From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.history,soc.culture.soviet,soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna,soc.culture.croatia,soc.culture.turkish
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Humane behavior and tolerance of Turks was a legend even 500 years ago.
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 21:18:50 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <1993Jan27.164045.29699@specialix.co.uk> kamal@specialix.co.uk (Kamal Mortoza) writes:

>Any more barbaric than the European cultures at the time ?

There is no point arguing about easily verifiable facts, Kamal.
Humane behavior and tolerance of Turks was a legend even 500 years 
ago when they accepted tens of thousands of Jews from Spain who were 
fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition. Again, many Jewish families
escaping from Nazi Armenians and Hitler's Nazi Germany took refugee
in Turkiye during the 1940's. 

Now let the Jewish scholars speak for themselves.

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

  page 205:

  <<Those Jews who survived these assaults in Southeastern Europe fled
  particularly to Salonica, whose Jewish population increased substantially
  as a result, from 28,000 in 1876 to 90,000 in 1908, more than half the
  total population, though even there increased persecution by local Greeks
  led many Jews to flee elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, particularly to
  the great port of Izmir.

  Despite all the pressure from Ottomans and foreign Jews alike, the ritual
  murders and other assaults by Christians on Jews went on and on. Greek
  efforts to decimate the Jewish population of Salonica culminated in 1912
  and 1913, following Greek conquest of Salonica during the first Balkan War,
  when many of its Jews, were either killed or terrorized into leaving...>>

  page 206:

  <<Though Greece was obligated by the post World War I treaties to allow
  Jews and other minorities to use their own languages in education and to
  practice their religions without hindrance, a law was issued in 1923
  which forbad all inhabitants from working on Sunday, stimulating a new
  Jewish exodus as it was intended to do. Between 1932 and 1934 there was a
  series of anti-Semitic riots in Salonica, with the Cambel quarter, where
  most of the remaining Jews lived, being burned to the ground. This
  was followed by regulations requiring the use of Greek and prohibiting
  Hebrew and Judea-Spanish in the Jewish schools. A start was made also
  on expropriating the land of the principal Jewish cemetery in Salonica
  for use by the new University in order to derive the Jews out [47]. By
  killing and driving out large numbers of Jews, the Greeks left a
  substantial Greek majority in the city for the first time, and starting
  Salonica Jewry on the way to its final decimation by the Nazis during the
  occupation of Greece starting in 1941.

  Salonica and Izmir of course were not the only places of refuge for
  Jewish refugees entering the Empire during its last century of existence.
  Istanbul, Edirne, and other parts of Rumelia and Anatolia received
  thousands more. Nor were Jews the only refugees received and helped by
  the government of the Sultan. Thousands of Muslims accompanied them in
  flight from similar persecutions wherever Balkan christian states gained
  independence or expanded. The Russian conquest of the Crimea and the
  Caucasus starting in the late eighteenth century, and particularly during
  and after the Crimean War, combined with the same independence movements
  in Southeastern Europe that had caused so much suffering and flight among
  its Jews caused thousands of helpless, ill, and poverty-stricken Muslim
  refugees to accompany them into the ever shrinking boundaries of the
  Ottoman Empire, with the Istanbul government struggling mightly but vainly
  to house and feed them as best it could. From 1850 to 1864 as many as
  800,000 Crimean Tatars, Circassians, and other Muslims from north and
  east of the Black Sea had entered Anatolia alone, as many as 200,000 more
  came during the next twenty years, while 474,389 refugees entered in 1876-
  1877 as a result of the Ottoman wars with Russia and the Balkan states,
  with an equal number gaining refuge in the European portions of the
  Empire.>>

