Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire

Introduction: Turkish and Ottoman Records for Jewish Genealogy

This page covers Ottoman Jewish genealogy in two parts: the Jewish community of the modern Republic of Turkey, and the archives of the former Ottoman Empire. Turkey has been home to a Jewish community for 2,400 years. For a century after 1492, it was the largest in the world. Today it numbers about 14,000 people.

The Ottoman archives are the common record base of some twenty-five successor states, stretching from Bosnia to Basra. We have separated the two. Part One is the community. Part Two is the records, and it is written to be used from any of those other pages.

A word about the scale of what is at stake in Part Two. The Ottoman Empire lasted six centuries under a single dynasty, and empires run on paper. There are hundreds of millions of documents in Istanbul alone, with millions more scattered across the successor states. One specialist estimate is that around half a billion people alive today could find ancestors in Ottoman records. Almost none of it has been searched for Jewish family history.

Part One: the community

Before 1492 — and why it matters more than people think

Jews have lived in Anatolia since at least the fourth century BCE. The synagogue at Sardis, part of a vast bath-gymnasium complex, was in use for four to five hundred years. Josephus records Antiochus III settling two thousand Jewish families in Lydia and Phrygia. These were Romaniote Jews — Greek-speaking, with their own rite and their own liturgical language, Yevanic.

Two facts about them are constantly missed, and both matter genealogically.

First, the Ottomans moved them. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II ordered a sürgün — a forced resettlement — bringing Muslims, Christians and Jews from across the empire to repopulate his new capital. Within months most of the empire’s Romaniote Jews were concentrated in Constantinople, where they made up about a tenth of the population. They experienced it as an expulsion.

Second, Istanbul is really a Sephardised Romaniote community. The Sephardim arrived after 1492 into a city already full of Romaniotes. It was only by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century that the Sephardim came to outnumber them. The result is a community that is Sephardi in minhag but substantially Romaniote in descent, with Romaniote strictness in personal-status law persisting long enough to cause documented halakhic disputes with Salonica.

So if your family is from Istanbul, do not assume Iberian descent. It is at least as likely to be Byzantine.

1492 and after

Bayezid II issued a formal invitation, and the refugees came in numbers. By the end of the sixteenth century the Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire was around 150,000. That was double the Jewish population of Poland and Ukraine combined, and the largest Jewish community in the world.

Where they actually settled is worth stating precisely, because assumptions here cause wasted searching. The Sephardim went to Rumelia — Constantinople, Salonica, Adrianople (Edirne), Sarajevo, Nicopolis — and to western and northern Anatolia: Bursa, Aydın, Tokat, Tire, Manisa, Amasya.

İzmir was not settled by Spanish Jews until considerably later. The İzmir community organised only in the late sixteenth century and was formally established in the first half of the seventeenth. It grew from three streams: earlier migrants from around Anatolia; a wave from Salonica in the 1620s led by Joseph Escapa; and a small but important group of Portuguese Jews who founded two synagogues there.

Why the Salonica kehalim are the best origin key

Salonica is the key to Sephardi origins in the whole region, and there is a document that proves it. The city’s twenty-nine historic kehalim were each named for the place their founders came from:

Thirteen founded by Jews arriving not directly from Spain but from Italy — Italia, Sisilia, Pulia, Otranto
Seven from Spain — Sefarad, Kastiya, Mayorca, Cataluña, Aragon
Five from Portugal — Portugal, Lisbon, Evora
One from North Africa — Mograbis
Plus Etz Ahaim (Greek and Romaniote, traditionally first-century), Ashkenaz (1376), Provencia (French, 1394) and a Venetian congregation (1423)

The congregation a family belonged to is therefore a documented statement of where it came from. Michael Molho and Isaac Emmanuel copied down the family registers of the Salonica kehalim. The surviving material is the single most useful origin key in Eastern Sephardi genealogy.

Note also that nearly half these congregations came by way of Italy, and that the Evora congregation was Portuguese New Christian — families who had lived as Catholics before reaching the Ottoman world.

Francos and Levantinos

The vocabulary is important and reciprocal. To the Western Sephardim of Amsterdam and London, the Eastern Sephardim of the Ottoman world were Levantinos. To the Eastern Sephardim, the Western Sephardim were Francos.

