Freedom and Prosperity - the Jews of Türkiye

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April 24, 1877
Ahrida Synagogue, Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire
Jews in Constantinople offering prayers for the success of the Turkish arms

Jews in Constantinople.jpg

In his sermon for the occasion, Hakham Moshe Halevi ... implored the Jews to do more than simply pray for the Ottomans’ victory in the war [against the invading Russia]; he argued for all able-bodied Jews to volunteer to fight.

In the months following Halevi’s sermon and similar appeals by other Jewish leaders, Jewish men from across the Ottoman Empire did enlist.

Jewish loyalty to the Ottoman Empire was sincere, not perfunctory.
When expelled from Spain in 1492, Iberian Jews were welcomed with few conditions into the Ottoman lands and founded large and prosperous communities throughout the Balkans and Anatolia.
Under Ottoman rule, much more so than in Europe, Jews found peace and prosperity and easy access to the Holy Land.

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Ahrida Synagogue today

Ahrida Synagogue.jpg

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While historians readily acknowledge that the United States has served as a Jewish refuge, few have recognized the similar role performed by the Ottoman Empire. In part, this imbalanced view derives from the continuing existence of the American state, and, as many believe, its enduring example as a model of pluralism in a twentieth-century world beset with unprecedented instances of ethnic and nationalistic intolerance and bestiality.

The United States, it is argued, constitutes a living case study which other peoples seek to emulate and to which desperate, persecuted individuals continue to flee. The focus on America's role in Jewish history may seem self-evident. Less obvious, however, is why we have overlooked or even shunned the Ottoman case. Until very recently, Jewish historiography has hardly recognized, much less examined, the Jewish settlement in the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish integration into the Ottoman world.

This evasion is difficult to comprehend.
Not only did thousands find refuge there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but over the next four hundred years, they enjoyed a cultural and economic renaissance that rivaled the great exilic communities of Babylonia and Spain.
The Quincentennial of 1492 and Ottoman-Jewish Studies by Daniel Goffman

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"CAN SUCH a king be called wise and intelligent, one who impoverishes his country and enriches my kingdom?"
Such is the question, or rather the exclamation, attributed to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512) about his contemporary, King Ferdinand of Spain, who together with Queen Isabella in 1492 decreed the expulsion, on pain of death, of all Spain's Jews who would not convert to Christianity.

Many who fled, or their descendants, ultimately found refuge in various parts of the Ottoman Empire.
On Bayezid's instructions, they were welcomed, and those most enterprising and best-qualified reestablished livelihoods that greatly benefitted their new country as well as themselves.

Some recent writing has rather anachronistically praised Bayezid as an almost prophetic embodiment of late 20th-century humanitarian ideals.
Bayezid's real virtue is not diminished by admitting that his favorable attitude to the Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal was in no small measure motivated also by his conviction that these newcomers would have the same commercial skills as the indigenous Greek-speaking ("Romaniot") Jews of his Empire and that important economic benefits would inevitably accrue to his realm.
His reward was a long-lasting economic boom, and his new subjects found that they could flourish both economically and as a religious and social community in relative peace and security. In their new home they continued to call themselves Sephardim ("Spaniards" in Hebrew and in their vernacular Judeo-Spanish), as they still do to the present.
Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Some Recent Historiography by Eleazar Florence Birnbaum

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Ashkenazi Jews also found a haven in the Ottoman Empire. These included Jews expelled from Hungary in 1376, from France in 1394, from Sicily, Bavaria, and from Venetian-ruled Salonika. In fact, shortly before the fall of Constantinople, the Turks actively encouraged Jewish immigration from Europe by offering the same conditions of tolerance that Jews had formerly enjoyed in the Abbasid Baghdad, Fatimid Egypt, and Muslim Spain.

As at Bursa, Jews helped the Turks everywhere to liberate them from their Greek Christian oppressors. In most cases, they were rewarded with tax exemptions, trade concessions, mineral rights, and even with free housing and shops.

