In the present article, based on Ottoman and Hebrew documents, we focus on people who made up fictitious stories of captivity in order to gain a living, as well as on authorities or local Jewish communities that detected and coped with those frauds in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In detecting acts of fraud, a novel method adopted by Jewish communities during the period under study was printed letters that were not available to all segments of society. Considering the vigilance of Jewish communities to root out the ploys used by their co-religionists to acquire money through deceitful means, we suggest that those communities formulated some regulations in order to validate authenticity and differentiate between the true and the fake. We argue that an efficient web of networks among early modern Jewish communities in the Mediterranean and the use of the printing press played a crucial role in certifying the truthfulness of a document or a person.

中文翻译：

---

俘虏还是骗子？十八世纪奥斯曼帝国的海盗、冒名顶替者和犹太社区

在本文中，根据奥斯曼帝国和希伯来语文献，我们关注那些编造虚构的囚禁故事以谋生的人，以及在 18 世纪发现并处理这些欺诈行为的当局或当地犹太社区——世纪奥斯曼帝国。在检测欺诈行为时，犹太社区在研究期间采用的一种新方法是印刷并非所有社会阶层都可以使用的信件。考虑到犹太社区警惕性地根除其同宗教者通过欺骗手段获取金钱的伎俩，我们建议这些社区制定一些规定以验证真实性并区分真假。