ABSTRACT
The two and half centuries from 1492 to around 1750 were characterized by developments in the world of Christendom and Islam that distinguish this period from both the premodern and the modern periods, while marking a transition between the very different Jewish worlds of the late fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. First and foremost, extensive migration and the rise of print culture increased contact between heretofore mutually isolated parts of the Jewish world. Migration in this context meant not only a steady eastward migration, from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and from central Europe to Poland; but also a two-pronged demographic migration from outlying small towns to larger cities and centers of urban commerce and culture, and from more established areas of settlement to frontier and border regions in Poland and the Ottoman Empire. These migration movements, moreover, brought together Jews from parts of the Jewish world that had heretofore been largely isolated from one another. The convergence of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews in the Italian states epitomized this trend, but it was true in the Ottoman Empire as well.
