About the Project

This website has been built to serve the community of researchers in the fields of Jewish history in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire and epigraphical studies. It offers a sophisticated research platform that enables a very broad range of search options, including the epigraphical content of the gravestones, the materials used, and their ornamental elements. This website is unique in the academic world both for its sheer size and for the research opportunities it opens up to its users.
This is a beta version of the computerized database. We are still working on updating and finalizing the interface and data. Suggestions and comments by users are welcomed.
We have made great efforts to get permissions from all copyright holders of works cited and photos used in this website. In the event that any copyright material has not been properly acknowledged, or if your content is being used incorrectly, we wish to apologize and ask you to contact us prior to making any copyright claim. Any improper use was unintentional and we will endeavor to rectify the situation to the satisfaction of all parties.

© All rights reserved to the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University.
The use of this website's materials in a publication of any kind is conditional upon providing the following credit:
Courtesy of the academic research site "A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey, 1583-1990" of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University.
When applicable, the details of the particular photograph or entry should also be cited.

The Nature and Purpose of the Computerized Database

article 0-1 — The pile of tombstones in the Hasköy cemetery created by its partial destruction due to the construction of the ring road around Istanbul

The computerized database, containing nearly 60,000 Jewish tombstones from across Turkey, is the largest academic tombstone database of its kind in the world. The fruit of the labor of numerous individuals and bodies, its primary goals are to preserve the remnants of the gradually-disappearing Jewish life in Turkey, aid scholars to paint a broader and richer picture of the past, and enable interested laypersons to search for their roots.

article 0-2 — Gouache and ink drawing of the Hasköy cemetery by Jules Laurens (1825–1901), January 1847

article 0-3 — Detail from the tombstone of Rivka, wife of Nissim Mutal, who appears to have died in a fire on December 28, 1760.

article 0-4 — The upper part of the table-shaped tombstone of Rivka, wife of Nissim Mutal, who appears to have died in a fire on December 28, 1760

article 0-5 — Side of the sarcophagus-shaped tombstone of Sol, wife of Abraham Shafami, who died on March 11, 1775

Turkish Jewry

The computerized database includes physical and epigraphical material dating from the earliest cemetery it documents (November 1582)—the Hasköy cemetery in Istanbul —until the end of field work in Turkey in the summer of 1990. It thus covers 400 years of Jewish existence in the region—mostly under Ottoman rule and then, from 1923, the Republic of Turkey.

The History of the Computerized Database and the Organizations and Individuals Involved in Creating It

In the mid-1980s, Prof. Bernard Lewis, one of the great historians of the Ottoman Empire and Muslim world was approached by Nuri Arlasız, an avid collector of Ottoman art. Nuri Bey to whom no beauty in the world was alien , urged Prof. Lewis to help save the Jewish cemeteries of Istanbul and prevent their treasures from being plundered or destroyed by natural causes. Then in 1987, a group of Istanbuli Jews got together and organized a series of events marking the 500th anniversary of Spanish Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire, to be held in 1992. Sanctioned by the Turkish Republic, the enterprise was headed by the businessman Jak Kamhi.

What Does the Computerized Database Allow You to Do?

The research methods developed by Prof. Rozen give the user access to a broad range of information relating to Turkish Jewry. The world of their dead sheds light on their way of life. In addition to genealogical research, these methods enable the reconstruction of the social life of the various Jewish communities, the economic stratification of their members, the connection between their economic stratification and place of residence. These same research methods enable us to understand the connection between social status and gender of the deceased, as well as between social status and the age of the deceased, the world of verbal and visual images inscribed on the tombstones, the association between Jewish tombstones and those of the surrounding Ottoman culture, the concept of death held by urban Istanbuli Jews, life expectancy, and the changes that occurred in all of these over time.

Cemeteries

Before the First World War (1914–1918) and Greco-Turkish war over Asia Minor (1919–1922), Turkey was dotted with Jewish communities. Apart from the important urban centres of Istanbul and Izmir and the communities in the ancient capital cities of the Ottoman Empire—Bursa and Edirne—Jews were also to be found in small provincial towns throughout Asia Minor. Each community had its own cemetery. Many of the western Anatolian communities ceased to exist during the Greco-Turkish war, the burning and destruction of settlements by the warring forces forming part of the military tactics employed by the two sides.