From the sixteenth century onward, Ottoman rule spread to Arab and other Muslim land, where the resident Jewish communities also welcomed the victorious Turkish armies. Suleiman the Magnificent, for example, gave tremendous encouragement to its Jewish community when he first entered Baghdad in triumph, accompanied by his Jewish physician and confidante and other Jewish scholars.

Under the benevolent sway of the Grand Turk, Sephardi refugees from Spain and Portugal joined existing Jewish communities all over the Ottoman Empire. They settled around the shores of the Mediterranean, penetrating up through the Balkans towards central Europe, and eventually across Turkey to Baghdad and beyond.
Usually superior in education and culture to the Jews in whose midst they settled, they at first preserved a separate identity and formed themselves into a kind of aristocracy. In time though, they either absorbed the older-established Jews or else merged with them.

The Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire was also enriched by a steady stream of Marranos who fled eastwards from the fifteenth century onward, bringing considerable capital with them. Rhodes, conquered by the Turks in 1522, became the main transit destination for New Christians seeking to return openly to Judaism. Other very wealthy individuals, who later commanded much influence at the Sultan's court, came directly — usually through Italy.
The Rise, Decline and Attempted Regeneration of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire by Lucien Gubbay

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HAVIVA OTOMANIA - BELOVED OTTOMANIA
Sephardi Jews by and large regarded the Ottoman Empire with a great deal of gratitude and affection as their historical savior. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II's open-arms policy toward the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish refugees in the 15th century was an integral part of Ottoman Sephardi collective memory, so much so that early-20th-century attempts by the Spanish government to renew its ties with Sephardi Jews were met with public scorn and disdain.

In addition, economic, social, and political competition from the Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the 19th century had pushed the Jewish communities of the empire from their earlier privileged position.
The consequence of this competition, argues the historian Hasan Kayal, was that the Jews saw the best protection of their interests in making common cause with the Muslim elements within a secular and constitutional Ottoman state.

Both historic and socioeconomic factors easily translated into enthusiastic support for the July 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and the approximately 400,000 Jews of the empire were consistently among the most loyal supporters of the new regime.
The Young Turk Revolution promised sweeping political and social reforms, modernization, and universal rights. Among other things, the 1876 Ottoman constitution was reactivated; parliamentary elections were held; and equality among the religious communities was reaffirmed.

Although the Ottoman sultan had at least twice previously declared equality among his subjects, those declarations had done little to dent the hierarchical confessionalism or institutionalized difference _ that existed between Muslims and non-Muslims. Now, for the first time, citizenship rights matched this latest formulation, and there is extensive evidence indicating that a notion of Ottoman nationalism that transcended religious or ethnic variables was envisioned and articulated on the grassroots level.
Between "Beloved Ottomania" and "The Land of Israel": The Struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palestine's Sephardi Jews, 1908-13 by Michelle U. Campos

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For over four centuries Turkey had been regarded as a friend of the Jews.
Her warm hospitality, extended to the refugees from Spain at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, left an indelible impression. The Spanish Jews found in Turkey not only a haven but freedom and prosperity.

Some, such as Don Joseph Nasi and Solomon Ashkenazi, rose to the highest positions in the state hierarchy. Under the millet system Ottoman Jewry enjoyed a wide measure of autonomy and the Chief Rabbi, the Chatham Bashi, was entitled to exercise authority in both religious and civil matters.
His decrees were sanctioned by the government and became law.

In Palestine the Ottoman rulers treated the Jews as tolerantly and benevolently as elsewhere. Selim I's conquest of Syria and Palestine in 1517 marked a new era in the history of the country, which was to remain under Ottoman rule for four hundred years.
The native Jews hailed Selim's victory enthusiastically. They had long been dissatisfied with the inefficient Mamluk regime and had good reason to believe that incorporation into the Ottoman Empire and direct contact with its Jewish inhabitants, the most influential and numerous at that time in the world, would open new vistas. They were not disappointed.

