Jewish converts refute Judaism: Conversions and religious polemic in the late fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This thesis consists of a textual and contextual analysis of two Ottoman polemical treatises directed against Judaism in the time of Bayezid II. In their works, the author of Risāla al-hādiya, Abd al-Salam, and the author of Risāla al-ilzām, Abd al-Allam, introduced themselves as Jewish converts to Islam at the service of Bayezid II. In these treatises, Judaism was attempted to be refuted relying on the rational argumentation and frequent Hebrew quotations from the Bible. The textual analysis reveals that two Ottoman polemicists followed the formal structure adopted by the medieval Muslim polemic writers. At the same time, a good deal of original content was produced in both polemics. The simultaneous appearance of these polemics, as the first known Ottoman polemics written against Judaism, was closely connected with the late fifteenth and early sixteenth-centuries historical context. In order to explore the relation of these polemics with the Ottoman religious politics, the religious policies of Bayezid II, especially towards the Jewish community, are broadly discussed. This thesis argues that the growing number of the Sephardic Jews arrived at the Ottoman lands aroused a scholarly interest in the Jewish faith among the Ottoman intellectuals. It is also among the claims of this thesis that the polemics under study marked the beginning of the anti-Jewish polemical writing in the Ottoman Empire.