But Franco also had a narrower, legal meaning, and it is the one that matters for records. Ottoman Jews who held or acquired European citizenship were known as Francos. They did so in order to escape the jizya and to fall under consular rather than Ottoman jurisdiction. Not all were actually European; the status was often obtained by powerful merchants whose protecting state had an interest in them. Italian and French protection were the most common, with Dutch, German and English also found.

This is the same arrangement set out on our Syria page for Aleppo and our Tunisia page for the Grana of Tunis. It has the same consequence: if a family held foreign protection, its records are in a European archive, not an Ottoman one.

The İzmir case is well documented. The Italian consular registers of İzmir survive from 1871, earlier ones having burned. They list Italian citizens including people born in the eighteenth century, with entries of the form “Giacobbe Reby, son of Abramo Reby and Sierra Davidas, born İzmir 1849, origin Livorno”. A Livorno origin recorded in an Italian consular register in İzmir is exactly the bridge between the Western and Eastern Sephardi worlds that this site exists to trace.

Decline, Republic and departure

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a chronicle of declining influence, with commercial position lost largely to Ottoman Greeks. Emigration then came in waves. Each one had a specific cause worth knowing, because it dates a departure.

From 1869 — the opening of the Suez Canal made Egypt a better prospect than Anatolia. This is the same hinge that appears on our Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Libya pages. Trading families also established branches in Western Europe and put down roots there.
1908–1909 — the Young Turk Revolution and compulsory conscription for non-Muslims. Some accounts treat this as a major driver of Jewish emigration. The specialists we have heard are sceptical, noting that Ottoman Jews were markedly Ottomanist and that the resentment was chiefly Christian. Treat family stories to this effect with mild caution.
1922–23 — the Great Fire of Smyrna and the establishment of the Republic. Before the catastrophe İzmir had perhaps 25,000 Jews in a population of 400,000.
1934 — the Thrace pogrom and the expulsion of Jews from Edirne and the Straits.
1942 — the Varlık Vergisi, the Wealth Tax, levied in principle on all and in practice on non-Muslims. Those who could not pay were sent to labour camps. Around 30,000 emigrated in consequence. It is still remembered as a catastrophe.
1948–51 — 34,547 Jews went to Israel, about 40% of the community.
1955 — the Istanbul pogrom, aimed chiefly at Greeks but affecting Jews and Armenians.
1986 and 2003 — attacks on the Neve Shalom synagogue.

Turkey was neutral during the Second World War. It also denaturalised three to five thousand Jews living abroad, and instructed its diplomats not to repatriate Jews who could prove Turkish nationality. It was the only neutral state to enact anti-Jewish legislation during the war.

Around 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to Nazi camps. The Struma sank with some 781 refugees aboard after Turkey refused to allow them to land. The narrative of Turkey as a rescuer of Jews is regarded by historians such as Marc Baer and Corry Guttstadt as a myth, and one that has been put to political use. More Turkish Jews suffered from wartime policy than were saved by it.

Today the community numbers around 14,000, some 95% in Istanbul with about 2,500 in İzmir. The ancient community of Antakya ended in the earthquake of 2023, which killed its leaders, destroyed the synagogue and led to the evacuation of its last fourteen members. A 2,500-year presence closed in a week.

Where they went: Israel above all, with some 280,000 people of Turkish origin, then the United States. The Seattle community, whose Sephardic Bikur Holim still uses Ladino and has its own siddur, Zehut Yosef, is the best known. Others went to France, Canada and Latin America. More recently, several hundred Turkish Jews have obtained Portuguese citizenship under that country’s nationality law, though the Portuguese route has been substantially tightened since 2022. See our page on Spanish and Portuguese nationality.

Part Two: the Ottoman records

Three challenges before you begin

The language. Ottoman Turkish is a dead language, and it is not “old Turkish”. It is what a nineteenth-century reformer called elsine-i selâse, “the three languages”: Turkish grammar with Arabic and Persian vocabulary, and Persian and Arabic grammar embedded within it. Arabic speakers routinely mistake Ottoman documents for Arabic and cannot read them. The distance from modern Turkish is greater than Shakespeare’s English is from ours, and closer to katharevousa against demotic Greek. Be wary of informal translations offered on social media; specialists report that they usually miss a great deal.