Following the example set by Selim I, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66) and Selim II (1566-74) allowed the Jews to move freely into the Holy Land and settle wherever they liked. The Jewish population, which in past centuries had been severely decimated by recurrent political and natural catastrophes, was now augmented by successive waves of immigration, mainly of the Sephardi extraction.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the total Jewish population in Palestine was estimated at no more than 5,000 to 6,000 ; fifty years later the community in Safad alone had risen to 10,000.
Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 1897-1918 by Isaiah Friedman

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Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records (sijillat), and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding - particularly of females of slavic origin - in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modern period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways.
I dealt with two of them:
The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children;
the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community.

These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata.
Blond, tall, with honey-colored eyes: Jewish ownership of slaves in the Ottoman Empire by Yaron Ben-Nach

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A strong friendship existed among all residents of the city [Hebron] … We used to attend Arab weddings... We were welcome guests at all their happy events…

The Arabs, and even their sheikhs, used to attend Jewish weddings as a sign of friendship…
The Yeshiva students, used to go down sometimes to the village to buy products, sometimes even after midnight. In those days we walked around freely, without security patrol and without any weapons in all the Arab villages. No one had any fear…

Every month on Erev Rosh Chodesh, the yeshiva would go pray at the Cave of Machpelah [Cave of the Patriarchs]. We were welcomed there…
It was well-known that when the yeshiva considered moving to a different location, the local Arab leaders stood up to prevent it.
To Rise Above - The Amazing Life of HaRav Dov Cohen by Dov Cohen

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Anti-Semitism arose in industrial Europe. In Morocco there was no anti-Semitism.
The European Jews were an exploitative class, and in Israel they are the same.
The Zionist movement came here and turned this country into an offshoot of Europe.
Charlie-Shalom Biton (1979)

Charlie Biton is an Israeli social activist of Moroccan descent and, at that time, member of the Knesset.
He was one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers movement that fought against the persistent discrimination against Mizrahi Jews (i.e., of African descent).
Their violent protests forced the government to establish a public committee to investigate the Panthers' claims. The committee concluded that real discrimination existed at many levels of society.
(and yes, Morocco never was part of the Ottoman Empire.)

[David Thompson]

A source or sources would be helpful for our readers, Wm.

[ljadw]

Anti-Semitism arose in industrial Europe. In Morocco there was no anti-Semitism.
The European Jews were an exploitative class, and in Israel they are the same.
The Zionist movement came here and turned this country into an offshoot of Europe.
Charlie-Shalom Biton (1979)

Charlie Biton is an Israeli social activist of Moroccan descent and, at that time, member of the Knesset.
He was one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers movement that fought against the persistent discrimination against Mizrahi Jews (i.e., of African descent).
Their violent protests forced the government to establish a public committee to investigate the Panthers' claims. The committee concluded that real discrimination existed at many levels of society.
(and yes, Morocco never was part of the Ottoman Empire.)

During the Fes riots of 1912,42 Moroccan Jews were murdered .Thus : Ín Morocco there was no anti-Semitism '' is wrong .

[ljadw]

Freedom and prosperity for the Jews in Turkey is totally wrong
Some examples :
1917 : Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportations : 8000 Jews expelled, 1500 died .
1934 : Thrace pogroms .
Etc,etc..

[Loïc]

First indeed Morocco was a country, even also an Empire, who resisted - with its army of black slaves and some european renegades - against the Ottoman Empire and never became part of it contrary to Algiers Tunis and the rest of North Africa, agree with that as it is precised

but second, such comment about Morocco is obviously totally wrong rewriting the Moroccan History to ignore antijudaism antisemitism and progroms throughout the interesting but complicated History of Morocco, the Historian Michel Abitbol, also Israeli-Moroccan and born in Casablanca like him, would not share a such conclusion

the dhimmi-zed inferiorised Jews were segregated in mellhas and suffered slaughters by muslims for centuries and until the 20th century who saw an huge migration of this community who passed from 300 000 to only 3000, the reason why this man was citizen in Israël like the majority of the Moroccan Jews, and at a lesser extent in France like Michel Abitbol or Canada



