This talk examines the wide-ranging evangelical, educational, medical and philanthropic activities carried out by three Protestant missionary societies among Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire in the years 1820-1914. Focusing on the major Jewish centres of Istanbul, Salonika and Izmir, the study explores key dimensions of Jewish communal life, including legal and social status, traditional and modern education, internal communal conflicts, processes of secularisation, class structures, family life and the position of women. At the core of the analysis are the missionaries’ objectives, achievements and failures.
The presentation will highlight the varied Jewish responses to missionary initiatives and investigates the strategies employed by Jewish leadership to counter Christian influence during a period marked by profound political, social and religious transformation in the Ottoman Empire and its Jewish communities.
The talk will demonstrate that Protestant missionaries arrived with strong convictions and ambitious plans – in particular, that of converting Jews. It will also address the broader question of whether the Protestant mission ever had a realistic prospect of success among the Jews of Istanbul, Salonika and Izmir. The study draws extensively on missionary reports and journals, as well as Jewish sources, especially responsa literature and Jewish periodicals.
About the speaker: Prof. Emerita Leah Makovetsky was born in Tel Aviv (19 November 1948) and completed her doctoral studies in Israel in 1979. Throughout her career, she has devoted much of her time to teaching and research. She taught a wide range of courses related to Jewish history in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, first at Bar-Ilan University and later at Ariel University. In parallel, she conducted extensive research into the history of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and has presented her work at approx. 60 academic conferences. Her research encompasses diverse topics concerning Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Much of her scholarship is grounded in rabbinic literature as well as British archival sources. She has authored 8 books, and has had more than 150 articles published in academic journals, collected volumes and encyclopedias. To date, she has supervised 15 doctoral dissertations.
