The Ottoman Empire offered Jews refuge from European Christian persecution.

Evidence

A French king allied himself with a Turkish sultan against the Habsburg Empire; the Pope similarly forged an alliance opposing the Habsburg emperor’s plans for a crusade against the Ottomans. Jews fleeing Europe, particularly after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, found a home in the Ottoman Empire. This was true too of Protestants and other dissident Christians seeking to escape Catholic persecution. In short, the diversity that marked al-Andalus found its reflection in the Ottoman territories; Christians and Jews not only lived in an atmosphere of tolerance but also experienced prosperity. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 79 (#expands, via linked claim)

Ironically, as this civilizing project necessarily presupposed the possibility of historical development and cultural, social, and intellectual progress on the part of natives considered racially naive and immature, it presumed the claim to transcendental value at once economic and epistemological;:. legal and moral. Transcendental value was represented in the universal currencies of money and the word, productive labor and sanctified truth, industry and knowledge, rational legality and moral virtue, The assumption is ironically universalist, for these imposed aspirations to universal ideals were always no more than embodiments of European, Christian virtue and practice, morality and truth. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 49 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ottoman society was relatively tolerant toward Jews and Christians; The Spanish Inquisition was economic control, and Ottomans sheltered its Jewish refugees — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 353; Czarist persecution and failed rebellion drove Eastern European Jews to mass emigration to America — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 131 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The Ottoman Empire sheltered religious refugees persecuted in Europe #expands (0.97) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 79
• Colonial universalism disguised European Christian values as transcendent truths #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 49