From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish,soc.culture.turkish,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.europe,soc.culture.soviet,soc.rights.human,soc.culture.yugoslavia
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: The result of watching ASALA/SDPA/ARF terrorists and revisionists.
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 11:28:42 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <BxzArI.M8o@news.cso.uiuc.edu> ptg2351@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Panos Tamamidis ) writes:

> I do not ignore different arguments.  I only ignore silly arguments, which
> are not based on historical evidence.  Speculations are by no means
> historical evidence.  I have questioned the motives of persons who are

That is the result of watching ASALA/SDPA/ARF terrorists and revisionists
too much.

  <<...the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire which had been going on
  for a century was disastrous for Ottoman Jewry. This was the age of
  nationalism among the Christian subjects of the Sultan, starting with
  the Greek Revolution early in the nineteenth century, which, based on
  the Megali Idea, or Great Idea, sought to add to Greek kingdom Istanbul
  and large portions of Anatolia, union of which with Greece was felt to be
  the 'dream and hope of all'. The success of the Greek national movement,
  provided more in fact by the intervention of the Great Powers than by the
  efforts of the Greeks themselves, stimulated similar uprisings among the
  other subjects in Southeastern Europe who had long been oppressed, not so
  much by the Ottomans but, rather, by the Greek religious hierarchy which
  dominated the Orthodox millet, leading first to pressure for religious
  independence, granted to the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate in 1870, to the
  Serbian Church in 1879, and to the Rumanian Church in 1885, with subsequent
  aspirations for, and achievement of, political independence following...>>

  <<...They [new nationalist leaders] were greatly assisted in their
   campaigns against the Ottomans both by the diplomatic and consular
   representatives of the major Powers of Europe and also by Christian
   missionaries, who emphasized feelings of Christian superiority and
   hatred for Muslims and Jews which fortified the religious as well as
   ethnic bases of their pursuit of independence.

   Christian nationalism, based as much on religious as on ethnic identity,
   soon resurrected the medieval bigotries which had devastated both Jews
   and Muslims and consequently had driven them together in the past.
   Vicious anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic movements developed, involving
   large-scale persecutions and massacres carried out by invading armies,
   by the independent states that resulted, also by Christian subjects
   who remained within the Empire, particularly because of Jewish and Muslim
   support for Ottoman integrity in fear of their fate in the emergent
   nationalist states of Southeastern Europe. The results were explosive
   and damaging.

   The invading armies of Russia and Austria as well as the revolting
   nationalists and, later, successfully established independent Christian
   states, committed systematic genocide against Jews and Muslims throughout
   the nineteenth century, despite Great Power admonitions to the contrary
   in the treaties of Paris (1858) and Berlin (1878),...>>

  <<...As the peoples of Southeastern Europe achieved their independence,
   their Muslim and Jewish minorities were systematically persecuted and
   massacred, and those who survived were driven beyond the ever-shrinking
   boundaries of the retreating Ottoman Empire in a kind of slaughter which
   had not been seen since the dispersal of the Jews from Palestine centuries
   earlier.

   This sort of genocide had begun as long before as the late sixteenth
   century, with the Rumanian Principalities taking the lead, as united
   Rumania did subsequently during the later years of the nineteenth
   century. In 1579 the ruler of Moldavia, Peter the Lame, banished its
   Jews because of their competition with its Christian merchants. When
   Prince Micheal the Brave revolted against the Ottomans in the Rumanian
   principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1593, he ordered the massacre
   of all the Jews as well as Turks in Bucharest.>>

  <<The slaughter continued well into the nineteenth century. When the
  Greeks revolted against Ottoman rule many Greek volunteers coming from
  Russia and the Principalities to join in the effort slaughtered and
  plundered the Jewish communities along their paths as they went through
  Moldavia and Wallachia toward Greece.>>

  <<When Venice occupied the island of Chios in 1694, its Jewish population
   was either massacred or deported and all Jewish communal and personal
   property was stolen by the native Greek population, leaving those Jews
   who returned in utter poverty and reduced to begging, no longer able to
   compete with the Greeks in trade or commerce.>>

