Yaron Ayalon, Ph.D. (2009), Princeton University, is Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. He has written many articles on Jewish and Ottoman history, and a monograph, Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (Cambridge, 2014)

• PrefaceList of Figures and TablesAbbreviationsIntroduction1 Who Were Ottoman Jews?2 Ottoman Jewish History: the State of the Field3 What This Book Does Not Do4 Book Structure1 Ottoman Jewry, Origins and Growth1 One Overplayed Letter2 The Sephardim Arrive3 The Textile Industry and the Decline of Safed4 Ottoman Jews and the Environment2 Ottoman Jewry, Opportunities and Crises1 Demography and Economy2 The Environment, Again: Jewish Settlement Patterns and the Little Ice Age3 Izmir and Aleppo4 Hardships and Prophecy5 Expanding Opportunities in the Eighteenth Century3 Communal Leadership, Rabbis, and Others1 Rabbis in the Existing Scholarship2 Jews in Ottoman Society3 The Frankos Affair4 Toward a Model of Communal Leadership4 Poor Relief and Communal Authority1 Foundations of Jewish Charity2 Public Charity3 Semi-public Charity4 Private Charity5 Why Give?6 Charitable Societies and the Weakening of Communal Authority5 Education, Reading, and Rabbinical Authority1 Education2 Intellectual Circles3 The Inner Circle and Its Library4 The Value of Books5 The End of Knowledge MonopolyConclusionBibliographyIndex