In this path breaking book, Yaron Ben-Naeh describes and analyzes for the first time in scholarly literature the Jewish Society in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, in Anatolia and in the Arab provinces. It focuses on the 17th century, the period which shaped and molded Ottoman Jewry as such. The book is solidly based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, among them Ottoman documents which the author has found and deciphered.
The chapters of the book deal with various aspects of communal life, family life and social dynamics, with special relation to city life and the surrounding Muslim society and acculturation processes which had made it into the core of sephardi Jewry.