Islam and Antisemitism

From the Religious Perspective and the History of Muslims rescuing Jews under Persecution

by Dr. Zahid Aziz

Part II: Muslims help Jews under Persecution (Jewish Testimonies)

Chapter 8. Ottoman Turkey gives Shelter to Jews of Spain

The Jews of Spain:

The period of Jewish history under Muslim rule of Spain for 700 years, from the 8th to the 15th century C.E., is widely known as the Golden Age of Jewish history. The Jewish Heritage Alliance describes it as follows:

“The golden age of Jewish culture in Spain coincided with the Middle Ages in Europe, a period when Muslims ruled much of the Iberian Peninsula. In the 8th century, the Berber Muslims (Moors) swiftly conquered nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula. … Jews rose to great prominence in society, business, and government. The Jews flourished in business, fields of astronomy, philosophy, math, science, medicine, and religious study.”1

Jocelyn Hellig, who had been an academic in religious studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and is the author of a book, The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History, wrote in a paper in 1982:

“… the Jews in Spain experienced relative freedom and toleration under Muslim rule. Many Jews became wealthy and influential. Several gained high positions in the administrative field, while others reached great heights in scientific, medical, literary, linguistic and philosophic achievement. The Jewish golden age was given its impetus and opportunity by the brilliance of Muslim culture of the time. Under the caliphate of Abd ar-Rahman III (891–961) no branch of learning was left unadorned. No art or craft was neglected. Cordoba became an important cultural capital of the Muslim world… No people was more ready to absorb and transmit this culture than the Jews.”2

Expulsion of Jews from Spain:

As Spain began to be re-conquered by the Christians from Muslim rule, the Christian rulers began a campaign of severe persecution of Jews and Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Catholicism to save themselves. According to the Jewish Heritage Alliance:

“The forced conversion of a quarter-million Jews in Spain was, in spiritual terms, a Holocaust never equaled in the long exile of the Jewish people.”3

Those who remained Jews were expelled from Spain by law. As soon as the last Muslim kingdom, that in Granada, was defeated by the Catholic monarchs of Spain in January 1492, they issued what is known as the Alhambra Decree in March of that year, expelling all Jews from Spain. An article on the website of the Museum of Jewish Heritage gives the following details:

“In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of all Jews from their kingdoms. In a matter of months, Spanish Jews were forced to renounce their faith or leave their thousand-year homeland behind. … Spanish Jews, who numbered around 300,000, were required to emigrate or convert to Catholicism by the end of July the same year, giving them a period of four months to liquidate all of their property, vacate their homes and businesses, and venture abroad. … Within the year, 175,000 Jews left Spain, while those who stayed were forced to renounce their faith. The Jewish presence in Spain was virtually extinguished for the next several hundred years.”4

This was the same time as the King and Queen of Spain sent Christopher Columbus on his famous journey in discovery of America. The Jewish Virtual Library, in its article The Spanish Expulsion (1492), quotes Columbus from his diary:

“In the same month in which their Majesties [Ferdinand and Isabella] issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies.”5

The same article goes on to report:

“Tens of thousands of refugees died while trying to reach safety. In some instances, Spanish ship captains charged Jewish passengers exorbitant sums, then dumped them overboard in the middle of the ocean. In the last days before the expulsion, rumors spread throughout Spain that the fleeing refugees had swallowed gold and diamonds, and many Jews were knifed to death by brigands hoping to find treasures in their stomachs. …

“… when the Spanish Army defeated Muslim forces in Granada, thereby restoring the whole of Spain to Christian rule … the king and queen concluded that the Jews were expendable. On March 30, they issued the expulsion decree, the order to take effect in precisely four months. The short time span was a great boon to the rest of Spain, as the Jews were forced to liquidate their homes and businesses at absurdly low prices.”

It concludes:

“Of the dozens of expulsions directed against Jews throughout their history, the one from Spain remains the most infamous.”