Authors who have been interested in the study of relations between Muslims and Jews in the land of Islam have all noticed that, in countries located in the far East and in the far West of the Muslim world, discriminatory measures were applied even more rigorously than anywhere else, this will be the case in Morocco which became muslim since 712
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in 1894, in his book on anti-Semitism and its causes, Bernard Lazare pointed out in a note concerning Morocco and Iran the calamitous condition of the Jews in these countries. This is confirmed by Bernard Lewis, Jews in the Land of Islam, 1984: “We can even say that the further a state was from the heart of Islamic civilization, the more repressive it was. The situation of non-Muslims was generally better in Egypt and Turquie or Iraq than in North Africa or Central Asia. The status of dhimmis was seen as vile and contemptible. The best proof, perhaps, is that the dhimmi represented in the eyes of Muslims the archetype of the inferior and the oppressed. […] Let us also note that it was in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the dhimmis wanted to free themselves from the constraints that weighed on them, that the most violent and deadly confrontations broke out. […] In their relations with Muslims, Jews were not equal before the law. »

The Muslim state institutionalized the social inferiority of dhimmis and organized social segregation between Muslims and dhimmis. In this way, social exclusion is enshrined in the law of the Muslim country and constitutes a major political argument which encourages abuse of power and leaves the door open to arbitrariness. In Morocco, from the top of the social ladder to the bottom, social discrimination was a daily reality for Jews. The persecution was as much religious as it was social.
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But, above all, what characterizes the situation of Jews in Morocco is arbitrariness. Impunity is guaranteed by the Dhimma Law. A Muslim cannot be convicted for the murder of a dhimmi; the blood price for a dhimmi is much lower than that of a Muslim. Violence falls on them for the most futile reasons. Death could also befall them in incomprehensible ways. Killing a dhimmi to steal it was never punished. Rapes of young women were the dread of families and did not fail to occur during riots by rebel tribes against the Sultan's government. Not to mention the theft of young children to convert them and raise them in Islam.

In Morocco, the equation Jew = dhimmi is, in fact, the only relevant one since there is no longer Christians dhimmi. The dhimmis in Morocco are the archetype of the oppressed and the excluded. Justice is a register that is unknown to them. All of this is attested in Jewish and non-Jewish historical sources. The letters sent by the directors of the Alliance Israelite Universelle are deposited in the archives of the Library and can be consulted. They come from direct witnesses of the events which shook the Jewish communities in Morocco from 1862 to 1912. The sack of the mellah of Casablanca in 1907, that of Fez in 1912 following the French Protectorate. Massacres, fires, rapes, thefts, kidnappings, nothing is missing. The vulnerability of Jewish dhimmis is such that even Charles de Foucauld who did not like them, described their condition at the end of the 19th century in terms which give a very precise idea: “The Israelites who, in the eyes of Muslims, are not men…”

We must face the facts, Morocco, a country of Islam, applies the laws of dhimma with the greatest severity: social discrimination is a political fact constituting the condition of Jews in these countries. It is a political argument that is aggravated by cruelty and systematic arbitrariness. Jews had no political rights. They had, on the other hand, many duties and constraints. Poverty and humiliation are their lot because they did not believe in Islam.
And it is worth emphasizing the fact that, paradoxically, anti-Judaism is not the real problem there; Jews are dhimmis, that is to say they can practice their religion even in a discreet and non-aggressive tone. They are protected by the clauses of a pact which ensures their lives are saved in exchange for numerous social and fiscal constraints. While social segregation turns out to be a form of domination and conquest by means other than weapons. Social death and fiscal crushing are weapons of a different nature than the sword, but they are very effective. Indeed, in his historical essay, Eisenbeth reports information taken from a work by M. de Chénier, French consul in Morocco in the 18th century; he gives a precise estimate of the impact of social discrimination and persecution on the Jewish demography in Morocco after the expulsion from Spain: at the beginning of the 16th century, there were 30 000 Jewish families in Morocco. In the 18th century, only the twelfth remained
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The social isolation of dhimmis in Morocco was watertight. Muslim and Jewish residents led parallel lives there. They didn't really meet. Since all the attributes or criteria of discrimination are present: social exclusion, shameful condition, humiliation and contempt, overtaxation, unpunished crimes and murders and permanent arbitrariness, theft, rape of young women and boys, kidnapping of children and women , insults of all kinds, it is then appropriate to speak about them according to the categories of definition of anti-Semitism. Consequently, it is useless to hide under the category of religion and the fanaticism of certain zealots to explain (without justifying) that These are not anti-Semitic phenomena. All areas of the state are involved in this institutionalized exclusion. Tribal nationalism and contempt added to the mix.