  <<Jews living in Greece and the Rumanian principalities suffered terribly
   because of their support for Ottoman rule. When the Greek nationalist
   movement Philike Etairia started its uprising in Wallachia and Moldavia
   during the spring of 1821, hundreds of Jews and Muslims were killed by
   the Greeks who lived there as well as by native Wallachs [14]. During
   the height of the Greek revolution, five thousand Jews were massacred
   in Morea along with most of the Muslim population, numbering about
   twenty thousand in all [15]. In Tripolizza alone 1,200 Jews were
   massacred along with uncounted Turks [16].  Reverend John Hartley,
   after describing the carnage, concluded 'Thus did Jewish blood, mingled
   with Turkish, flow down the streets of captured city. The sons of Isaac
   and the sons of Ishmael, on this as well as on every occasion during the
   Greek Revolution, met with common fate. Their corpses were cast out of the
   city, and, like the ancient sovereign of Judah, they received no burial
   superior to that of an ass.' [17] Jewish communities on the islands of
   Sparta, Patras, Corinthos, Mistra, and Argos were wiped out by bands of
   Greek rebels along with those of Thebes, Vrachori, Attica and Epirus [18].
   The surviving Jews fled to the island of Corfu, where Jews who had fled
   from Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula had lived in peace and prosperity
   under the Venetian rule since the twelfth century, though divided into
   rival Greek and Italian communities. It was not long, however, before
   it too fell victim to the Greek Revolution, leading to savage repression
   and massacres of Jews, forcing the surviving members of the two communities
   to come together for self-defense for the first time. Throughout the years
   of Greek revolution, Greek nationalists went from town to town on the
   mainland and from island to island in the Agean, exterminating all the
   Jews and Muslims they could find, many along the roads as they desperately
   fled to safety in what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Contemporary
   accounts relate that the Greeks left the murdered Jews and Muslims lying
   exposed so their bodies could be torn apart by the buzzards [19]. Most of
   the Jews who survived these massacres fled across the Agean in small boats
   to Izmir, thus starting its rise as one of the leading centers of Ottoman
   Jewish life during the nineteenth century. Only in Northern Greece,
   particularly in the areas of Janina and Salonica, were the Jews and the
   Turks able to successfully resist the Greek assaults, thus saving their
   populations from massacre as well [20]. During the remainder of the 19th
   century, particularly during the Greek-Turkish war in 1897, those Jews
   who remained in Greece in the areas of Athens, Chalkis, Larissa, Corfu
   and Crete suffered severe persecution and massacre, forcing thousands
   more to emigrate into Ottoman territory, particularly to Salonica and
   Izmir [21].>>

   <<The inclusion in the Treaty of Berlin of stipulations providing
   protection for the Jewish and Muslim minorities in Southeastern Europe
   stimulated more popular anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hysteria in all
   the countries involved, with blood-libel accusations once again being
   used as pretexts for attacking and ravaging Jewish quarters as well as
   for new tactics for boycotting Jewish shopkeepers, merchants and
   professionals, a movement which was quickly adapted by the Christian
   millets in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. Because the Bulgarians,
   Rumanians and Greeks correctly regarded the Jews as supporters of the
   Turks, both Jews and Turks were expelled from these countries in equally
   atrocious and brutal manners. Their property was plundered and their
   homes and shops taken over without compensation, while the survivors
   fled in desperation to Edirne and Istanbul. While official statements
   subsequently were issued granting equal rights to Jews, little was done
   in fact and they continued to be persecuted regularly well into the
   twentieth century.>>

  <<Things were not much better elsewhere in Southeastern Europe or the
   Greek islands of the Agean and the eastern Mediterranean. In 1891 the
   Jews on Corfu were subjected to severe persecution by local Greeks due
   to the revival of the old ritual murder accusations [26]. Many of
   those who survived found refuge in Ottoman territory with the help of a
   popular subscription drive carried out in Istanbul under leadership of
   the Banque Camondo. In 1881 and 1884, and again in 1892 and 1903,
   thousands of Jews came to Ottoman territory as a result of pogroms
   in Russia which went on between 1881 and 1921 with only slight periods
   of respite. In 1899 Jewish families arrived in Istanbul in flight from
   persecution in Vidin, in independent Bulgaria.

   The conquest of Ottoman Thrace and Macedonia by Greek and Bulgarian
   forces during the Balkan Wars (1912-13), including Salonica, Corlu,
   and Edirne, was followed by general attacks on Jews, their synagogues,
   homes and shops, in both countries [27], resulting in a renewed exodus
   toward Istanbul and beyond. Two reports from Salonica graphically
   described the situation caused by the invading armies:

      'All the self-interested justifications of the newspapers of Europe,
      all the lies which they have used to cover up the truth, can never
      destroy the impression of the terrible anguish which has marked the
      entry of the Greeks in Salonica. A week of terror and horror one can
      never easily forget. The Hellenes now cruelly feel today all the
      damage that the explosion of hatred by the (Greek) population has done
      to their cause. The mob has shown itself odious and the government
      weak...The incompetence of the Greek administration and the horrors
      inflicted by the soldiers has put them in a terrible situation. The
      consuls guaranteed the absolute safety of the Muslims, but sixty of
      them were massacred in a single night....'[28]

