THE EIGHTEENTH century saw a massive penetration of the Ottoman empire by European powers and ideas. In the nineteenth, according to Albert Hourani, the Arabs were swept into a new world created in western Europe. Other scholars have studied the broad processes fostering the entry of the Ottoman empire into modernity, as embodied by the period of mid nineteenth-century administrative reform known as the Tanzimat era; this book focuses on how one sector of the variegated Ottoman mosaic—its Syrian Jewish community—experienced the changes sweeping the empire during those years.

Any consideration of Ottoman modernization must take note of its distinctive nature as compared to the European process. Eurocentric divisions of history into the ancient, medieval, and modern periods are of questionable applicability to the Middle East, itself a European-defined term. More pertinent to this study is the historical framework proposed by Albert Hourani in the study mentioned above, which designates the sixteenth- to eighteenth century history of the Arab peoples as the ‘Ottoman Age’, and the period that opens in the early nineteenth century and ends on the eve of the Second World War as the ‘Age of European Empires’.

Underlying the decision to open this book with a look at the eighteenth century exposure of Aleppine Jews to western influences is the recognition that each of the eras identified by Hourani both preserves elements of the preceding period and contains harbingers of the one to follow. In the case of the Ottoman empire, as Hourani and others note, the eighteenth century can be identified as a transitional phase containing traditional and new elements, which eventually gave way to more thoroughgoing westernization and modernization in the nineteenth. In his characterization of the eighteenth-century Ottoman empire, Hourani refers to transitions in both the internal and external balance of power: a shift in influence from the sultan's court to a small group of upper-level civil servants, and significant changes in the empire's relations with Europe. Earlier, the European–Ottoman relationship had been grounded in military and diplomatic equality; now a shift took place in which the technologically and scientifically advanced, economically flourishing, and militarily newly strengthened European powers began to demand priority. Losing its primacy on the European political scene, the Ottoman empire was slowly pushed to the sidelines.