From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.europe,soc.history,news.admin
Subject: Tri*: Greeks depicted Jews as a contaminated rabble of unclean lepers.
Date: 2 Sep 92 00:48:34 GMT





<1992Aug28.042245.18758@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
by403@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Spiros Triantafyllopoulos)

>Will your site also not tolerate smoke-and-mirror headers, commonly
>used by Mutlu and Company? Some pretty conclusive evidence was

I leapt to the defense of the "Tri*s". It's bad enough that "mutlu" 
hypnotizes them into kamikaze runs and that scholars "zap" them into 
lunch meat, but "news.admin" boys are excessive handicaps to have to 
overcome. Poor "Tri*s". 


Source: Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and 
        the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

  page 16:

  <<In Roman Egypt and Syria there were difficulties caused by the
  long-standing Greek antipathy for Jews. Hellenic authors depicted
  Jews as a contaminated rabble of unclean lepers, whom the Egyptians
  had thrown out of their country in the time of Moses in order to
  purge themselves of defilement. Already at this time the Greeks were
  inventing the blood libel and desecration of host fantasies which
  were to cause so much suffering in later times, affirming that Jews
  sacrificed human beings at the Temple in Jerusalem, using their blood
  for religious rituals. Many Greeks used the destruction of the Temple
  as proof that God hated the Jews and was punishing them for their
  'evil acts'. As a result, even as Rome continued to treat Jews well,
  in the East there were numerous Greek attacks against Jewish settlements.

  After the Edict of Milan (AD 312) began Roman Empire's gradual conversion
  to Christianity (...) the Empire became increasingly intolerant toward
  Jews. The Hellenistic anti-Semitic images of the Jews as a people whom
  God hated were revived. Roman Jews therefore were gradually deprived
  of their rights and made into second-class citizens. They were excluded
  from administrative and military positions. (...) and the masses
  increasingly attacked them in the streets as well as in their homes
  and shops. In 387-388 Christian mobs followed the destruction of all the
  heathen temples in Rome by going on to destroy synagogues as well....>>

  page 16 (last paragraph):

 <<This intolerance and persecution was even worse in the East Roman
   Empire, founded in AD 330, when Emperor Constantine dedicated the old
   town of Byzantum as the site for his new capital and gave it his name,
   Constantinople. Imperial edicts starting with those of Emperor Arcadius
   in 395 and continuing until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
   in 1453, subjected Byzantine Jewry to over a millenium of oppression
   and persecution. Thousands of Jews who had flooded into Asia Minor
   following their exile from the Holy Land and their descendants were
   forcibly converted, murdered, or driven out as a result of sporadic
   purges.>>

  page 24:

  <<Jews were similarly persecuted on a large scale in Serbia and the
   other Balkan states in the two centuries before they were conquered
   by the Turks. In Crete, the Jews comprised a middle class between
   the mass of Greeks and the feudal nobles, acting as bankers, artisans,
   lawyers and physicians, with the right to maintain their own community
   organization. They were treated as serfs, however, forced to live in a
   ghetto (Ciudecca), and to affix a special Jewish badge to the fronts of
   their houses as well as on their clothing. After the island came under
   Venetian rule in 1204, local Greeks continued to harass,  persecute,
   and attack their Jewish neighbors, particularly because of Jewish
   support for the periodic Muslim efforts to conquer the island. (...)
   During the Venetian war with the Ottomans in 1538, the Jews were
   subjected to extortions to finance the military operations, and a rumor
   that the jews of Crete were helping the Ottomans led local Greeks
   to massacre all the Jews they could find. Giacomo Foscari (1574-77)
   introduced harsh anti-Jewish laws intended to force them to convert or
   to live in isolated parts of the island.>>

  page 24 (second paragraph):

  <<In Corfu Jews were subjected to violent attacks and almost constant
   persecution by its Greek population. They had to row in the galleys
   even when they had committed no crime. They had to provide food and
   lodging for soldiers on demand, were required to go to Greek law courts
   on the Sabbath as well as during Jewish festivals, and as elsewhere in
   the Byzantine empire they were compelled to act as public executioners,
   adding to the public wrath to which they were normally subjected. After
   Venice took control of the island in 1386, conditions became even worse.>>

 page 24(last paragraph):

  <<There had been thousands of Jews living in Byzantium following the
   exodus from the Holy Land, but in consequence of all this persecution
   many were forcibly converted and massacred, and most of the remainder
   fled.....(...) As a result by the time the Ottomans conquered Anatolia
   during fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, hardly any Jews remained.>>

  page 25:

  <<Byzantium, however, was breaking up, fortunately for the few Jews
  who remained under its dominion. As the Turkomans invaded Anatolia
  starting with their rout of the Byzantine army at the Battle of
  Menzikert (1071) [Malazgirt] and formed Turkoman principalities
  throughout the peninsula, and as the Seljuk Turks established a more
  settled state centered, first in defense of the Abbasid Empire of
  Baghdad, and later in Konya and Central Anatolia starting the twelfth
  century (the Seljuks of Rum, 1077-1246), Byzantine Jewry sprang rapidly
  to their assistance, welcoming the tolerance and prosperity which the
  rule of Islam was offering them once again, as it had done previously
  both in the Middle East and Spain, with thousands of Jews fleeing from
  Byzantine persecution to Seljuk protection even before the Ottoman
  state was born.>>

  page 25 (last paragraph):

  <<...Ottoman conquests marked a very substantial change for the Jews
  of the Middle East and Europe. They meant instant liberation, not only
  from subjugation, persecution, and humiliation but often from actual
  slavery in Christian hands. As a result, Jews contributed significantly
  to the Ottoman conquests.>>

  page 26 (last paragraph):

  <<When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II FATIH (The Conquerer) captured
  Constantinople and brought the Byzantine Empire to its inglorious end
  in 1453, his armies broke into the city through one of the Jewish
  quarters and with the assistance of the local Jewish population who,
  as at Bursa and Edirne, were overjoyed at the opportunity to throw off
  their Greek oppressors. So also at Buda and Pest in 1526, on the island
  of Rhodes in 1522, at Belgrade (1526), in Azerbaijan (1534), Iraq and
  Iran (1534-35, 1638), Yemen (1628) and elsewhere, Jews welcomed the
  conquering forces of Suleyman the Magnificent,...>>

 page 27:

  << Mehmed II's conquest of Costantinople was not followed by killing
     and destruction, as Greek nationalists have claimed to the present
     day in efforts to depict Turks as barbarians, but rather by an effort
     to rebuild and repopulate the city so that it could become the center
     of the great multinational empire he was trying to create, extending
     far beyond the Roman Empire and incorporating all the people of the
     world as he knew it under the dominion of his Turkish dynasty.>>

 page 29:

  <<Even more than the Jews living in the expanding Ottoman Empire itself,
    Mehmed from the start attempted to encourage the emigration of Jews
    from Europe. Just as the Jews of England, France, Germany, Spain, and
    even Poland and Lithuania were being subjected to increasing persecution,
    blood libels, massacres, and deportations, the Turkish rulers of the
    expanding Ottoman state actively encouraged them to come and live in the
    Ottoman Empire under the same conditions of tolerance and freedom which
    had favored the lives of Jews in the empires of the Umayyads of Damascus
    and Abbasids of Baghdad, and more recently in Muslim Spain.>>

Serdar Argic

                     'This war quickly developed into one of extermination. 
                      We closed the roads and mountain passes that might 
                      serve as ways of escape for the Tartars [Turks] and 
                      then proceeded in the work of extermination.'
                                                       (Ohanus Appressian)

Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.europe,soc.rights.human