1. Ottoman Period

The Balkan Peninsula was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From then until the Ottoman retreat due to military defeats and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jews of the Balkans lived under Muslim rule. Before the Ottoman conquest, small Romaniot communities existed under the Byzantines, and the Romaniot rite remained dominant under the Ottomans until the arrival of masses of Sephar…