchen or hospital. Women of every rank used the kadi courts to claim inheritances, sue debtors and seek divorce. At the top, the seventeenth century saw a period sometimes called the Sultanate of Women, when royal mothers such as Kösem Sultan acted as regents and power brokers for young or weak sultans.

Unfreedom

Ottoman society also rested partly on slavery. Islamic law forbade enslaving freeborn Muslims, so slaves came from outside: war captives, people bought from Africa across the Sahara and up the Nile, and captives from the north. Crimean Tatar raids into Poland, Lithuania and Russia supplied many of the captives sold in Ottoman slave markets. Most slaves worked in households rather than on plantations, and freeing slaves was praised as a pious act, but this was still the ownership of human beings, often seized in violent raids.

Worked example: Ottoman Salonica

Take one city to test the general picture. Salonica, today Thessaloniki in Greece, was conquered by the Ottomans in 1430. After 1492 Sephardic Jews settled there in such numbers that for centuries they formed the city's largest community, and Ladino, their Spanish dialect, became a language of its streets and markets. Jewish workshops wove the wool cloth for Janissary uniforms, delivered to the state as a form of tax. Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians and others lived alongside them. In the 1660s the city was swept by excitement over the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Zevi, who converted to Islam under pressure from the sultan, and some followers formed a community of converts that lasted into the twentieth century.

What does Salonica teach? It shows coexistence that lasted for centuries, with communities keeping their languages, faiths and institutions. It also shows hierarchy: Jews and Christians paid special taxes and lived under rules Muslims did not face. And it shows how fragile the arrangement became once empires gave way to nation-states. Greece took the city in 1912, a great fire destroyed much of the Jewish quarter in 1917, and in 1943 Nazi Germany deported most of its Jews to Auschwitz. Ottoman coexistence was neither a paradise nor a prison; it was a working arrangement whose loss revealed how much it had protected.