The script. For Ottoman documents, Riqa was the preferred hand among some nineteen variants. For Jewish community documents in Judeo-Spanish, the printed script is Rashi and the handwritten script is Solitreo. Solitreo is a genuinely difficult palaeographical problem, unrecognisable to a reader of modern Hebrew, and heavily influenced by Arabic calligraphy. There is also a Mizrahi script that sits between the two.

The calendar, and this is the practical trap. Ottoman civil documents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries generally use the Rumi calendar, not the Islamic Hijri one. Rumi counts its year one from the Hijra but is a solar calendar. If you convert a Rumi date as though it were Hijri you will be several years out. More errors in this field come from this than from anything else.

The Ottoman State Archives (BOA), Istanbul

The central archive is in Istanbul, at devletarsivleri.gov.tr. The printed guide is Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi Rehberi (Istanbul, 2017).

A practical warning. Registration from outside Turkey is reported to be effectively impossible; researchers describe being unable to complete the process from abroad. In practice this is an archive you visit, or one you use through someone in Istanbul.

The finding aids are in modern Turkish. The documents are in Ottoman Turkish. So you need one language to find and another to read. The useful exception is the Ottoman Foreign Service records from the mid-nineteenth century, which are largely in French, clean and legible, and cover Ottoman consulates and cultural activity worldwide. Search in Turkish, read in French.

The classifications a researcher will meet include Kamil Kepeci, Maliyeden Müdevver (finance), Bab-ı Asafi Defterhane-i Amire (the Grand Vizier’s office) and Cevdet, some 216,572 documents in 34 volumes arranged by topic. For Jewish material specifically, the Divan-ı Hümâyûn kept records of non-Muslim communities, and its Kilise Defterleri covers the construction and repair of synagogues, schools, orphanages and cemeteries. The Cizye Muhasebesi Kalemi administered the poll tax on non-Muslims.

The most effective search strategy is by place. Find the modern Turkish name of the town, use the finding aids to pull everything relating to it, and work through the results.

The registers, and what each one will actually give you

Nüfus defterleri — population registers. The single most important series, and it comes in two generations.

From 1831 — sporadic censuses, held at the Ottoman archives and downloadable for a fee. But they are thin: generally males only, and no parents named.
From about 1878 — robust, systematic, and naming both the mother and the father. These will take you from the late nineteenth century back into the mid-century through the parents.

The registers begun in the 1870s and running to the end of the empire are not in Istanbul. They are in a separate archive in Ankara, the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs (Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü), which researchers are not permitted to enter. Access is by petition, in Turkish, as a descendant of the people named.

These are the registers behind e-Devlet, Turkey’s e-government portal. It gives any Turkish citizen with an identity number a family tree reaching into the nineteenth and sometimes the eighteenth century. It is only open to Turkish citizens. But if you have Turkish cousins, this is the fastest route into the family that exists.

Nüfus tezkeresi — the identity card. Often found in family papers. It gives birth year, religion, place of residence down to the house number, and almost always the names of both parents. If you have one, it is probably the best single document you hold. It was also the document used to leave the empire, so departure should in principle have generated a record.

Tahrir defterleri — the survey registers, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. They record heads of household, single men, widows, the tax-exempt and the elderly, with Muslims and non-Muslims recorded separately and, in some regions, ethnicity noted. Surnames are generally not recorded, only “name, son of father”. This varied entirely with the official: one sixteenth-century Aleppo register is known to give family names. They are held at the Ottoman archives and at the Land Registry and Cadastre Directorate (Tapu ve Kadastro) in Ankara.

Cizye defterleri — poll tax registers. These cover everyone legally liable, and they exist from the beginning of the empire. Usually “name, son of father”, but sometimes surnames, and sometimes organised by synagogue. Given what the Salonica kehalim tell you about origins, that is a real prize when it happens.

Other tax series. Avarız defterleri are extraordinary tax registers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Temettüat defterleri record nineteenth-century income and assets. Tapu defterleri are property deeds, significant from the second half of the nineteenth century and carrying information about the owner as well as the property.

Ottoman censuses ran in 1831, 1844 (Rumelia), 1881/2–1893 (the first modern one, counting by gender and ethno-religious group), and 1905–06. The 1905–06 results were never fully published and some were destroyed in the Balkan Wars.

