The Grão-Turco and the Jews: translation to the West of two Oriental ‘powers’ (XVI–XVII centuries).

What rhetorical arguments can be found in various sources – pamphlets, religious literature, travelogues, and so on – to depict the historical sequence of events that led to the encounter between the expelled Iberian Jews and the Ottomans as a realm of emotions? The accusation made by some western travellers, such as the French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay, that the Sephardim Jews played a crucial role in the Ottoman Empire's technological modernization, especially in the field of armaments, is well known. As such, they were stereotyped in the West as a nation of traitors whose transfer to the empire brought even greater power to the Infidel. But, in these sources, was the sultan/Jew relationship a dialectical one, that is, was it transmitted in the West as an essentialist discourse? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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