Communication in Middle East and Abroad

There was an eastward reflux of technological diffusion when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain, the Jews in 1492 and the Moriscos, in a steady flow of emigrants from 1492 through the definitive expulsion of 1610. The Moriscos took back to North Africa a version of Indian agriculture (Arabic, filaha hindiyya) updated especially with New World crops (maize, tomatoes, American beans, chili pepper, opuntia [cactus], and tobacco). The Ottomans (and the Mamlukes before them) received firearms from different sources, but the Moriscos diffused the Spanish approach to artillery. Ibrahim ibn Ahmad ibn Ghanim, a Morisco who had been an artilleryman in Spain, arrived in Tunis in 1609–1610 and wrote an influential artillery manual in Arabic, in great part paraphrased or translated from Luis Collado's Plática manual de artillería.

Spanish Jews introduced a new, modern textile industry, that of broadcloth, into the Ottoman Empire, the new cloth being the result of the introduction, from Spain, of a fulling mill that made for a stronger, cheaper brand of textile. A French traveler in Istanbul in the mid-sixteenth century remarked that the Marranos "were the men who have taught the Turks how to trade and to deal with those things that we use mechanically." In Cristóbal de Villalón's pseudonymous sixteenth-century Viaje de Turquia, the author explains that the Turkish artillery corps

had no masters to teach them (particularly how to mount pieces on carriages) until the Jews were thrown out of Spain. They showed them how, as well as how to fire muskets, to make forts and trenches, and whatever devices and strategies there are in war, because before they [the Turks] were no better than animals.

The report is exaggerated, but all the crafts of the Renaissance military engineer are represented. Giovanni Soranzo (doge of Venice, r. 1312–28) is said to have prevented the expulsion of the Jews from Venice in 1571 on the grounds that Jewish refugees from Spain had taught the Turks how to make cannons, cannonballs, and other armaments. That Jews had modernized medicine in the Ottoman Empire had become a cliché in European commentary by the eighteenth century. Villalón, referring to Jewish physicians in the Ottoman court, says they practiced there "almost by inheritance." Those physicians diffused a kind of compendium of late medieval European medicine.

The traditional culture of the Middle East also offered ample resistance to innovations: some opposed the telegraph because they supposed that spirits inhabited the wires. Jews or Christians generally established the first printing presses in the Ottoman Empire or Islamic world because Muslims had long opposed printing on religious grounds. The first government gazette in the Ottoman Empire appeared in Turkish and Arabic in 1867, the first newspaper, the following year (the first newspaper did not appear in Persia until 1935).