It was only in December 1968 that the

“Alhambra Decree was officially overturned at the Second Vatican Council”.

We may note that this was after more than two-thirds of the 20th century had passed and a few months before humans landed on the moon.

In another article at the Jewish Virtual Library, Turkish Jewish History Tour, this event is reported as follows:

“At midnight on August 2, 1492, when Columbus embarked on what would become his most famous expedition to the New World, his fleet departed from the relatively unknown seaport of Palos because the shipping lanes of Cadiz and Seville were clogged with Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by the Edict of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. The Jews were forced either to convert to Christianity or to ‘leave’ the country under menace ‘they dare not return… not so much as to take a step on them’. … They left their land, their property, their belongings all that was theirs and familiar to them rather than abandon their beliefs, their traditions, their heritage.”6

Escaping Jews find Refuge in Turkey:

The first article quoted above, The Spanish Expulsion (1492), goes on to record:

“The most fortunate of the expelled Jews succeeded in escaping to Turkey. Sultan Bajazet welcomed them warmly. ‘How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king,’ he was fond of asking, ‘the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?’ Among the most unfortunate refugees were those who fled to neighboring Portugal.”7

In other words, to escape the persecution imposed on them in a Christian-ruled country, it was far preferable for the Jews to seek shelter in a distant Muslim land than in the Christian country next door.

According to Jane S. Gerber, in her book The Jews of Spain:

“He [Sultan Bayazid II] not only welcomed Sephardic exiles but ordered his provincial government to assist the wanderers by opening the borders. Indeed, the refugees would find the Ottoman state to be powerful, generous, and tolerant.”8

The second article cited above, Turkish Jewish History Tour,9 continues as follows:

“In the faraway Ottoman Empire, one ruler — Sultan Bayazid II — extended an immediate welcome to the persecuted Jews of Spain, the Sephardim.”

Even before the time of this Sultan, who lived from 1447–1512, Jews had found shelter in the Ottoman empire. This article gives the following details about it:

“[After their pre-Islamic establishment] Jewish communities in Anatolia flourished and continued to prosper through the Turkish conquest. When the Ottomans captured Bursa in 1324 and made it their capital, they found a Jewish community oppressed under Byzantine rule. The Jews welcomed the Ottomans as saviors. Sultan Orhan permitted them to build the Etz ha-Hayyim (Tree of Life) synagogue, which remained in service until 50 years ago.

“Early in the 14th century, when the Ottomans had established their capital at Edirne, Jews from Europe, including Karaites, migrated there. Similarly, Jews expelled from Hungary in 1376, from France by Charles VI in September 1394, and from Sicily early in the 15th century found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. In the 1420s, Jews from Salonika, then under Venetian control, fled to Edirne.

“When Mehmet II, ‘the Conqueror,’ took Constantinople in 1453, he encountered an oppressed Romaniot (Byzantine) Jewish community which welcomed him with enthusiasm. Sultan Mehmet II proclaimed to all Jews ‘… to ascend the site of the Imperial Throne, to dwell in the best of the land, each beneath his Dine and his fig tree, with silver and with gold, with wealth and with cattle…’

“In 1470, Jews expelled from Bavaria by Ludwig X found refuge in the Ottoman Empire.”

As to the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, the article continues under the subheading A Haven for Sephardic Jews as follows:

“Sultan Bayezid II’s offer of refuge gave new hope to the persecuted Sephardim [i.e. Spanish Jews]. In 1492, the Sultan ordered the governors of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire ‘not to refuse the Jews entry or cause them difficulties, but to receive them cordially.’ According to Bernard Lewis, ‘the Jews were not just permitted to settle in the Ottoman lands, but were encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled.’10

Speaking of later times, the article adds:

“Over the centuries, many European Jews, escaping persecution in their native countries, settled in the Ottoman Empire. In 1537, the Jews were expelled from Apulia (Italy) after the city fell under Papal control; in 1542, those expelled from Bohemia by King Ferdinand found a haven in the Ottoman Empire. In March of 1556, Sultan Suleyman ‘the Magnificent’ wrote a letter to Pope Paul IV asking for the immediate release of the Ancona Marranos, which he declared Ottoman citizens. The pope had no other alternative than to release them, the Ottoman Empire being the ‘Superpower’ of those days. …

“For 300 years following the expulsion, the prosperity and creativity of the Ottoman Jews rivaled that of the Golden Age of Spain. Istanbul, Izmir, Safed, and Salonica became the centers of Sephardic Jewry.”

