Researching the Sephardic Communities of the Ottoman Empire

Researching the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire has always been challenging. Our presentation by Jonathan McCollum will cover the use and accessibility of records from the Ottoman Empire for research into Sephardic families and communities. The discussion will include a review of imperial records in Ottoman Turkish and some record sets available in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish).
Jonathan McCollum, Ph.D. is the content manager for the MENA region at FamilySearch and a visiting scholar at Brigham Young University where he leads the BYU/FamilySearch Ottoman Palestine Family History Project. He specialises in the history of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. His forthcoming book with Edinburgh University Press, The Anti-Colonial Empire: Volunteerism and Humanitarianism in the Late Ottoman World, 1908-1924, investigates the role of humanitarianism and volunteerism in the final wars of the Ottoman Empire and the independence movements of its successor states. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Institute of Turkish Studies. After completing his BA (2004) and MA (2007) in history at BYU, Jonathan worked in the field of education in Turkey and Qatar for several years before returning to graduate school at UCLA, where he obtained his PhD in 2018.
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