In this book Walter Weiker explores the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. That expulsion had the immediate consequence of enlarging the Jewish presence in the Ottoman Empire, particularly what is today Turkey and the adjacent areas of the Balkans. Weiker not only provides a full account of the Turkish Jews' intellectual and cultural contributions dating back to the Byzantine Empire and continuing through the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, its rise and decline, and its twentieth century transformation into the Turkish Republic, but he does so from a perspective of Jewish political history.