Tire is a town in western Anatolia, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Izmir (Smyrna). Its small community of Romaniot Jews antedated the Ottoman conquest (1390). Some of them were  moved to Istanbul as part of the forced population transfers ( sürgün ) after the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453. In the late fifteenth century, Sephardic immigrants to the Ottoman Empire began to settle in Tire. According to Ottoman tax-registers for the period between 1512 and 1530, the town had a Jewish quarter with sixty-four Jewish households and eighteen unmarried Jews. Betwee…