Three German travellers on Istanbul Jews

Sixteenth-century Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire and seat of the Sultans, was demographically the most important city in the Euro-Asian world of the time and contained not only the largest urban Moslem population but also the largest Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities, this last feature surprising to Western travellers. Hence the diaries of three German language travellers, Hans Dernschwam, Stephan Gerlach and Salomon Schweigger, who visited the city in that period and lived there for a certain number of years, contain interesting remarks on the particular situation of Ottoman Jewry, so different from that in the Western world.