In this paper, I propose to examine two different instances of politicized violence directed against Jews and Armenians respectively during the late nineteenth century. Comparing a major riot and siege of a Jewish neighborhood of Istanbul in the 1880s with the Armenian massacres in the same city a decade later, I seek to think comparatively about violence perpetrated against Jews and Christians in the late Ottoman imperial capital and to survey the varied responses of members of different religious communities to each event. In both cases, the sudden eruption of violence on the streets of the Ottoman capital caused tensions not only between members of each religious community but also within each community. When elite Christians and Jews found that their coreligionists were among the rioters, they sought to dissociate themselves from those who engaged in violent attacks toward their neighbors of other faiths. In doing so, elites of various confessions attempted to preserve the status quo and also manage the image of their own community, which—they claimed—was betrayed by the violent among them. Yet despite the best efforts of communal leaders, their rioting coreligionists posed a threat to their own religious establishment. In each case, Jewish and Christian leaders publicly refuted the rumors that circulated throughout their city in the midst of the violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, their refutations did not quell the rumors that continued to fuel the violence, since--as Jean-Noël Kapferer has noted-- “rumors often arise from distrust of official versions” of events. In this sense, both the rumors and those who believed them challenged the officials who strove to control narratives told about and accepted by their own communities. During the two moments of anti-Jewish and anti-Armenian violence that will be the focus of my paper, communal leaders temporarily lost control of their flock. In each case, as mobs from one religious group attacked or pillaged from members of another group, the elites and popular classes from each community engaged in their own battle over the right to define the truth and to offer an appropriate code of conduct for their coreligionists.