Empire from the Margins - Martin Jacobs

The writings of three early modern Jewish historians highlight the divided allegiances of a Jewish diaspora living in and between the Spanish and Ottoman empires In 1492, the year that marked the start of Spain's transatlantic expansion, the Spanish monarchs expelled their Jewish subjects and triggered a mass Jewish migration to the lands of the Ottoman empire. But while the rise of these rival empires had tremendous impact on the Jewish population's geography, the historical accounts of contemporary Jews have remained peripheral to the study of early modern imperialism. In Empire from the Margins, Martin Jacobs seeks to understand how the history of empires appears through the lens of marginalized communities and to explore how Jews responded to Spanish and Ottoman imperial expansion. He approaches this history through the Hebrew chronicles of three sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jewish authors. Elijah Capsali of Crete, Joseph ha-Kohen of Genoa, and Joseph Sambari of Cairo all lived in early modern hubs with global connections, and—in unusual detail for premodern Jewish historians—they described how the Spanish and Ottoman empires redrew the political, cultural, and religious map of the Mediterranean region while simultaneously transforming the transatlantic world. As Jews, these writers belonged to an ethno-religious minority within the Mediterranean basin where the Spanish and Ottoman empires were centered, and from here they expressed marginalized
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