Sharia court records — the under-used source

The şer’iyye sicilleri — the Sharia court records — are, for the centuries before 1831, probably the best source of all. Hardly anyone uses them.

The Ottomans systematised the Islamic court system across the Levant, Anatolia and the Balkans. Where the records were not destroyed they survive from the sixteenth century, occasionally the fifteenth. Jews and Christians used these courts constantly, often in preference to their own.

There were two reasons, both documented. An Islamic court would give judgment the same day where a beit din might take years. And litigants who got there first could sometimes secure a favourable outcome. Jews used them to sue over property, to record wills and inheritance, and sometimes to escape a communal ruling they disliked.

They are held in libraries and archives across the Middle East and the Balkans, including the National Library of Turkey in Ankara for some cities, and the Palace of Justice in Damascus for Syria.

The dispersed archives — Twenty-five successor states

This is the point most researchers miss. If your family’s town is now in Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Israel, Syria, Iraq or anywhere else that was Ottoman, there will be Ottoman records there as well as in Istanbul.

Bulgaria — the Oriental Department of the Cyril and Methodius National Library, Sofia, which claims the largest Ottoman collection outside Turkey. Massive, difficult to use, none digitised and some uncatalogued.
Greece — the Historical Archive of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, holding the Ottoman records for Salonica and Monastir. Recently catalogued, not digitised. This is the archive for the largest Sephardi community that ever existed and it must be consulted in person.
North Macedonia — the State Archives, with a large Ottoman collection.
Syria — the Centre of Historical Documents in Damascus, holding nüfus records, and the Sharia court records.
And so on through Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia.

Some material went further still. Parts of the Salonica Jewish community archive were taken to Moscow as war booty and remain there.

Where are the Ottoman Jewish community archives now?

Most Ottoman Jewish community archives are no longer in the communities.

The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem holds most of them, in part or in full. This is where you should start.

İzmir is the clearest case. The community’s extensive archives, reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century, were taken to Israel by Rabbi Yosef Ashkenazi when he left the presidency of the İzmir beit din for a post there. After his death the CAHJP purchased them from his family. So the archive of İzmir Jewry is in Jerusalem, not İzmir.

What remains in place is mainly late nineteenth and twentieth century, and accessibility varies community by community. The Istanbul archives are held by the office of the Hakham Bashi. An indexing project by Dan Kaziez was taken down under Turkish privacy law. Enquiries to the community may be answered in six months, or never. Researchers who have tried report that this is not discrimination but general practice, and reflects a community that has good reason to keep its head down.

Marriage registers survive better than anything else. The İzmir community registers run in good detail from the mid-nineteenth century and record the synagogue, the parties and even the dowry. Dov Cohen of Bar-Ilan has published indexes, including a list of 7,300 brides and grooms who married in İzmir in 1883–1901 and 1918–1933, a copy of which is in the JGSGB library.

On the İzmir civil records: yes, they burned in the fire of 1922. But reconstructions were made for people who needed them. A 1929 US visa application in one researcher’s family contains a Turkish civil registry document stating the original was burned and setting out the reconstructed information. Do not assume the fire is the end of the line.

Consular and protégé records

For Franco families this is where the documentation is, and it is accessible.

The European powers issued protégé status to Ottoman subjects: Russia to the Orthodox, Britain to Protestants, France to Catholics. There are consequently large lists of protégés in those national archives. Jews obtained protection chiefly from Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Britain. The Italian consular registers of İzmir from 1871 are the best-documented Jewish example.

The United States did not confer citizenship this way, so there are no comparable American protégé lists. But there are consular reports and diplomatic correspondence, and the Ottomans regarded the Americans as an honest broker and dealt with them extensively in the late imperial period.

Cemeteries

The transformative resource here is Minna Rosen’s survey, conducted in İzmir and elsewhere from the late 1980s and unpublished for decades. It is now available as A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey, 1583–1990, covering around 60,000 stones and fragments spanning four centuries. If you research Turkish Jewish families, start here.

Two things to know when reading the stones. In the Eastern Sephardi tradition of this period the mother’s name often appears on the tombstone. That makes these among the few sources that name women, and a partial answer to the perennial problem of matrilineal lines. And Ottoman Jewish epitaphs are frequently long and biographical, giving parentage, office and family relationships.

