Athens opposes 'Arabisation' of Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem

And to think how very accommodating the Greek Orthodox hierarchy in Jerusalem has been, until now, to its would-be masters, the "Palestinian" Arabs. But make a single move that displeases those Muslim masters, and hark what fury follows.

This is odd. From what I know, the Greeks are some of the biggest anti-Semites in the Christian world.

Cato: Yes the Greeks are antisemites, I met a Greek on another forum, despite the fact that the Greeks have suffered under Islamic (Turkish) tyranny, massacres and lived as rayyah (dhimmi's) for some strange reason they believe that the Jews have and always had it in their agenda to destroy the Greeks. His Islamophobia is sublimated by his antisemitism, as are other Greeks I've met on the internet (and strangely I am discovering that the American Indians are also virulent anti Semitic as well). As if blaming the Jews for the woes, enables them to rationalize the failures and woes of their own culture.

Reading Bat Ye'ors Islam and Dhimmitude, and having other knowledge of the Ottoman Empire, I know that under the Ottoman's, the Jews were in fact able to secure a special "dhimmi" status, at the expense of the Christians, they were for instance excluded from devirshme (the blood levy where a portion of the young boys were taken for service as yani shari's (Janissaries) and slaves, and they were able to serve in the Sultan's court and retain their religion.

Also in 1492 the Sultan welcomed the Jews, as exiles from Spain, and many of them migrated to Turkish territories, especially in the Balkans and Hungary.

This memory still resonates in the Greeks, Serbs and Croats (BTW).

But on topic, in as much as I watch Mosaic on link TV (News from 15 mid east countries including Israel), I saw this item today. Apparently the Dhimmi churches in Palestine have joined with the Muslims in protesting the sale.

The phenomenon (an abortion and assault to the senses) of dhimmi churches in Palestine and Iraq and Syria cannot be understood unless one bothers to read Bat Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude.

What was a survival tactic for Churches (Catholic and Eastern rites) has become over time epitomized by the stockholm syndrome, where the dhimmi identifies with the oppressor, much like Michel Aflaq (once a Christian Arab) did when he joined with a Muslim Arab to create the Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party (Aflaq subsequently converted to Islam).

"the Jews were in fact able to secure a special "dhimmi" status, at the expense of the Christians, they were for instance excluded from devirshme" -- from a posting above.

Jews were not exempt, always and everywhere, from the devshirme. I will try to find the reference which discusses this. Forming a much smaller part of the population, of course the numbers that could be levied from the Jews was also far smaller. But they were, at lest initially, subject to the devshirme as well.

The lack of religious freedom is a great stain for these times, there was a history with problems, but now, it´s very sad. Dhirmitude was the most terrible dicatorship of our times.

Of particular interest 9andoffense0 to me is the fact that the predominantly Muslim government seems to believe it has the right to dictate the structure of church government for Christians in the region? What next -- declare that Arab Catholics are independent of the Vatican and force them into the new Arab church?

If Palestinians are interested in affiliating with a non-greek Orthodox communion, there is already teh Syrian Orthodox Church under the Patriarch of Antioch.

In an article by Andrew Bostom, posted at www.secularislam.org, he quotes from an article by Joseph Hacker, "Ottoman Policy Toward the Jews and Jewish Attitudes toward the Ottomans during the Fifteenth Century", published in "Christians and Jews in the Ottoman empire," edited by Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis.

Bostom points out that Hacker debunks the view that the "..Jewish experience" in the Ottoman Empire" was from the beginning "a calm, peaceful, and fruitful one..".

Hacker notes:

"...It would seem to me that this accepted view of consistently good relations between the Ottomans and the Jews during the 15th century should be modified in light of new research and manuscript resources." (p. 117)

"The Jews, like other inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire, suffered heavily from the Ottoman conquests and policy of colonization and population transfer (i.e., the surgun system). This explains the disappearance of several Jewish communities, including Salonica, and their founding anew by Spanish Jewish immigrants."