This will clarify the debate and perhaps prevent us from continuing to cloud the discourse with religious arguments or by evoking a totally illusory Jewish-Moroccan symbiosis, which historical facts deny. Hence the importance of defining and understanding why the Jews of Morocco were unable to look into their own history, unaware that they too had been caught in the turmoil of anti-Semitism and not being able to distance themselves to reflect and testify

Albert Memmi criticizes historians who have exclusively supported the thesis of anti-Judaism to qualify the phenomena linked to dhimma, of having contributed to maintaining the “myth of a Jewish-Arab understanding” as a political argument. According to him, four complicities came together to promote the propagation of this myth after the independence of the Maghreb. Apart from the complicity of the European left and Arab propaganda, he sees that of Western Jewish historians and that of Jews from North Africa themselves

“In fact, Jewish history was written by Western Jews, there has been no great Easterner Jewish historian. And this is the absurd distinction made by Isaac (whom I respect a lot) between “real” and “false” anti-Semitism, the “real” being that produced by Christianity and the other being called “anti-Judaism”. No, it is not only Christianity that causes anti-Semitism, but the fact that the Jew is a minority; and unfortunately by making anti-Semitism a Christian creation, Isaac minimized the tragedy of the Jews in Arab countries, and contributed to distorting minds.
Fourth complicity, finally: it is ours, it is this more or less unconscious complicity of the uprooted Eastern Jews who tend to embellish the past, and who, in their regret for North Africa, minimize or completely erase the memory of persecutions. »

We still need to question a strange phenomenon that occurred after Morocco regained its political sovereignty and independence in 1956. While they had just been recognized as Moroccan citizens, Jews left this country en masse. Nearly 90% of them emigrated to Israel between 1961 and 1974. Only a minority settled in Canada and France.

They did not retain the words of Mohamed V in his Speech from the Throne of November 18, 1955 in which he solemnly reaffirmed his desire to see the new Morocco “access a regime of democracy eliminating all racial distinction

It is true that these words of welcome and hope came after the trauma caused by the riots in Petit-Jean (today Sidi-Kacem) in which five Jews from Meknes had just been savagely massacred and burned by the population. Muslim in a state of turmoil on the eve of the anniversary of the deposition of Mohamed V by the French colonialist power. After this massacre, Aliyah to Israel broke records. In addition, Mohamed V died on February 26, 1961 and departures resumed until there were almost no Jews left in Morocco.

and it is quite astonishing that the myth of the Jewish-Moroccan understanding is refuted by the testimony of a Moroccan Arab, Saïd Ghallab, published in Les Temps Modernes in 1965
" We grew up. My childhood friends remained anti-Jewish. They veil their virulent anti-Semitism by arguing that the State of Israel is the creation of Western imperialism. […] But you just have to open your eyes to see that the swastikas cover the walls and to listen to understand how deeply hatred of the Jew is rooted in hearts, even in a very backward peasant class, which is unaware of this what does Israel mean, therefore that there is a Jewish-Arab 'political conflict'. On the contrary, everything happens as if the Jew were this hereditary enemy that must be eliminated, a thorn in the soles of the feet that must be pulled out, an evil that must be destroyed. »

extracts taken from Ruth Tolédano Attias's article Antisemitism in Morocco
https://www.cairn.info/revue-pardes-2003-1.htm

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A source or sources would be helpful for our readers, Wm.

Charlie Biton said that in one of his Knesset speeches in 1979 and it's from "The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust" by Tom Segev.
The rest is just my very brief summary of a long, and complicated story still written even today, as evidenced by the They're Not Nice Alley in Jerusalem - named not that many years ago. "Not nice people" were Black Panthers - called that by Golda Meir.