You can start
here and
here. He'd need to put more money into the project, provide some protection against pirates, and devote full time to it rather than going off on tangents. Butterflying the Ottoman-Venetian war of 1570-73, which interrupted the flow of Italian Jewish immigrants, would also help.
A long time ago, in a forum far, far away, I suggested a POD in which Fakhr al-Din II's Druze rebellion occurred under his grandfather instead, and Nasi persuaded the Sultan to allow him to raise Jewish troops to crush the revolt. This then became the nucleus of a Jewish quasi-state in the Galilee similar to Lebanon under the Shihabis. If you start
here and expand the 20 or so succeeding posts, you should get the idea.
This is the one where I actually proposed the POD.