Daily Life In The Ottoman Empire (20 page)

The demand for an independent Armenian state began in the
19th century, when the Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire and the
Caucasus experienced a cultural revival. The study of Armenian language and
history became increasingly popular, the Bible was published in the vernacular,
and Armenian intellectuals developed a new literary language that made their
works accessible to the masses. Wealthy families began to send their children
to study in Europe, where a new class of young and educated Armenians became
fluent in European languages and imbued with modern ideologies of nationalism,
liberalism, and socialism.

Inspired by the rise and success of the 19th century
nationalist movements in the Balkans, a small group of Armenian intellectuals
began to question the leadership of the Armenian Church and called for the
introduction of secular education. Some went one step further and joined the
Young Ottomans in their demand for the creation of a constitutional form of
government that would grant all subjects of the sultan equal rights and
protection under law. When the Congress of Berlin granted independence and/or
autonomy to several Balkan states, a small group of Armenian officers who
served in the Russian army began to advocate the creation of an independent
Armenian state with support from the Russian tsar. Two Armenian organizations —
the Social Democratic Hnchakian Party, which published the newspaper
Hnchak
(Bell),
founded by Armenian students in Geneva, Switzerland in 1887; and the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (ARF or Dashnak Party), created in Tbilisi, Georgia,
in 1890 — played a central role in advocating Armenian independence.

Starting in the 1890s, the tension between the Armenian and
Muslim communities in eastern Anatolia intensified, as Armenian nationalists
and Ottoman forces clashed. Abdülhamid II ordered a crackdown on the wealthy
Armenian families in Istanbul and organized the Hamidiye regiment that included
Kurdish tribal units. From 1890 to 1893, the Hamidiye regiments were unleashed
against the Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia with devastating results.
Thousands of Armenians living in Sasun were murdered in the summer of 1894. The
attacks and mass killings continued in “Trebizond, Urfa, and Erzurum in autumn
1895, and Diarbekir, Arabkir, Kharpert, and Kayseri in November 1895.” In
response, the Hnchaks organized demonstrations in Istanbul and appealed to
European embassies to intervene. Similar protests were organized in towns
across eastern Anatolia. The situation worsened in 1895 and 1896, as clashes
between the Hamidiye regiments and Armenian nationalists intensified. In August
1896, armed Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul, threatening to blow
it up. Other terrorist attacks against government offices and officials
followed. The sultan himself was attacked when bombs were set off as he walked
to Aya Sofya for his Friday prayer. Some twenty Ottoman policemen were killed
in the attack. Throughout the conflict with the Ottoman government, the
Armenians pinned their hopes on intervention by European powers, particularly
the British and the Russians. Tsar Nicholas II, however, opposed British
intervention in the region, which he viewed as a sphere of Russian influence.
He also feared the establishment of an Armenian state led by revolutionaries
who could infect his own Armenian subjects with such radical ideas as
nationalism and socialism.

As the First World War began and fighting erupted in
eastern Anatolia, many Armenian officers and soldiers serving in the Ottoman
army defected, joining the Russians with the hope that the defeat and collapse
of the Ottoman state would lead to the establishment of an independent Armenian
state. The defections were followed by an uprising of the Armenians in the city
of Van in April 1915. The Ottoman government responded by adopting a policy of
forcibly relocating the Armenian population to the Syrian desert. Starting in
May 1915, virtually the entire Armenian population of central and eastern
Anatolia was removed from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
perished from starvation, disease, and exposure, and many more were brutalized
by Ottoman army units and the irregular Kurdish regiments who robbed, raped,
and killed the defenseless refugees.