[47] Robert Mantran, 'La structure sociale de la communaute juive de
  Salonqiue a la fin du dix-neuvieme siecle', RH no.534 (1980), 391-92;
  Nehama VII, 762; Joseph Nehama (Salonica) to AIU (Paris) no.2868/2,
  12 May 1903 (AIU Archives I-C-43); and no.2775, 10 January 1900 (AIU
  Archives I-C-41), describing daily battles between Jewish and Greek
  children in the streets of Salonica. Benghiat, Director of Ecole Moise
  Allatini, Salonica, to AIU (Paris), no.7784, 1 December 1909 (AIU
  Archives I-C-48), describing Greek attacks on Jews, boycotts of Jewish
  shops and manufacturers, and Greek press campaigns leading to blood libel
  attacks. Cohen, Ecole Secondaire Moise Allatini, Salonica, to AIU (Paris),
  no.7745/4, 4 December 1912 (AIU Archives I-C-49) describes a week of terror
  that followed the Greek army occupation  of Salonica in 1912, with the
  soldiers pillaging the Jewish quarters and destroying Jewish synagogues,
  accompanied by what he described as an 'explosion of hatred' by local
  Greek population against local Jews and Muslims. Mizrahi, President of the
  AIU at Salonica, reported to the AIU (Paris), no.2704/3, 25 July 1913
  (AIU Archives I-C-51) that 'It was not only the irregulars (Comitadjis)
  that massacred, pillaged and burned. The Army soldiers, the Chief of
  Police, and the high civil officials also took an active part in the
  horrors...', Moise Tovi (Salonica) to AIU (Paris) no.3027 (20 August 1913)
  (AIU Archives I-C-51) describes the Greek pillage of the Jewish quarter
  during the night of 18-19 August 1913.

(AIU = Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris.)

The main body of the following book is the diary of Errikos Sevillias
(a Jew who was born in Athens in 1901 and suffered during the Nazi invasion
of Greece). Nikos Stavroulakis translated the book into English and wrote
an introduction. In his Introduction, Stavroulakis gives a brief history
of Jews in Greece. The following excerpts are taken from the Introduction.

  Athens-Auschwitz (by Errikos Sevillias), Translated and Introduced by
  Nikos Stavroulakis, Lycabettus Press (P.O. Box 17091, 100 24 Athens),
  Greece (1983).

  Introduction, Historical Outline (by Nikos Stavroulakis), page viii:

  <<By the third quarter of the 15th century the Ottoman Empire had
  supplanted the Byzantine. Ottoman policy toward minorities was based
  on Islamic Law, which recognized both Jews and Christians as a separate
  millet (nation) with religious and, to an extraordinary extent, legal
  autonomy within their own communities. This tolerant millet system
  encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe who had been feeling
  the brunt of Christian persecution, notably, in the late 15th century,
  in Spain. This immigration was welcomed by the Ottomans because of the
  economic stimulation it brought. In 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella
  proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion for the Jews of Spain, Sultan Beyazid II
  proclaimed that Jews from Spain would be welcome in the Ottoman Empire,
  and over 20,000 Sephardic or Iberian Jews arrived in Thessaloniki the
  same year. Soon afterwards 36,000 Jews left Sicily, many of them to settle
  in the Balkans.

  Within a generation a Judea-Spanish culture had been transplanted to many
  centers in the Ottoman Empire. This was not always done smoothly. Many
  of the Sepharadim were Marranos, Jews who had converted to Christianity
  in the 14th century, thereby being able to participate in much of Europe's
  cultural and intellectual life. Their reconversion to Judaism was sometimes
  difficult, and their pride and sense of cultural superiority caused
  friction in their dealings with Romaniot Jews. Whatever the difficulties,
  the former Romaniot communities of Constantinople, Edirne (Adrinople),
  Thessaloniki, and Rhodes were forced by the weight of numbers and cultural
  superiority to adopt not only the minhag but also the language of the
  newcomers. A new, and certainly one of the most exciting periods of Balkan
  Jewry began. In 1497 the first book printed in Constantinople was published
  in Hebrew, well over two hundred years before the first Greek books were
  printed in Balkans. Some Jews, notably Joseph Nasi (1520-1579) during the
  reigns of Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim II, rose to high positions
  in the Ottoman service.

  The Greek War of Independence brought disaster to the Jewish communities
  in the Peloponnesos, where the revolution erupted in 1821. The Jews,
  because of their close association with the Ottoman administration,
  were massacred along with the Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras,
  Tripolis, and Kalamata were decimated; the few survivors moved north to
  settle in Chalkis and Volos, still under Ottoman rule. Patras lost its
  ancient Jewish community, which was refounded only in 1905.>>

  page xi (second paragraph):

  <<The absence of Jews in Athens immediately following the Greek War of
  Independence is ominous, indicating that they either fled or were
  massacred as were the Turks.>>

Need I go on?

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 - 1919)
                           'In Soviet Armenia today there no longer exists 
                            a single Turkish soul.' (Sahak Melkonian - 1920)

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