James Traub at Foreign Policy on why the Ottoman Empire was more tolerant of religious pluralism than the era of nationalism has been:
In his masterful new book, The Great Sea, historian David Abulafia recounts how a polyglot Mediterranean culture of Jews, Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Catholics arose in the coastal cities of Constantinople, Salonika, Tunis, Jaffa, and Alexandria. This last, in the 1920s, had 25,000 Jews in a population of about 500,000, as well as Greeks, Italians, Maltese, and others….
[U]ntil World War I. Ottoman rulers welcomed the Jews who fled the Inquisition. In great Ottoman capitals like Aleppo, in modern Syria, Jews, Christians, Kurds, and Sunni Muslims lived in the same neighborhoods. “Inter-communal residential mixing” was the norm across the Ottoman empire, according to Donald Quataert, a scholar of the Ottoman period. If it all unraveled in the 20th century, Quataert writes, it is not because of “inherent animosities of an alleged racial or ethnic nature.”
Quataert argues that the collapse of pluralism was not an inevitable consequence of seething inter-group resentment, but rather the work of nationalists who agitated for the creation of states, whether in Turkey, Bulgaria, or the Maghreb, and who then exploited and encouraged nationalist sentiment in order to consolidate power. Political choices, in other words, poisoned the atmosphere of pluralism — as they later would in the Balkans, the Ottoman heartland, as well.
I’ve been “propagandized” to believe that, until 1900, Jews and Christians and Muslims got along well in Palestine. Women from all three groups who wanted babies prayed at the same shrines (or trees! sounds a bit animist, doesn’t it?)
Fighting for political predominance along ethnic lines (think of poor Lebanon) has not been good for harmony. Yugoslavia, Iraq, once held together by “strong-men” coming wildly apart due to — what? religion? nationalism? A determination by some leaders to demonize the “others”?
Was it nationalism or imperialism? Nationalism didn’t reduce pluralism in India. A Middle East with no Israel and no oil could have developed very differently.
Hmm, I’m not convinced. Nationalism, or self-determination, is the most powerful force in the world.
I don’t agree that it was a ‘political choice’, it’s human nature. That doesn’t mean that multiculturalism is unbearable, but it tends to break down sooner or later.
Bill Clinton did a speech on this in the mid-nineties where he actually spoke of this fact; that multicultural empires always fall due to sectarian tension(whether it’s the Roman Empire, Persian Empire, Habsburg Empire, Ottoman Empire and so forth), and he warned that ‘America must be different if we are to survive’. It remains to be soon if America will be different, but history suggests otherwise.
Nontheless, the example of the Ottoman Empire is interesting because it shows that things can actually be quite harmonic.
Tolerance faded in the Ottoman Empire before WWI. There were massacres of Armenians earlier under Sultan Abdul Hamid and later the CUP prior to the 1915 genocide. By the 1890s ethnic conflict in eastern Anatolia between Armenians and Turks and Kurds was already an established fact. Earlier in the Balkans there had been considerable conflict between Muslims and Christians. It is true that there isn’t any persecution of Jews by the Ottoman Sultanate, but Jews were not the only minority in the empire. Even among trading middle men minorities they were far less important than Greeks and Armenians.
Nationalism was a direct response to colonialism. Leaving colonialism out of what this ‘analysis’ purports to be is deceptive and dishonest.
Utter nonsense. Pluralism was a threat to colonialism. It’s one of the reasons that Mandate France and Britain divided the Middle East into a dozen ‘states’. Divide and conquer.
Traub should be writing for Pam Geller, not Foreign Policy.