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Concept
History of the Jews in Turkey
Summary
The history of the Jews in Turkey (Türkiye Yahudileri or Türkiye Musevileri; Yehudim Turkim; Djudios Turkos) covers the 2400 years that Jews have lived in what is now Turkey. There have been Jewish communities in Anatolia since at least the fifth century BCE and many Spanish and Portuguese Jews expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire in the late 15th century, including regions now part of Turkey, centuries later, forming the bulk of the Ottoman Jews.
Today, the vast majority of Turkish Jews live in Israel, though Turkey itself still has a modest Jewish population, where the vast majority live in Istanbul, and the remainder in Izmir.
History of the Jews in GreeceHistory of the Jews in the Roman Empire and History of the Jews in the Byzantine Empire
According to the Hebrew Bible, Noah's Ark landed on the top of Mount Ararat, a mountain in eastern Anatolia, in the Armenian Highlands, near the present-day borders of Turkey, Armenia, and Iran. Josephus, Jewish historian of the first century, notes Jewish origins for many of the cities in Anatolia, though much of his sourcing for these passages is traditional. The New Testament has many mentions of Jewish populations in Anatolia: Iconium (now Konya) is said to have a synagogue in Acts of the Apostles 14:1, and Ephesus is mentioned as having a synagogue in Acts 19:1 and in Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. The Epistle to the Galatians is likewise directed at Galatia, which once held an established Jewish population.
Based on physical evidence, there has been a Jewish community in Anatolia since the fourth century BCE, most notably in the city of Sardis. The subsequent Roman and Byzantine Empires included sizable Greek-speaking Jewish communities in their Anatolian domains which seem to have been relatively well-integrated and enjoyed certain legal immunities. The size of the Jewish community was not greatly affected by the attempts of some Byzantine emperors (most notably Justinian I) to forcibly convert the Jews of Anatolia to Christianity, as these attempts met with very little success.
Official source
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