From: KELLY@SUVM.BITNET
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: Christian Ant-Semitism in the Ottoman Empire-5
Date: 17 Aug 92 18:07:55 GMT


 Stanford J. Shaw (Professor of Turkish History, University of California
 Los Angeles),  'Christian Anti Semitism in the Ottoman Empire,' Belleten,
 C. LIV, 68 (1991).

 page 1078:


 <<Things were no better in Byzantium. Byzantine Jews were nominally free to
 follow their own faith, but just as the Romans had reduced Jews to no more
 than subject status, so also Byzantines excluded Jews from rights of full
 citizenship. The motives of Romans were mainly political; but Byzantines
 were moved also by religious reasons as well. From their absolute
 conviction, taught by the Greek Orthodox Church, that the Jews were
 condemned by God for rejecting his Word and for the Unforgivable Crime
 of killing Jesus Christ, it was logical to conclude that the Jews ought to
 be punished by God's new chosen people, the Christians, by being subjected
 to various restrictions.

 Byzantine leaders demanded on numerous occasions that Jews be removed
 from Constantinople and the Empire altogether, and several expulsion
 orders were issued. Judaism actually was outlawed and Jews ordered
 forceably converted at least five times, by Emperor Heraclius in 632,
 in 680 in an effort to secure a united front against Islamic attacks,
 by Leo III in 721-723, by Basil I in 873-874, and by Romanos I in 930.
 Jews were allowed to seek 'salvation' through conversion, but even those
 who did convert were suspected of potential acts of blasphemy and were
 therefore subjected to periodic persecution, as was later the case in
 Spain. Legends of Jewish moneylenders took on the negative dimensions
 of the later Shylock traditions. In church services Jews were normally
 referred to as 'the accursed', but they could benefit from divine guidance
 to baptism, as opposed to other non-Christians who could be converted
 only by the sword. There were also passion plays and the like which played
 on the popular prejudice. All these religious traditions and folklore
 accounts influenced the Orthodox urban neighbors of Jews, causing a great
 deal of persecution and conflict [15].

 Those Jews who lived in Byzantium were subjected to various legal
 restrictions, severely limiting even minor details of their religious
 activities, excluding them from most of the privileges of citizenship
 while imposing all sorts of intolerable burdens. Theodosius II (408-450)
 excluded Jews from all offices of honor and prohibited them from building
 new synagogues, although he did allow them to repair old ones. Soon after-
 wards, during a battle between parties in the chariot races at Rome, many
 Jews were murdered, their synagogues burned, and their bodies thrown into
 the fire.

 Justinian (527-565) was the first emperor to set a precedent for inter-
 ference with the social and religious practices of Judaism, in 553 even
 going so far as to dictate that Greek and Latin translations of the
 Old Testament should be used in Jewish religious services in hope that
 this would convince some Jews to convert. He forbad the use of the phrase
 'our God is the one and only God' in Jewish services because he considered
 this to be blasphemy against the Christian Holy Trinity, and he outlawed
 the reading of sayings of Isaiah promising consolation for the downtrodded
 people of Judaism. He went on to forbid the observance of religious
 services during Passover, forbad the celebrating of Passover at the same
 time as Easter, and ordered end to the baking of unleavened bread [16].
 He even placed spies in synagogues during services to watch out for any
 violations of his rules, though he soon found they could not prevent
 secret praying of the disputed passages at other times of day when the
 spies were not present. He also imposed many disabilities on Jewish
 citizens, prohibiting them from testifying against Christians in court
 and restricting them to minor positions in bureaucracy. As a result of all
 this, when his armies attacked Naples, its Jews gave up their property and
 even their lives joining in defence of the city against the Byzantines.

 Heraclius (610-641) was the first emperor to convert the Jews to
 Christianity by force, and other emperors did the same between the
 eighth and tenth centuries. After the Vandals destroyed the Jewish
 synagogue in the late fifth century, the Byzantines refused to allow
 it to be restored, and soon after Heraclius died, the Church prevented
 the survivers and newly arriving Jewish immigrants from building new
 synagogues to meet their religious needs. Basil I (867-886) first tried
 to convert the Jews by persuasion, inviting rabbis to debate to defend
 their faith and offering them benefits if they accepted defeat. He then
 had recourse to bribary, providing gifts to those who agreed to convert.
 After that failed, in 884 he ordered all Jews converted to Christianity,
 and though this effort was abondoned under his immediate successors,
 the pressure continued, and most Byzantine theologians and church leaders
 protested vigorously when those who had converted under pressure during
 the preceding regime were allowed to return to Judaism. Emperor Romanos
 Lucapenus, in about 935, again ordered the forcible conversion of all
 Jews of Byzantium, leading to the murder of hundreds of Jews and the
 desecration of many synagogues throughout the Empire.

 To the Greek Orthodox Church, Jews were absolute filth, whose touch was
 considered to be contaminating. Christians who had any contact with Jews
 had to be excommunicated.

 Thus the Quinisext Council of 692 declared that 'Whatever remnant of pagan
 or Jewish perversity is mixed with the ripe fruit of the truth must be
 uprooted like a weed...Neither clergyman nor layman may partake of the
 unleavened bread of the Jews, associate with them, accept medical treatment
 from them, or bathe with them. Should anyone attempt to do it, if a
 clergyman, be defrocked, if a layman excommunicated.' [17]>>

[15] Steven Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium (Alabama Press, 1985), 34-36.
[16] Byzantine Empire, EJ [Encyclopaedia Judaica] IV, 1550-1552.
     Joshua Starr, The Jews of Byzantine Empire, 4-6, 212-213.
     Philip P. Argenti, The Religious Minorities of Chios: Jews and Roman
     Catholics (Cambridge, 1970), 39-63.
     Abraham Galante, Histoire des Juifs d'Istanbul depuis la prise de cetle
     ville en 1453 jusqu'a nos jours (Istanbul, 1941-42), 39.
[17] Joshua Starr, The Jews of Byzantine Empire (Athens, 1939), 89.

(To be continued)

Nejat