ABSTRACT
In the 19th century, the Turkish Ottoman Empire encompassed not only the present-day country of Turkey but also modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and much of North Africa, Arabia, and the Balkans. A very few texts in Turkish in Hebrew characters are known from the 16th to 19th centuries, but these seem to be isolated examples, and not part of any larger literary trend. During the Ottoman period, when Turkish was written in a version of the Arabic alphabet, the written language was rather difficult to learn. By publishing Turkish in Hebrew characters, Jewish readers could be introduced to a simpler version of the language, closer to the spoken variety. The new Jewish schools that opened in the last decades of the 19th century, operated by the Paris-based Alliance Israelite Universelle, provided some teaching of Turkish, but French was the primary medium of instruction.