It cites examples showing that

“Most of the court physicians were Jews”,

“Jews often carried out Ottoman diplomacy”

and

“In the free air of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish literature flourished”.

Jane S. Gerber in her book The Jews of Spain, cited above, notes that Jewish historians of those times wrote that the Ottoman policies of granting shelter in their kingdom to persecuted Jews from elsewhere were a part of God’s plan. Referring to the Jewish historian and Rabbi Elijah Capsali, she writes:

“Capsali, in particular, discerned special redemptive portents in this unprecedented Islamic largesse and compared the Turkish leaders to the ancient Persian Cyrus, who had invited the Jewish exiles in Babylon to return to the land of Israel. He confidently described the working of God’s will in the decisions made by Islamic rulers.”

She then quotes Capsali as writing in his book Seder Eliyahu Zutta that it was God Who

“aroused the spirit of the king, Sultan Mehmet, King of Turkey”

to proclaim through his kingdom that God had commanded him

“to give them [i.e., the Jews] sustenance in the land and to provide a safe haven to them”,

and that therefore they should come and

“settle in the land and trade and become part of it.”11

“Blood libel” banned by the Ottoman Sultan:

In 1840 an event took place under Ottoman rule known as the Damascus Affair. Some Jews in the city were charged with killing a Christian monk, Father Thomas, and his servant. A story spread that Jews had committed this murder to obtain blood for use in their religious rituals. Allegations of this kind used to be made against Jews in the Christian world, and are known as the “blood libel”. After protests by Jews in the West, the Ottoman sultan, Abdulmecid I, issued an edict (or ferman), banning the blood libel throughout his empire as a slander against the Jews. According to the website of the Centre for Israel Education (CIE), it was declared in this edict:

“We cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth.”12

Footnotes:

  1. See the link: https://jewishheritagealliance.com/story-saga-sefarad/ ↩︎
  2. Jocelyn Hellig, The Jewish Golden Age of Spain Revisited, in Religion in Southern Africa, Vol. 3, No. 2 (July 1982), p. 23. ↩︎
  3. See the link: https://jewishheritagealliance.com/history/ ↩︎
  4. See the link: https://mjhnyc.org/blog/1492-letter-regarding-jewish-property-in-spain/ ↩︎
  5. See the link: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-spanish-expulsion-1492 ↩︎
  6. See the link: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/turkey-virtual-jewish-history-tour ↩︎
  7. See ref. in Note 5 above. ↩︎
  8. Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain, A History of the Sepharadic Experience, published 1992, p. 151. ↩︎
  9. See ref. in Note 6 above. ↩︎
  10. In this and in the preceding quotation from the Turkish Jewish History Tour article (see Note 6 above), the italics are as in the original article. The article also gives references to the sources from which it has taken the information in these quotations. ↩︎
  11. See ref. in Note 8 above, p. 151. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1906, Elijah ben Elkanah Capsali (d. circa 1555 C.E.) was a Turkish Talmudist and historian, whose book Seder Eliyahu Zutta, “a history of the Turkish empire from the earliest times down to the year 1522, is an important contribution to general history, as well as to the history of the Jews.” He was “not only an excellent stylist … but was also a reliable historian.” See https://jewishencyclopedia.com/ under Capsali. ↩︎
  12. See: https://israeled.org/9-jews-freed-after-damascus-blood-libel/ ↩︎

Top