Also relevant: the Family History Library holds records of the Altındağ cemetery, 1934–1995. The Bahribaba cemetery in İzmir was partly appropriated in 1878–79 and 1914, then wholly demolished under the Greek occupation in 1921, for a university that was never built. The community declared a day of mourning and moved what remains it could to Gürçeşme.

Rabbinic literature and manuscripts — the source nobody uses

Hundreds of books were published by Ottoman Jewish hakhamim, and they are freely available as PDFs on HebrewBooks.org. They are not only halakhic. They contain eulogies and sermons that describe family relationships in detail — deaths, marriages, disputes, divorces — and their introductions frequently include the author’s own genealogy and lists of the people who sponsored the printing.

Because Ottoman Jewish women are so often recorded only as “wife of” or “daughter of”, these sermons are sometimes the only place a relationship is stated at all.

Alongside them are thousands of manuscripts scattered worldwide, many uncatalogued and some circulating in the private auction market. The National Library of Israel’s Ktiv project has digitised a great many. They include unpublished books, circumcision registers, marriage and divorce registers, letters and fragments of community archives.

What is being done, and what it means for you

FamilySearch has a substantial Ottoman programme: digitising, indexing, and working toward translation. The reasoning is that Ottoman Turkish has too few specialists for translation help to be available on demand.

It has created an index of the Ottoman nüfus registers of Israel and Palestine. At present this is searchable by the parents’ names rather than the individual’s, with the images viewable at a FamilySearch centre rather than online. It is training handwritten text recognition on Ottoman nüfus registers, currently around 60 to 70 per cent accurate and aiming for 80 per cent and above. With IGRA, FamilySearch is also indexing the interwar Greek-administration records of the Salonica Jewish community. There is another project in Austria, using the Transkribus AI platform.

Solitreo is being handled differently, by training human teams rather than machines, because the corpus is smaller.

What this means practically: the position is improving quickly, and material that was inaccessible five years ago may be indexed within a few years. It is worth re-checking.

City by city

Istanbul — the largest community, and Romaniote beneath the Sephardi surface. Community archives are with the Hakham Bashi. Since the Republic, religious affairs have been under the Grand Rabbinate (the Office of the Haham Bashi) and finance and administration under a Conseil laïque. There are sixteen synagogues and a well-kept cemetery. The Jewish Museum of Turkey was founded in 2001 by the Quincentennial Foundation.

İzmir (Smyrna) — community archives at the CAHJP in Jerusalem; marriage registers indexed by Dov Cohen; the cemeteries in Minna Rosen’s survey; Italian consular registers from 1871; civil records burned in 1922 but partly reconstructed. The İzmir Jewish Heritage Project, funded by the Kiriaty Foundation, is restoring the synagogue complex as a living museum, with professional conservation work of a high standard.

Edirne (Adrianople) — around 12,000 Jews out of 80,000 people at the time of the 1905 fire. See Gürer Karagedikli’s thesis on Edirne Jewry c. 1686–1750, and Erol Haker on the community and its Alliance schools, 1867–1937. The Grand Synagogue has been restored.

Bursa — the Etz Hayim synagogue may predate the Ottoman conquest. The Mayor synagogue is by tradition Majorcan, and the Gerush synagogue was reportedly built for early Spanish refugees, with one source suggesting they came chiefly from the Granada region. The cemetery at Kükürtlü dates to the sixteenth century and is one of the oldest in Turkey. Leyla Oral, Bursa Musevi Kaynakları (1839–1922) is reported to be a collection of the community’s birth, marriage and death records. If so, that is a significant and little-known source.

Gallipoli (Gelibolu) — no community remains. There is a dedicated Gallipoli Jews website and a KehilaLinks page. Fuat Durmuş has published on the Jewish cemetery in Turkish, from a master’s thesis using Ottoman archival documents and archaeological remains. The 500-year-old synagogue was reported near collapse in 2019.

Tire — small, gone, and unusually well served. A municipal project under the mayor from 2013 produced a free, open prosopographical database of more than 5,000 individuals and 166 surnames, drawn from the city archives and cemetery, together with an active Facebook group. It is a model of what a municipality can do, and also of how fragile such projects are: the project was wound down when the administration changed, and the website survived only after protests from the descendant community.

Antakya, Çanakkale, Manisa, Tokat, Amasya and Aydın, together with the Kurdish-speaking communities of the south-east, are all small, all now gone or nearly so, and all under-documented.

