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Lecture

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
The Expulsion from Spain and Sultan Beyazid: Welcoming the Jews in Ottoman Empire

Tuesday 11.11.2025

How to watch

This lecture starts on 11 November at 5:00pm (UK).

Summary

In 1492, the Alhambra Decree expelled the Jewish population from Spain. Sultan Bayezid II issued a proclamation welcoming the Jewish refugees into the Ottoman Empire, with many of them settling in the city of Salonica, which came to be known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite

An image of Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches Chinese History, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and sometimes Jewish history, at New York University. He is author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017); and Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History (Hawaii University Press, 2023).