From: KELLY@SUVM.BITNET
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Christian Anti-Semitism in the Ottoman Empire-1
Date: 12 Aug 92 17:05:30 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 1073:

  <<As a result of the tension now existing between Israel and the Muslim
  world, it long has been assumed that the anti Semitism to which the Jews
  of the Ottoman Empire were subjected over the centuries was the result
  of Muslim antipathy for Judaism and Jews, and that it was carried out
  largely by Muslims. This idea was spread by Christian nationalist groups
  within and outside the Ottoman Empire for the purpose of gaining the
  support of world Jewry for their causes. At times, moreover, these groups
  even stimulated Muslim attacks on their own people to gain the support
  of the Christian nations of Europe [1]. The fact, however, was quite
  different. It was the Muslim Turks who invited Jews to the Ottoman Empire
  as they were driven out of western Europe and Russia by massacres, blood
  libels, and persecutions of all sorts. It was the Muslim Turks who
  provided Ottoman Jewry with the kind of opportunities and protection
  which enabled them to prosper during four centuries of Ottoman rule.
  During the centuries of Ottoman decline which began in the seventeenth
  century, it was the Ottoman Turks who provided Jews with what protection
  they could against the advancing anti-Semitism of Christians both within
  and outside the Empire. During the nineteenth and early twentieth
  centuries in particular it was Christian armies invading the Ottoman
  Empire as well as Christian national movements arising within that
  carried out most of the mass attacks, persecution and massacres which
  decimated much of Ottoman Jewry before World War I despite the continued
  protection provided by the Ottoman government.

  CHRISTIAN ANTI SEMITISM. Anti Semitism originated as a Christian and
  not a Muslim phenomenon. Jews were driven from the Holy Land by Pagan
  Rome primarily for political rather than religious reasons. The Jews of
  Eretz Israel refused to accept Roman rule and wanted to remain independent.
  But once rule over Palestine was settled, Pagan Rome had no antipathy
  to Jews, and allowed them to settle freely elsewhere in its domains,
  particularly in Anatolia where they constituted a large portion of the
  population. It was only after Rome converted to Christianity, and in
  particular after the East Roman Empire became Byzantium and developed
  its own form of Orthodox Christianity, which was particularly virulent
  regarding Jews, that the latter came to be subject to intense persecution
  so that hardly any Jews were left by the time the Ottoman Turks came
  onto the scene.>>

[1] The latter efforts were well-documented in William L. Langer,
    'The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902,' (2nd Ed., New York, Knopf,
    1956) and Louise Nalbandian, 'The Armenian Revolutionary Movement:
    The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through The Nineteenth
    Century,' (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), particularly pp. 110-112.


(To be continued)

Nejat