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‘mother city.’ ” In an article in the travel section of The New York Times (“Where the Ram’s Horn Sounded in the Land of the Sultans”), Joel Zack writes that once, “almost every Turkish town had a Jewish quarter, or Yahudi Mahallesi. But today, few Jews can be found. Most have emigrated, many to Israel. Communities that once numbered in the thousands now cannot raise the quorum of ten men needed for communal prayer.” After Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the edict of expulsion in 1492, Spanish Jews (or Sephardic Jews) fled to the Ottoman Empire, principally to Salonica. Leon Sciaky, in Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era, notes that “Sultan Bayezit II, in a letter to his governors, ordered that they be received with kindness and that all possible assistance be extended to them in their resettlement. Oppression or ill-treatment to the newcomers was to be considered a major offense and severely punished. ‘They say that Ferdinand is a wise monarch,’ he exclaimed before his courtiers. ‘How could he be one, he who impoverishes his country to enrich mine!’ ”

According to Ben Frank, by the sixteenth century, Istanbul, with 440,000 Jews, had the largest Jewish population in the world. Jews were one of the city’s protected minorities, though this didn’t mean they were exempt from special taxes or rules governing their dress and their housing. Turkey was the first Muslim nation to recognize Israel, in 1949. Since then, relations between the countries have had their ups and downs, but in 1993, Turkish foreign minister Hikmet Çetin was the very first foreign minister to visit Israel.

I bought a woven handbag (which I had made into a pillow) from a Sephardic vendor at the Grand Bazaar years ago, and he told me that, at that time, there were three daily newspapers published in Istanbul in Ladino, the dialect of Sephardic Jews. According to The Cultural Guide to Jewish Europe, “more often than not, Istanbul’s Jews speak Turkish among themselves, even if most know French. Only the very elderly remember Ladino, their old language to which the Hebrew weekly Shalom (circulation of 3,500) still dedicates one or two pages in each issue.” In all of Turkey today there are no more than 20,000 Jews.

We in North America are so accustomed to the customs and traditions of Ashkenazic Jews that it’s easy to assume they are observed by Sephardic Jews, too. The sometimes vast differences between the two communities may be gleaned from an interesting book that accompanied an exhibit of the same name, A Tale of Two Cities: Jewish Life in Frankfurt and Istanbul, 1750-1870, by Vivian Mann (The Jewish Museum, New York, under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982). The book is filled with illustrations of many ceremonial objects and prints that examine two different communities over a period of 120 years. Mann notes that at the beginning of Ottoman rule, the Jewish population of Istanbul was organized into congregations according to their members’ places of origin. Even if one married and moved to a different neighborhood of the city, individuals still paid taxes according to their original congregations, such as Córdoba, Portugal, Sicily, Ohrid, and Salonika. In complete contrast to the ghettoized populations of European cities like Frankfurt, the Jews of Istanbul lived among Muslim and Christian neighbors in many quarters throughout the city and the suburbs.

I think a perfect visit to Istanbul includes seeing mosques, churches, and synagogues. Mosques and a church or two aren’t problematic, but unfortunately one needs an appointment to visit a synagogue, so you need to plan in advance (either by sending a fax of a copy of the first page of your passport directly to the synagogue, or to a concierge or guide who will help you arrange the appointment). Of the sixteen synagogues still in existence—located on both the European and Asian sides of the city and on the Princes’ Islands—only a few are active. There are two major synagogues in the city. One is Ahrida Synagogue (Kurtci Cesmi Sokak 15, Balat; contact