And more specifically, Hacker continues:

"...We possess letters written about the fate of Jews who underwent one or another of the Ottoman conquests. In one of the letters which was written before 1470, there is a description of the fate of such a Jew and his community, according to which description, written in Rhodes and sent to Crete, the fate of the Jews was not different from that of Christians. Many
were killed; others were taken captive, and children were brought to devshirme (i.e., the Ottoman system of expropriating, and forcibly
Islamizing dhimmi male children for service to the Empire, primarily as slave soldiers)...Some letters describe the carrying of the captive Jews to Istanbul and are filled with anti-Ottoman sentiments. Moreover, we have a
description of the fate of a Jewish doctor and homilist from Veroia (Kara-Ferya) who fled to Negroponte when his community was driven into exile in 1455. He furnished us with a description of the exiles and their forced
passage to Istanbul. Later on we find him at Istanbul itself, and in a homily delivered there in 1468 he expressed his anti-Ottoman feelings
openly. We also have some evidence that the Jews of Constantinople suffered from the conquest of the city and that several were sold into slavery."(p. 120)

It is surely of note that those Jews who were settled in Salonika "replaced" a prior settlement of Jews that had been previously been uprooted.

Of course the situation varied according to the sultan. Mehmet Fatih, Mehmet the Conqueror, had policies that benefitted Jews, including protection from the mob. Was this because of Islam, or despite Islam? In any case, Bayezid II ("Bajazeth" in Elizabethan drama)was far less friendly, indeed imposed restrictions, on Jewish practices.

The entire piece can be found at www.secularislam.org, under "Bostom."

This is interesting. I have been reading old books (like travelogues and pilgrimages etc) from before '48 about what is now the modern state of Israel.

I just recently came to the conclusion that a large percentage, perhaps even a majority of the people who lived there before modern Zionism attracted large numbers of Arabs, didn't even identify as Arab.

One of the most prominent groups of people in "Palestine" in the 19th century were "Greeks." At first, I wasn't sure if this designation was religious or ethnic. Perhaps they were just Arabs who had found their way to the Greek Orthodox church. But as I read more and more I came to realize they were ethnically Greek. They often described themselves as immigrants, or descendants of immigrants from Greece, escaping the Muslim persecution there. I guess it was worse than in "Palestine," if that's possible. One writer even said something on the order of that "not a few of the women in Beit Jala [almost entirely Greek Orthodox] have blue eyes."

There were multitudes of other ethnicities there as well. I realized that with the British and the Effendies in cahoots, they basically lumped all of these people together as "Arabs," without asking them obviously, to oppose them to the Jews. "There are 600,000 of us, and only 100,000 of you." That kind of thing.

The total population of Jerusalem in 1850 was 15,000. A majority of the population was non-Muslim; a plurality consisted of Jews. Every single traveller, Volney or Lamartine or Chateaubriand, Mark Twain or Melville, comments on the near desolation of the Holy Land, which in total had, in 1850, at the very most 100,000 people. The Christian population consisted of Armenians, Greeks, Russians, Ethiopians (the Coptic Church), French and Italians (mainly Franciscans), Germans, even Americans who settled there. At mid-century, the Holy Land became part not only of the Grand Tour of celebrities and swells, but of American and British ministers. It was promoted, as a travel destination, by the then famous-writer Bayard Taylor.

If the Christians were from every part of Europe and America, the so-called "Arabs" were also not native. For that part of the Ottoman Empire had, because of its very emptiness, but as, in the 19th century, more Christians (and then Jews) arrived, it had some attractions. Among the "outside" Muslims who arrived were former soldiers of Abd el-Kader, after his Jihad against the French in the 1830s failed; troops who had come to that area (the Holy Land) with Mehmet Ali, and stayed upon his retreat back to Egypt (and these troops were not Arabs but Turks); Muslims from Bulgaria and other parts of the Ottoman domains in Europe who, as the Ottoman power receded, were transplanted wholesale by the Ottoman Porte into this most desolate area.

