It is fairly established in the scholarship that Jews and Christians were well integrated, socially and economically, into Ottoman Islamic society. But were they also part of a Mediterranean world that transcended the Ottoman Empire? In this paper, I will present social developments that took place within the Jewish community from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and link them to Jews’ involvement in the greater Mediterranean economy. Based on my ongoing research into Ottoman Jewish communities, I will argue that internal processes that had weakened communal and rabbinical leadership (and that had parallels in Orthodox Christian communities) led to, and were influenced by, an expanding involvement in the greater Mediterranean economy. Two significant such internal developments were the proliferation of private charitable societies; and a widening dissemination of texts accompanied by the appearance of schools sponsored by private individuals rather than the community or its rabbis. By the mid-eighteenth century, such initiatives had created a new class of educated Ottoman Jews who were less dependent on their communities, and more involved, directly or indirectly, in social and commercial networks with European Jews or non-Jews. Furthermore, evidence from rabbinical responsa, archival Ottoman state documents, and shar‘i court records reveals that while Jews were indeed marginalized from some professions in the seventeenth century, the settlement of Jews from Livorno in the empire in the second half of that century eventually led to an economic expansion – one that was dramatically larger than what Jews had experienced in the empire in the early sixteenth century. This at first affected only the commercial elite who maintained business ties with traders in other countries; but by the mid-eighteenth century, it involved many Jews in middle and lower classes whose work supported a robust Mediterranean trade that was gradually expanding into a global network spanning Western Europe and the New World. By the turn of the nineteenth century, a significant stratum – perhaps a plurality – of Ottoman Jewry was indeed “Mediterranean” – in its ties with partners outside the empire, its involvement in or support of international trade, the several languages its members spoke (no longer only Ladino or Arabic), and its intellectual curiosity that transcended traditional Jewish topics.