Second-generation Ottoman Jews lost their European linguistic edge and were replaced by Greeks.

Evidence

In doing so they replaced the Jews. Jews had come from Europe in the fourteenth, more especially in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They came with a knowledge of languages and countries and for a while were very useful. But they lost their usefulness; no new ones were coming, and the second generation born in Turkey no longer possessed the skills and knowledge that their parents had brought from Europe. They were replaced by Greeks, and to a much lesser extent Armenians, who went out and came back, and took over many of the roles which Jews had formerly played in the Ottoman lands. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 164

Categorization

• SHARE: For a scholar of Mediterranean or Ottoman Jewish history — the mechanism of diaspora knowledge depreciation within two generations is a sharp case.