Sephardic World lectures on Ottoman Jewish genealogy

Jewish Archives in the Ottoman Empire — Michael Waas
Researching the Sephardic Communities of the Ottoman Empire — Jonathan McCollum
Muestro Yerusha: Jewish Heritage and Identity in the Ottoman Empire — Michael Waas
The Jews of Edirne, Turkey — Jacob Daniels
Researching Jewish Ancestors in the Ottoman Empire — David Mendoza

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Ottoman archives have never been searched systematically for Jewish family history. This is the largest untouched body of material in Sephardi genealogy, and the obstacles are language and access rather than survival.

The Salonica kehalim registers are the best origin key in Eastern Sephardi genealogy and are not widely used. Molho and Emmanuel copied them; the material deserves proper publication and indexing.

The consular protégé lists have never been compiled for Jewish families across Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Britain. Doing so would produce, in effect, a register of the Franco families of the empire.

The rabbinic literature is free, digitised, searchable and almost entirely unused for genealogy.

Departure records. The nüfus tezkeresi was required to leave the empire, so an application must have been recorded. Nobody appears to know whether those records survive. It is a specific, answerable question.

Surnames. Baruch Pinto’s Sephardic Onomasticon is the only book on Turkish Sephardi surnames and is not well regarded. Alexander Beider is understood to be working on Eastern Sephardi surnames, which would fill the largest reference gap in the field. See our page on Sephardic surnames.

The Greek, Bulgarian and Macedonian Ottoman collections are catalogued at best and undigitised, and hold the records of the largest Sephardi communities that ever existed.

Organisations and repositories

Ottoman State Archives (BOA), Istanbul; the Land Registry and Cadastre Directorate and the General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs, Ankara; the National Library of Turkey, Ankara.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, the first stop for community records. [LINK NEEDED: CAHJP]

National Library of Israel, for Ktiv manuscripts, the Historical Jewish Press and ketubot. [LINK NEEDED]

FamilySearch and IGRA, for the digitisation and indexing programmes described above.

Cyril and Methodius National Library, Sofia; Historical Archive of Macedonia, Thessaloniki; State Archives of North Macedonia.

Office of the Hakham Bashi, Istanbul; the Jewish Museum of Turkey; Şalom newspaper.

Ottoman Bank Archives and SALT Research, Istanbul, with London branch records at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Cercle de Généalogie Juive, Paris; Sephardic Bikur Holim, Seattle; the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture.

Other resources

Hazine — a practical guide to using the Başbakanlık archive
An Overview of the Ottoman Archival Documents and their Characteristics
Overview of Digital Sources for the Study of the Ottoman Empire (Leiden)
Guide to the General Directorate of State Archives
The Terminology of the Ottoman-Turkish Judicial Documents
In Search of a Jewish Community in the Early Modern Ottoman World
Land Registry Archives publications
Stroum Center for Jewish Studies — learning Ladino
Turkish genealogical research — video series
Search Your Middle Eastern and European Genealogy

Help us find records

Turkey and the Ottoman archives are the largest opportunity on this site and the least worked. We are looking for:

Anyone with access to the Ottoman archives in Istanbul willing to undertake or advise on research
Ottoman Turkish and Solitreo readers — the binding constraint in this whole field
Nüfus tezkeresi identity cards and other Ottoman documents in family hands
Consular registrations and protégé documents from any European power
Anything from the Salonica kehalim registers
Community registers from any Ottoman city, or information about where they now are
Answers on whether Ottoman departure or passport records survive

We have contacts in Istanbul. If anyone would like to sponsor research, or is willing to offer their own family history as a test case, please get in touch. This is a field where one well-designed pilot would teach everybody a great deal.

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].

Research services

Ottoman research is a specialist matter and we will be straight with you about it. The finding aids are in modern Turkish, the documents in Ottoman Turkish, the community records in Hebrew and Solitreo, and the dates in a calendar that will mislead you if you convert it wrongly. The best documents — the post-1878 population registers naming both parents — sit in an archive in Ankara that researchers cannot enter.

Against that, the community archives are mostly in Jerusalem and are accessible, the cemeteries are now surveyed, and if a family held European protection its records are in Europe. We will tell you which of those routes applies to your family before you commit to anything. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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