Today, after the passage of almost a century, the plight of
the Armenian people continues to ignite intense emotional debate between
Armenians and Turks, centering on the number of casualties, the causes for the
deportations, and the intent of the perpetrators. Armenians claim that nearly a
million and a half people lost their lives in a genocide designed at the
highest levels of the Ottoman government. Turks, by contrast, posit the “disloyalty”
and “traitorous activities” of many Armenians who defected from the Ottoman
state and joined the Russian army, which had invaded the Ottoman homeland. They
also claim that the majority of Armenian deaths were caused by irregular armed
Kurdish units, who felt threatened by the prospect of living as a minority
community under a newly established Armenian state. According to this argument,
the Ottoman government can be held responsible for failing to prevent the
inter-communal violence between the Kurds and the Armenians, but it cannot be
blamed for atrocities that were committed by the local Muslim population during
the fog and agony of civil war. Regardless, there is little doubt that a small
inner circle within the Ottoman government, known as
Teşkilat-i Mahsusa
or Special Organization operating under the ministry of defense since
January 1914, designed and implemented the plan for relocating the Armenian
population in order to affect a “permanent solution” to the question of
Armenian nationalism in Ottoman lands.

JEWISH MILLET

Numerous Jewish communities lived scattered throughout the
Ottoman Empire. Although “the Jews were recognized as a separate religious
community by both Muslim legal scholars and Ottoman officials,” they “did not
seek formal status as a
millet
until 1835, when the Ottoman government,
in its attempt to standardize the way it dealt with each of the minority
religious communities, pushed the Jewish community leaders to name a chief
rabbi (
hahambaşi)
for the empire.” The Jews of the Ottoman Empire
governed their own affairs, just as the Orthodox Christians and Armenians did,
under their local rabbis who were elected by their congregation and confirmed
in office by the sultan.

The Jewish population of the empire did not constitute a
monolith. It contained original communities in various parts of the Middle East
and the Balkans, as well as the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews who arrived in
the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. The original Jewish
communities were divided into Rabbanites, or those who revered the Talmud
(Commentaries), and the Karaites, or those who accepted the Bible as the only source
of authority, did not recognize Hanukkah as a holiday, and permitted first
cousins to marry.

Linguistically, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were divided
into four main groups: Romiotes, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazic Jews, and
Arabic-speaking Jews. Some smaller Jewish communities in the Kurdish-populated
regions spoke either Kurdish or Aramaic, while others in North Africa spoke
Berber (Tamazight). Romiotes or Greek-speaking descendants of the Jews, who had
settled in the former Byzantine Empire, formed the core Jewish population
encountered by the Ottomans in the early centuries of building their empire.
The Sephardic Jews who were refugees from Spain and Portugal “spoke a dialect
of Castilian Spanish” called “Ladino or Judezmo,” while the Ashkenazic Jews who
were originally from central and eastern Europe “spoke either German or the
Jewish dialect of medieval German known as Yiddish.” Arabic-speaking Jews
resided in all the major cities of the Middle East and North Africa, but the
largest communities were to be found in Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad.
Baghdad served “as a major center of learning for Arabic-speaking Jews,” and
rabbis trained in the city “were in demand” both in Egypt and Syria. All
educated Ottoman Jews knew Hebrew, which served as the language of worship and
prayer, of intellectual life and, in some cases, of trade and commerce.

The arrival of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from
the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, and the influx of the Ashkenazic Jews from
central Europe, only intensified the diversity and the internal divisions
within the Jewish community. These divisions were the result of significant
differences in language, rituals, and even prayer books. Thus, far from being a
unified religious group, the Jewish community was a mosaic of subgroups each
identified by its own unique linguistic and cultural characteristics. The
Ottoman
millet
system recognized neither the fundamental differences
between the Ashkenazic and the Sephardic communities, nor the unique
characteristics of the subgroups that existed within each group. However, it
would be impossible to deny that, for centuries, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire
lived under far more tolerant political and cultural conditions than the Jews
of Christian Europe. The protection and tolerance offered by the Ottoman state
allowed both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities to preserve their languages,
rituals, customs, and traditions.

