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Jews in Ottoman Constantinople. A brief thread. 👇
The story of Sultan Beyazid taking in the expelled Jews of Spain in 1492 following the Alhambra Decree is well known but that was only part of the influx into the Jewish community within the empire & a significant population had been present in Constantinople prior to 1453. 
Among Sultan Mehmed's early reforms was the creation of the Hakham Bashi /Hahambaşı to oversee the Jewish community. In a similar way to using the Patriarch to run the Rum community. It was an office which has had a continuous line ever since.
The first Hahambaşı was Elijah (sometimes called Moses) Capsali, a rabbi already living in Constantinople before the fall. He was born in Crete & the family name came from the Morea. Mehmed thought enough of him to include him in his diwan (counsel) ahead of the Rum Patriarch.
Capsali headed the growing Jewish community in the city from 1452 to 1495. During this period he & other rabbis wrote to the Jewish communities across Europe extolling their treatment & inviting them to migrate east. Incidents such as Simon of Trent affair only added to the flow.
Capsali's relatives back in Candia included a great nephew, Elia. It's another mark of this era that family ties regularly crossed national lines. Elia was a citizen of Venice, his great uncle a member of the Ottoman diwan.
In 1541, Elia - now head of the Jewish community in Candia - had to diffuse tensions with the Greek community, who accused the Jews there of being Turkish spies.
Whilst that was not the case, the suspicion of Christians towards Jews was stoked by some glee shown at their military defeats. E.g. Elia wrote in 1522, on the fall of Rhodes, that the Turk conquests & defeat of Christian nations anticipated the joyous coming of the Messiah.
Elijah Capsali was far from the only Jewish member of Constantinople's community to be relied upon by Mehmed II. His chief physician was Hekim Yakub, born Jacopo of Gaeta, who had studied medicine at Sapienza in Rome. He eventually became minister of finance too (defterdar).
Hakim Yakub was approached by Venetian agents on several occasions in the hope he could be persuaded to poison the sultan. The deal was 10k ducats upfront, 20k on Mehmed's death & Ventian citizenship.
The fact the messenger, Lando degli Albizzi, set out from Venice to Constantinople with this offer (approved & noted in Venetian records) but then disappeared, while Hakim Yakub remained in the Sultan's favour until his death 10yrs later, suggests the answer was an emphatic no.
Not all Jews were treated equally however. The Romaniote Jews who predated the conquest were forcibly resettled under the surgun policy & were bound to that location unless paying double tax. The Iberian Jews who came later were allowed freedom of movement without surgun.
Romaniote Jews probably represented around 10% of Constantinople's population under Mehmed. With the influx of Iberian Jews, that proportion was probably much higher under Beyazid, although there was plenty of migration to other cities such as Thessaloniki.
The oldest surviving Synagogue in Istanbul is Ahrida Synagogue in Balat. Built in 1460 by Romaniot Jews, it is known foremost by its boat-shaped bimah which supposedly represents the ships of Beyazid's Ottoman navy sent to Spain to rescue the Sephadic Jews in 1492.
