Since the early 1980s, literature on early modern Ottoman historiography witnessed a significant expansion in tandem with the rising interest in narrative sources and archival documents. The research, especially during the last two decades, is characterized by the use of new sources and methodology, which in turn, enabled the examination of previously overlooked features and dynamics of early modern history writing. This review argues that the imprint of the new trajectories in the study of early modern Ottoman historiography is particularly manifest in two themes of research. First, the field has undergone a shift from an emphasis on the narrowly defined political function of history writing to the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of purposes, agents, and messages. Studies in the field of art history have particularly contributed to this transformation by expanding the repertoire of historiographical sources beyond textual materials and raising productive questions regarding the authorship and audience of official histories. Second, thought-provoking studies on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography challenged the conventional categories of historian and historiographical work. Historiographers who were neither bureaucrats nor scholars integrated otherwise marginalized voices into the study of Ottoman historiography. Despite the promising developments in the field, there is still a lack of research on the theoretical dimensions and cross-cultural connections of early modern Ottoman history writing.
Two Jewish converts to Islam in the service of Bayezid II penned the earliest known anti-Jewish polemicals in the Ottoman Empire. This article aims at exploring the historical context of the two epistles and their connection with Islamic polemical literature. The simultaneous appearances of Abd al-Salam’s Risāla al-hādiya and Abd al-Allam’s Risāla al-ilzām al-Yahūd will be discussed in the context of the Sephardic influx to the Ottoman lands, an encounter that stimulated scholarly interest in the Jewish faith among Ottoman intellectuals. At first glance, the two treatises seem to be structured so as to persuade a Jewish audience to embrace the Muslim faith by abandoning their former religion. However, the choice of Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the circulation of the texts primarily among Muslim readers suggest that ad- dressing the Jews appears to have been a rhetorical tactic. Considering the negative connotations attached to converts by the Ottoman elite, the authors might also have viewed the composition of anti-Jewish treatises as an effort to distance themselves from their Jewish past.
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