by Mehrdad Kia
In 1454 when Mehmed II appointed the Greek bishop Gennadios Scholarios as the head of Orthodox Christian millet, he assumed that the office of the new patriarch represented the “interests of all Orthodox subjects in his empire.” But not all Orthodox Christians were Greeks. Bulgarians, like the Serbs, possessed their own native church hierarchies and organizations, which were taken over by the Greek appointees of Istanbul’s patriarchate. Greek “interests and culture came to pervade the Orthodox millet” to the increased exclusion of the Bulgarian and Serbian churches. Greek “bishops and Greek liturgical books replaced the Bulgarian bishops who were banished.” As a sense of Greek superiority emerged within the church hierarchy, its Slavic faithful grew increasingly resentful. Their ethnic and cultural self-awareness grew correspondingly, and a deep-seated animosity toward Greek superiority began to make itself felt within the Orthodox millet. It was the Bulgarian religious leaders and monks from remote monasteries and spiritual enclaves who called for throwing off the supremacy of the Greek clergy and Greek language. If the Bulgarians wished to establish Bulgarian schools and liturgy, they needed an independent ecclesiastical system. In 1557, when Süleyman the Magnificent reconstituted the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, the Ottomans placed the Bulgarian eparchies under its authority. The Peć Patriarchate was, however, abolished by the Ottoman government in 1766. In the 19th century, as the authority of the Ottoman central government waned, the Bulgarians demanded “church services in Bulgarian, Bulgarian-speaking high clergy, the establishment of a national church, and a form of political autonomy.” The first “major struggles” for Bulgarian cultural independence were waged against “the domination of the Greek clergy” in the 1820s, and they were organized around the refusal of the Bulgarian people to pay taxes demanded by Greek bishops and a call to create an independent educational system with modern Bulgarian as the language of instruction. By “the beginning of the 1870s, more than 1,600 Bulgarian language schools had been founded.” The most important aspect of this movement was the popular demand for the creation of an independent Bulgarian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Finally, “in 1870, the sultan issued a decree authorizing the establishment of a Bulgarian exarchate.”
ARMENIAN MILLET
Armenians constituted the oldest and the largest non-Muslim community in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. There were also Armenian communities in the urban centers of the empire, particularly in Istanbul.
The Arsacid (Arshakuni) Kingdom of Armenia was the first state in history to adopt Christianity as its religion. In A.D. 301, Trdat (Tiridates) III converted to Christianity by Grigor Lusavorich (Gregory the Illuminator), and in A.D. 314, Grigor Lusavorich was ordained as the first bishop of Armenia. For Armenians, their church emerged as the focal point of communal identity that preserved their unity in face of threats, domination, and conquest by larger and stronger neighbors. Sometime around A.D. 400, an Armenian alphabet was invented, ushering in the golden age of Armenian culture and civilization, when numerous books and manuscripts in foreign languages, including the Bible, were translated into Armenian. Starting in the last decade of the 4th century, Armenia lost its independence to the Byzantine and the Sassanid Persian empires, which partitioned the country. Despite several attempts to reestablish their independence, the Armenians lost their sovereignty as the Arab Muslims, and later the Seljuk Turks, Mongols, Ottomans, and Safavid Iranians invaded and occupied their ancient homeland.
During the long Byzantine rule, the Armenian Apostolic Church was not allowed to operate in Constantinople because the Greek Orthodox Church viewed it as heretical. Persecution by the Byzantine authorities only strengthened the separate and distinct Armenian identity. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II was determined to make his new capital a “universal metropolis” by “officially recognizing the spiritual leaders of the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish communities” under his rule. He aspired to establish an Armenian patriarchate of Istanbul, but he faced a problem in the case of Armenians that did not arise with either the Orthodox Christians or Jews. At the time of the conquest, the majority of the Armenian population did not live under the authority of the sultan. The most important center of the Gregorian Church and the seat of the Armenian Patriarch, the Catholicos at Echmiadzin (Ejmiatsin) was “outside the borders of the Ottoman Empire, in adjacent hostile territory.” In 1461, Mehmed II appointed Bishop Hovakim of Bursa as the first Armenian patriarch of Istanbul and the religious and secular leader of all Armenians living in the Ottoman domains.
The Armenian millet differed from the Orthodox not only in certain beliefs, rituals, and customs, but also in that its members were all from one ethnic group and the majority lived far from the urban centers of the empire in eastern Anatolia and the south Caucasus, which were contested by the Ottoman and Safavid empires. The devastating wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid dynasty in Iran partitioned Armenian-populated territory. The south Caucasus, including the seat of the Armenian Patriarch, the Catholicos at Echmiadzin, was incorporated into the Iranian state, and eastern Anatolia remained under Ottoman rule. During the Ottoman-Iranian wars, the Armenian population suffered. Armenian towns and villages were destroyed, harvest was burnt, and water wells were filled by the Iranians who forcibly moved entire communities and settled them in the interior of their territory so that they would not supply the Ottoman forces with food and shelter. Many Armenians were never allowed to return. Others helped the Safavid monarch Shah Abbas (1587–1629) and his successors divert the silk trade from a land route, which would have benefited the Ottomans, to a sea route, which skipped Ottoman territory to establish a direct link between Iran and the Christian powers of Europe.
Meanwhile, the Armenian population living under Ottoman rule was also depleted by military campaigns, the anarchy caused by internal revolts (i.e., celali revolts) in the 17th century, and emigration. The vacated lands and villages of the Armenians were mostly occupied and repopulated by various Kurdish tribes from eastern Anatolia. Since the central government in Istanbul viewed the borderland between western Iran and eastern Anatolia as strategically vital, Ottoman sultans rewarded the Kurds, who fought against the Iranians, by dividing the region into administrative units called sancaks and appointing loyal Kurdish tribal chiefs as hereditary governors (sancak beys), responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining order. Thus, while Ottoman rule restored peace and tranquility, it forced the Armenians to live under the dominance of their mortal enemies, the Kurds. As long as the central government was strong and could protect Armenian communities through its local officials, a certain balance was maintained between the Kurds and the Armenians. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the power of the state waned, Kurdish tribal chiefs “had matters all their own way and the Armenians suffered accordingly.”
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 su
pport 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.