The fact that there are very different groups within Judaism -as in other religious communities -is not surprising 1 . In scholarship, it has become more and more customary to refer to diverse Jewish cultures, Jewries, or even Judaisms 2 . Special attention has been given to the early modern centuries as the time period in which distinct cultural entities started to take shape that are still known today as, for example, Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, i.e., Jews of Central European and Iberian descent 3 . Unlike academic scholarship, however, historical actors have often referred to Judaism as one religious system comprising a considerable degree of diversity. As Martin Goodman states: "Some contemporary scholars have referred to these varieties as separate Judaisms, but the Jews themselves have rarely done so, preferring instead in general to treat Judaism as a single system -albeit one containing considerable diversity […]" 4 . This essay aims to follow Goodman's line of thinking and to shift the focus from the observation of Jewish diversity to the question of how individual Jews actually dealt with differences within their communities and eventually made the case for Jewish unity -a unity that was neither given nor self-evident, but pursued for a range of different reasons. 2The focus will be on a particular historical setting, a very specific historical moment, when a great many Jews found themselves confronted with a diversity of experiences within their communities. I will concentrate on the decades around the turn of the 16 th century and on cities in the Ottoman Empire, whose Jewish populations grew considerably in just a few years due to the arrival of thousands of Iberian refugees. At that time, Jews also migrated from other parts of Europe, among them France and Germany, into the territories of the Sultan, some of which had only recently been A Question of Competition? How to Deal with Inner-Jewish Diversity in Cities ...

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