Drawing on a large body of previously unexplored Ladino archival material, this paper will examine the changing contours of Jewish communal autonomy in Izmir during the late Ottoman period. By reference to a multitude of communal sources such as minute books, correspondence, and taxation records, the paper will demonstrate how Jewish leaders in Izmir sought to reconfigure long-standing fixtures of traditional Jewish self-governance, such as the chief rabbinate, lay communal council, and mechanisms of internal taxation, to meet the perceived demands of "modernity." The paper will thus reconstruct how the centralizing and rationalizing impulses of the Tanzimat reverberated within Izmir’s Jewish community, as leaders sought to standardize processes embedded in the contentious issue of rabbinic succession, elaborate new representative bodies such as a meclis umumi, or general assembly, and abandon destabilizing tax burdens, such as the regressive gabela tax on kosher meat. In addition to reconstructing such concrete initiatives, the paper will track how the Jews of Izmir mobilized modern vocabularies and discourses of “progress” to affect change within their own community. While these varied efforts at communal reform achieved mixed results, this paper will argue that fluid experimentation exhibited by Izmir’s Jewish leaders in re-envisioning their community's structures stands as instructive case study in interpreting both the Ottoman and Jewish encounters with “modernity.” Scholarship on Ottoman Izmir during the modern period has focused in large part on the transformation of the port and the city’s marked commercial prowess. Given their diminished socioeconomic profile during the 19th century, Izmir’s Jews were not heavily involved in the city’s booming international commerce or in the port’s transformation into a modern waterfront. Yet, as this paper will argue, the manner in which Izmir’s Jews debated and re-envisioned the contours of their communal structures reflects a deep investment in making their city, and by extension, their Empire, modern. In addition, this paper will demonstrate how standing in contrast to the Jewish communities of both Western and Eastern Europe, who in the modern period were largely forced to dismantle their communal infrastructures to merit inclusion in the larger polity, modernity for Ottoman Jews ultimately inspired a reconfiguration of the traditional kehillah, or community, not its dissolution.