The Ashkenazic Jews were descended from the medieval Jewish
communities of Rhineland in Germany and had moved east, settling in Poland,
Russia, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe. Seeking a refuge from
anti-Jewish attacks and persecution, many migrated to the Ottoman Empire in the
15th and 16th centuries. There they sought, and received, the protection of
Ottoman sultans who “encouraged the immigration of Jews from Europe, as an
element bringing trade and wealth.” The “welcome that the Ottoman sultans gave
these Jewish immigrants is evident in the permissions granted to build new
synagogues in the cities in which they settled.” By the second half of the 16th
century, there were vibrant Ashkenazic communities in Istanbul, Edirne, Sofia,
Pleven, Vidin, Trikala, Arta, and Salonika, which had been established in the
Ottoman domain during the reigns of the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II,
and his successor Bayezid II. By 1477, the Jews “formed the third largest
section of Istanbul’s population after Muslims and Greeks.” Many sent letters
home describing how much their lives had improved under Ottoman rule and
encouraged family and friends to join them. The news that Jews were welcome in
the Ottoman Empire travelled quickly, and immigrants began to arrive not only
from the countries of central and western Europe, but also from Hungary,
Moldavia, the Crimea, and even parts of Asia. Many of these new immigrants set out
for Palestine despite the opposition from the Franciscans of Jerusalem who “talked
the Pope into forbidding the Venetians to carry Jewish passengers to the Holy
Land.”

In sharp contrast to the Ashkenazic Jews, the Sephardic
Jews lived originally in Spain and Portugal and fled to North Africa and the
Middle East during the Spanish Inquisition, seeking economic security and
religious freedom under the protection of Muslim rule. The new immigrants from
the Iberian Peninsula included the so-called
Maraños
(Muranos), Jews who
had expediently converted to Catholicism to escape persecution but upon
arriving in Ottoman territory abandoned their disguise and merged back into the
Sephardic congregation. Many settled in Istanbul and Edirne, as well as other
cities of the empire, in the 15th and 16th centuries. There were Sephardic
communities in the urban centers of the Balkans such as Sarajevo, Travnik,
Mostar, Banja Luka, and Salonika, where the largest Jewish community of nearly
thirty thousand resided. Salonika alone had some thirty different
congregations, including Aragonese, Castilian, Portuguese, and Apulian
communities. Many “Jewish males were employed in Salonika’s woolen industry,” where
they used “the techniques brought from Spain and Italy” to supply the imperial
palace in Istanbul and the Ottoman army with most of the cloth they consumed. The
urban centers of Anatolia such as Izmir, Bursa, Amasya, and Tokat, also
witnessed a significant influx of Sephardic Jews. In each urban center, the
Jewish community was divided into separate congregations that formed around the
unique traditions and customs the immigrants had brought with them from various
regions of Spain and Portugal. As with the Ashkenazic Jews, many Sephardic
immigrants also headed to the shores of Palestine and settled in Jerusalem,
Gaza, and Safad in Galilee, which served as “a center for the study of the
Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah.” Smaller groups chose Syria,
particularly Damascus, and Egypt, where they settled mostly in Alexandria and
Cairo.

In 1517, when the Ottomans defeated the ruling Mamluk
dynasty and conquered Egypt, Selim I decreed new laws for the Jews. At the
time, the Egyptian Jews were led by their
nagid,
or
reis,
a rabbi
and prince-judge whose authority was similar to that conferred on the
hahambaşi
in Istanbul. Selim abolished the office of
nagid “
to prevent his
becoming a rival to the chief rabbi in Istanbul,” and Selim’s son, Süleyman the
Magnificent, reasserted the authority of the
hahambaşi
as the
representative of all Jews in the empire. Süleyman also appointed an officer (
kahya)
,
a Jew himself, who enjoyed direct access to the sultan, the grand vizier, and
his cabinet, and “to whose notice he could bring cases of injustice” suffered
by the members of the Jewish community “at the hands of either provincial
governors or of fanatical Christians.”