     'It wasn't only irregulars (Comitacis) who massacred, pillaged and
      burned. The soldiers of the Army, the Chief of Police, and the high
      civil officials took an active part in the events at Serres. Out of
      6,000 houses, 4,000 were burned. Almost 1,200 shops were consumed by
      flames and destructive bombs. The (Jewish) population lost all, and
      without even anything to wear is in despair. Everyone wants to
      emigrate...'[29]

    <<As a result of these assaults, massacres, and forced deportations from
   the independent countries of Southeastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire
   received literally thousands of Jewish refugees who joined the Muslims
   who survived the persecution, flooding into the Empire...>>

[14] Shlomo Rozanes, Korot Hayehudim Beturkiyah Vebeartzot Hakedem:
    Hadorot Haachronim (Jerusalem, 1945), pp.42-44, cited Yitzchak Kerem,
    'The Influence of Anti-Semitism on Jewish Immigration Patterns from
    Greece to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century', pp.2, 14.

[15] Maxime Raybaud, Memoires sur la Grece, pour servir a l'histoire de la
    Guerre de l'Independence (2 Vols, Paris, 1824), pp.5-19; Galante,
    Turcs et Juifs (Istanbul, 1932), 76-77.

[16] Rev. T.S. Hughes, Travels in Greece and Albania (2nd edn, 2 vols,
    London, 1830), II, 194-95.

[17] Rev. John Hartley, Researches in Greece and the Levant (London, 1831),
    207, quoted in Yitzchak Kerem, 'Jewish Immigration Patterns from Greece
    to the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century', published paper
    delivered at the Comite International d'Etudes Pre-Ottomanes et Ottomanes,
    VIII Symposium, 'Decision-Making and the Transmission of Authority
    in the Turkic System', University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
    Minnesota, 14-19 August 1988, p.4.

[18] Hartley, ibid., pp.206-7, William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern
    Greece (2 Vols, London, 1835) II, 231-32, 609; Errikos Sevillas,
    Athens-Auschwitz (Athens, 1983), p.ix, quoted in Kerem, ibid., p.14.

[19] Documented in Kerem, ibid., pp.14-19. Pearl L. Preschel, The Jews
    of Corfu (Greece), Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University,
    1984. Goerge Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1861),
    172, 179-86; See also 'Greece', EJ VII, 876-77.

[20] Yoannina Vasdraveli, Ee Thessaloniki: Kata Ton Agona Tis Aneksantizias
    (Salonica, 1946), pp.19-35; Yitzchak Kerem, An Outline of the History
    of Jews of Selonica (in Hebrew) (Museum of Kibbutz Lahoma, Getaot, 1985),
    p.21, quoted in Kerem, ibid., p.15.

[21] Kerem, ibid., pp.8-12, 'The Persecution of the Jews', Times (London),
    16 May 1891; A. Ablagon to AIU, 19 October 1898, AIU, Grece VIII.B.34,
    Schaki (Larissa) to AIU, 23 August/4 September 1893, BAIU, Grece,
    Deuxieme Serie, no.18, 1er et 2e Semestre, 1893; Elia Fraggi (Larissa)
    to AIU, 5 June 1874, AIU Grece, I.C.22; Larissa AIU represantatives
    to AIU, 23 June/5 July 1897, AIU, Grece II.B.16; Jewish Community of
    Canea leaders in Samos to AIU, 3 March, 1897, AIU, Grece VIII.B.35.

[26] Pearl L. Preschel, The Jews of Corfu (Greece), Unpublished Ph.D.
    dissertation, New York University, 1984.

[27] Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era (New York, 1946);
    Edgar Morin, Vidal et les Siens (Paris, Seuil, 1989), 55-67; Paul Dumont,
    'The Social Structure of the Jewish Community of Salonica at the end of
    the nineteenth century', Southeastern Europe V (1979), 33-72; Galante,
    Turcs VIII, 18-21; Rodrigue, pp.178-80.

[28] A. Cohen, Ecole Secondaire Moise Allatini, Salonica, to AIU, Paris,
   no.7745/7, 4 December 1912, in AIU Archives I C 49.

[29] Mizrahi, President of AIU at Salonica, to AIU (Paris), no.2704/3,
   25 July 1913. In AIU Archives (Paris) I C 51.

( AIU = Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris. )

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.jewish