THE Ottoman regime imposed few restrictions on the economic activity of Jews, who were neither barred from, nor forced to pursue, particular occupations. Where Jews were excluded from a specific sector, this was the result of the inflexible Ottoman guild system. Syrian Jews engaged in a wide variety of occupations, ranging from crafts and small workshops to lending on credit and investment in light industry and agriculture. Before examining this activity in any detail, however, it is necessary to consider its context: the economic decline of the Ottoman empire.

The Ottoman Empire in Economic Decline

A number of factors were responsible for the economic deterioration of the Ottoman empire in the mid-nineteenth century. External factors, such as the transfer of international commercial traffic to the sea routes across the Atlantic and around Africa, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, were exacerbated by internal factors, above all the inept imperial management of the economy. Huge expenditures on military campaigns, a balance-of-payments deficit, and the failure to direct funds to economic and technological development in agriculture and industry had crippling financial effects. The imperial administration's economic difficulties peaked in 1875, when it was forced to declare bankruptcy. Industrialized, capitalist western Europe was at the centre of the new nineteenth-century world economic order, and the unindustrialized Ottoman empire was pushed to the sidelines. For all its efforts to become part of the new economic order, the Ottoman empire thereafter remained a secondary force in world trade.

Syria was badly affected by these trends, impoverished by its loss of importance as a transit point in east–west trade, the decline of trade and crafts, the dangers of travel, and the absence of public projects, coupled with heavy taxation and monetary instability. Although foreign trade brought some development of commerce and agriculture in its wake, at the same time it destroyed what remained of local production and industry. Syria was flooded with cheap, high-quality European goods, which the Syrians purchased in preference to local products. The sector worst affected by this shift was textile production, Syria's foremost industry.