The more one studies this subject, the more one realizes that not only are transparently phony "Palestinian" people without any basis (invented post-1967 to give the relentless Jihad against Israel a nice, "two-tiny-peoples" sheen for the gullible West -- oh, and the gullible Israelis too, who often fail to study their own history and many of whom seem eager to accept the most ridiculous tales of their enemies because otherwise they would have to face up tot the unpleasant fact of permanent Jihad which for many, is too upsetting to consider), but that the area had been steadily emptied out of its population, and that only the Christian and Jewish interest in turn made the area of interest to non-Arab and then Arab Muslims who did not "return" but settled in another area that they regarded as part of dar al-Islam.

It is a pity that the Israelis never made their case very well. Had they done so, and had they pointed to Islam as what prompts the Jihad against them, they might have helped keep some in Europe wary enough to prevent large-scale Muslim migration. But who can blame them? They have to wake up each morning and confront new threats, new disasters, new outrages, new diplomatic "initiatives" -- as the example of Sharon shows, this drives many into a semi-trance, where all they can fixate on is the word, deprived of real meaning, of "peace."

Europeans deceived themselves about the nature of the Arab and Muslim opposition to Israel, and in so doing, they also let down their own guard and let in millions who, it is now clear, by overbreeding may in the end inevitably islamize all of Europe -- unless European attitudes change, and they are willing to behave as the advanced and tolerant Czechs did, in 1946, with the Sudeten Germans. It will come to that.

Hugh,

you wrote:
Muslims from Bulgaria and other parts of the Ottoman domains in Europe who, as the Ottoman power receded, were transplanted wholesale by the Ottoman Porte into this most desolate area.

Just a couple of days ago, I read regarding a train ride from Damascus to Haifa from "The Land that is desolate," by Sir Frederick Treves, published in 1912 p. 277

"The stoker, who was a Turk...The enginedriver, a Bulgarian..."

The Bulgarian, who was a Muslim, probably lived in or around Haifa. This was the first time I had come upon a Bulgarian mentioned in my readings, so I wasn't sure if the Bulgarians had come to the Holy Land as a group or only as individuals. Thanks for the info.

I'm trying to compile information like this for a future web site.

Hugh, much as I agree that the "Palestinian" nationality is about as "imagined" a community as you can get (I still remember the Six-Day War on TV and in the news), don't think that the Christian population of that strip of land is necessarily immigrant. The Eastern Orthodox Church in Arabic-speaking lands has a long and deep root in the indigenous population; while in 'Eretz Yisroel,it was ethnically Greek only in its hierarchy and a portion of its laity. The bulk--including those going back and forth from various places in the Middle East--descend from People who spoke Arabic for centuries and, before the Islamic conquest, Aramaic.

Finding Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims)in 19th century 'Eretz Yisroel should surprise no-one. As the Ottoman Empire retreated from Europe, a lot of Muslim refugees went with it, including ethnic Albanians, Turks, Hellenophones (especially from Thessaly and Crete), Bosniaks, and members of the various Caucasus tribes like Chechens and Circassians. The last speakers of Ubykh, a Caucasian language, lived in Turkey near the Sea of Marmora, where their refugee ancestors were resettled. Not a few of these Muslim refugees were settled in 'Eretz Yisroel. I have also met Muslim "Falastin Arabs" who descend from Bosniak and Greek Muslims--although Arabic-speaking today (while Jews descended from folks resettled in Safad and Jerusalem in 1492, four hundred years before the Bosniaks and Cretans arrived, are "settlers"; while the relative latecomers are "indigenous"). Further, a lot of refugees from French conquests in northern Africa also ended up in 'Eretz Yisroel during Ottoman times.

BTW, strangely enough, the Circassian Muslims in Israel serve in the Israeli army.