From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast,soc.culture.greek,soc.history
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Re: "news.admin.policy" postings -- "hela.iti" is dealing?
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 93 20:15:43 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <1993Jan7.150608.25769@nastar.uucp> phardie@nastar.uucp (Pete Hardie) writes:

>>Think of something innovative...
>> maybe a 40hr course on Turko-Greek relations taught by Mutulu?

>C'mon....
>Just reading the syllabus takes 40 hours....

I tend to agree here. And I'm surprised you weren't offended by this,
too.

  <<The revival of Ottoman Jewry during the last half of the nineteenth
  century produced ugly reactions among their rivals within Ottoman
  society. So long as the Jews were excluded from economic and financial
  life and remained in ignorance and poverty, the Ottoman Christians
  secure in the protection they were getting from the Great Powers of
  Europe, left the Jews alone. But once Jewish competition rose once again,
  violence resumed, as the Christians sought to divert onto the Jews
  increasing Muslim hatred resulting from assaults on Muslims throughout
  Southeastern Europe as well as North Africa and Russian Central Asia [33].
  The virulent anti-Semitism, underpinned by long-standing anti-Muslim
  bigotry, that was propagated within the Ottoman Empire was spread back
  into Europe by Middle Eastern Christian Churchmen seeking to secure
  European support for their causes, providing an important source for the
  hatred which culminated in the Holocaust little less than a century later.

  Frequent Greek uprisings, particularly in Macedonia and during the
  Ottoman-Greek war over Crete that started in 1897, exacerbated relations
  in Istanbul, not only between Greeks and Muslims but also between the
  former and the Jews, who invariably supported the Turks against their
  persecuters [34]. Muslims in the Arab provinces sometimes were convinced
  to join the Christians in the resulting attacks, but these were relatively
  minor and far between compared with hatred nourished by both religious
  and economic factors, particularly since the Ottoman government regularly
  intervened to protect the Jews whenever possible.

  In addition to the Greeks, 'The Jews were also hated by the Christian
  Syrians, the Christian Arabs, and the Armenians for religious reasons---
  a religious hatred which was deeply implanted in their hearts---and out of
  jealousy for the general competition of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire.'
  At each approach of the Eastern season, Jews in Istanbul, Salonica and
  Izmir in particular barracaded their shops and moved in the streets with
  great caution because of the fear that it would be they who would be set
  upon by Greek and Armenian mobs when no-one was around to protect them.

  The American Presbyterian missionary H.H. Jessup, who spent some fifty-
  three years in the Middle East from his church in Beirut, said about the
  Jews:

    ''They are hated intensely by all sects, but more especially by the
    Greeks and Latins. In the gradations of Oriental cursing, it is
    tolerably reasonable to call a man a donkey, somewhat more severe
    to call him a dog, contemptuous to call him a swine, but withering
    to the last degree to call him a Jew. The animosity of the nominal
    Christian sects against the Jews is most relentless and unreasoning.
    They believe that the Jews kill Christian children every year at the
    Passover and mingle their blood with the Passover bread. Almost every
    year in the spring, this senseless charge is brought against the Jews...
    the Jews of Beirut and Damascus are obliged to pay heavy blackmail
    every year to the Greek and Latin 'lewd fellows of the baser sort' who
    threaten to raise a mob against them for killing Christian children...,
    not only do they regard them as children of hell, but would rejoice
    to send them there if they could.''[35]

  The first modern pogrom within the Empire came early. In 1663 two
  Janissaries of Christian origin accused Istanbul Jews of killing the
  child of one, who had in fact been killed by his own father, who had
  thrown the body into the Jewish quarter on the night that Passover
  began in order to implicate Jews in the crime. In response to the
  complaint, local Greeks flooded into Balat from neighboring Fener,
  assaulting Jews as they were going to their synagogues and ravaging
  Balat's commercial quarter early the next morning. Subsequently, however,
  the Grand Vezir learned the facts of the case from his spies stationed
  in the Greek quarter, informed the Sultan, and the Janissaries in question
  were put to death, but only after Greek mobs had killed almost twenty
  Jews and emptied out most of Balat's shops. In 1774 Greeks in Izmir
  reacted to the arrival of large numbers of Jews fleeing from Greek
  persecution in Salonica by mounting the first ritual murder accusation
  in modern times and in consequence attacking and sacking the Jewish
  quarters of the city.>>

[33] Detailed references regarding Christian attacks on Ottoman Jews
     can be found in S.J. Shaw, 'Christian Anti-Semitism within the
     Ottoman Empire,' Belleten (1991).

[34] See, for example, the reports of A.Eskenazi (Istanbul) to the AIU(Paris)
     5 July 1897, 26 March 1901, 1 June 1899, and 27 June 1898, in AIU
     archives (Paris) II C 7. Also report in El Tiempo, 11 and 12 May
     and 1 June 1899. Jews were attacked in the Salonica newspaper
     L'Acropolis on May 2, 1897, with the accusation that they were
     profaning churches. Robert Mantran, 'La Structure sociale de la
     communaute juive de Salonqiue a la fin du dix-neuvieme siecle',
     RH no.534 (1980), 387-88.

[35] H.H. Jessup, Fifty Three Years in Syria (2 Vols, London 1910), II, 424.

Serdar Argic

                           'We closed the roads and mountain passes that 
                            might serve as ways of escape for the Turks 
                            and then proceeded in the work of extermination.'
                                                       (Ohanus Appressian)
                           'In Soviet Armenia today there no longer exists 
                            a single Turkish soul.'    (Sahak Melkonian)


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