ABSTRACT
Chapters 9 and 10 consider those elements of Ottoman Arab society that lay outside the normative male Sunni Muslim population. Chapter 9 takes up non-Muslim communities, as well as the poor and disabled. The chapter introduces the general strictures governing non-Muslims under Muslim rule before turning to specific populations. The Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands occurred just as these regions were absorbing a massive influx of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal, who overwhelmed the pre-existing Arabized communities. In the late sixteenth century, Sephardic rabbis launched a revolutionary flowering of Jewish mysticism in the city of Safed in Ottoman Palestine. A century later, however, Ottoman Jewish communities were traumatized by the apostasy of the messianic claimant Sabbatai Sevi. In the eighteenth century, as European commercial powers began to penetrate the region, Syrian Christian merchants under French protection converted to Catholicism, giving rise to an influential new sect of Syrian Catholics. Care of society’s most disadvantaged usually fell to the charitable structures of the various religious communities, although member of the Ottoman imperial family, along with provincial officials and notables, also founded soup kitchens, hospitals, and similar institutions.
