“Jewish Living Environments in the Ottoman Empire”

In cooperation with INTEREG (International Institute for Nationality Law and Regionalism e.V., Munich) and the MMZ (Moses Mandelsohn Center, Potsdam) invites the Lepsiushaus Potsdam to the following program:

Roy Knocke (Lepsiushaus Potsdam): Welcome

Werner Tress (MMZ Potsdam): Presentation of the series “European-Jewish Studies”

Martina Bitunjac (MMZ Potsdam): and present authors - presentation of the volume

Meinolf Arens (INTEREG Munich): New Perspectives, Summary and Conclusion

When Sephardic Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the course of the Spanish Inquisition, thanks to comparatively tolerant Ottoman politics, they entered the realm of sultans, in which they will in future as dhimmis, i.e. as “wards”, lived. In the following decades, Jewish personalities, including rabbis, community members, travelers, traders, entrepreneurs and medical professionals, shaped religious, cultural, economic and social life from Syria to Egypt to the Ottoman Balkans. In this volume, transnational and interdisciplinary individual studies, the diversity of Jewish living environments in various intercultural communication spaces and in the context of acceptance and rejection, cultural transfer and economic relations — but also in connection with wars, conflicts, pogroms and nation-building processes.

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