Isaiah (Yeşaya) Aciman (d. 1826 in Istanbul) was a scion of the well-known Aciman (Adjiman) family. Like his father and uncles, he pursued a career in finance, and from 1808 he served as a banker to Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839), and at the same time as a money-changer for the Janissaries. Two of his contemporaries were Solomon Camondo and Ezekiel Gabbai, very influential Jewish bankers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. A powerful and wealthy man, Isaiah was a generous benefactor of Jewish communities in Istanbul and elsewhere in the empire. In …