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This chapter explores the experience of Jewish captives in the slave market in Istanbul. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim guild merchants to exclude Jews from the slave trade, there were always plenty of opportunities for non-guild merchants, prominent among them Jews, to act as unofficial traders or to broker various deals. Jews thus remained prominent figures in the business. All this meant that when it came to ransoming the captives, there were people in the Istanbul Jewish community with a great deal of experience in buying and selling slaves. Nonetheless, it was not they who led the campaign. That role seems to have fallen to the rabbinic leadership, who took their responsibilities in the field of pidyon shevuyim very seriously. The chapter then considers the challenge of raising the money for ransoming Jewish captives.

This chapter focuses on the mission of a young rabbinic scholar, David ben Natan'el Carcassoni, to visit the major Sephardi communities of Europe in person and raise the funds needed to ransom the Jewish captives from eastern Europe. David Carcassoni's mission plunged him into the complex world of Mediterranean Jewish philanthropy that raised money for a number of different purposes, which formally did not include the needs of the Istanbul Jewish community. In order to succeed, Carcassoni needed to access the general pidyon shevuyim funds collected by most communities and ensure that as much as possible was sent back home to help the ransoming effort. He faced two major problems. First, he was by no means the only person traveling around the Jewish communities asking for money to help relieve the suffering of the Polish Jews. Second, the Jewish communities of Venice were the controlling force of the Jewish Mediterranean philanthropic network; they were the clearing house to which most funds were sent, and one of their roles was to determine where the money was most needed and to send it there. Without Venetian support, Carcassoni would find it very difficult to raise the sums he needed.

This chapter studies the role of Italian Jewry in ransoming Polish Jewish captives. In truth, the most important use for the pidyon shevuyim money as far as Italian Jewry was concerned had nothing to do with Polish Jews and their problems. Instead, ransom money was used primarily to redeem Jewish maritime merchants and travelers who were preyed on by pirates, particularly the Knights of St. John on Malta. This desire to prioritize the needs of the captives on Malta did not mean, however, that Venice totally ignored all other causes. Moreover, the Italian communities in general, though they seem to have understood the benefits of having Venice manage the ransoming on Malta, were not willing entirely to give up their autonomy in how they used their philanthropic funds. This was good news for Polish Jews because it improved their chances of receiving financial support from Italian Jewry. Their requests for that can be divided into two main groups. The first were made by individuals, asking for help with their personal issues. The second were requests for larger groups, most often communities in Poland–Lithuania that were struggling with the costs of recovering from the war or communities outside eastern Europe that were dealing with an influx of Polish Jewish refugees.

This chapter explains that alongside the pidyon shevuyim network, there existed another economic and religious system covering the entire Jewish world that was focused on the eastern Mediterranean. This was the philanthropic network dedicated to supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Though its goals were different, it overlapped with the pidyon shevuyim network: most communities collected money for both causes, sometimes even combining them into a single fund. The two systems thus acted in parallel, always in tension, and sometimes even in competition with each other. To understand this phenomenon and its broad significance for the Jewish world in both philanthropic and religious terms, the chapter looks at the issue of raising money for the Jews in the early modern Land of Israel. It also considers the spread of Sabbatheanism.