Conclusion: Managing Religious Diversity
The Kadizadeli, the rabbi who apostatised and then went looking for converts in the synagogues of Istanbul, and the monks who prepared young men for death were exceptions within the religious leadership of the various communities - Muslim, Jewish and Christian -in the Ottoman Empire.
They were exceptions within Ottoman society more generally as well because, from the pinnacles of state power to the elders of individual villages, there was a widely shared interest in upholding the political and social order. Religious fanatics of any stripe were a threat to this commitment. Rabbi Tzevi was opposed by the Jewish leadership in Istanbul and elsewhere. He had been banished by the Jewish authorities more than once prior to his arrival in the capital. It was some members of the Jewish leadership that alerted the Ottomans to the fact that he had arrived in the city. Similarly, the Ecumenical Patriarchate was opposed to the practice of martyring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman authorities themselves had no interest in promoting religious unrest or zealots, and tried to talk them out of their suicidal missions. Members of elite Muslim society in Istanbul had nothing but scorn for the Kadizadeli and their religious fervor. And in fact the Ottomans counted on the elites in all three religious communities to impose and maintain social order.This shared, and mostly successful, interest in maintaining the traditional equilibrium can tempt historians into drawing a profoundly conservative picture of Ottoman society, essentially hundreds of years of convivencia, or religious accommodation, which is the everyday counterpart to official Ottoman tolerance. However, the widespread desire for stability, of course, does not automatically translate into stability. War, for instance, regularly upended existing social arrangements.
Clashes with the Venetians and the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean resulted in massive enslavement on both sides, and the victims were not limited to the combatants. On the Ottoman side, unscrupulous actors seized the opportunity to enslave local Ottoman Christians, passing them off as captured enemy combatants.[142] Then there were the seasonal tensions as the Ottoman polity faced the annual cycle of competing religious festivals of the various communities. Although no comprehensive study has yet been done, we know that Easter, for example, was always a fraught time for relations between Christians and Jews.The convivencia model also pays insufficient attention to the local context. As was seen with the case of Angelis the goldsmith, socialising between Muslims and Christians in Istanbul could be dangerous. And throughout the Ottoman centuries both Christian and Muslim authorities objected to mixing of the communities. In a fetva (religious opinion) the great sixteenth-century jurist Ebusuud wrote that ‘[t]he religious communities should be separate' and that Muslims should not speak a language used by non-Muslims, lest the line between the two communities become blurred.[143] Converts to Islam were repeatedly enjoined to cut contact with their communities of origin and were criticised for continuing to celebrate Easter and to dance and drink wine with Christians. On the Christian side, the church tried to prevent Christians from using the empire's Islamic courts and the narratives in the martyrologies warned against the dangers of contact with Muslims. However, a recent study of religious life in the towns and villages of Syria and Palestine shows widespread sharing of sacred space, seemingly without controversy.[144] In Homs the former Church of St Helen was converted into a mosque early in the sixteenth century, but Christians were allowed to continue to pray there. Muslims routinely worshipped at the Church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem, and even used it as temporary lodging.
The French traveller Thevenot recorded his annoyance at the practice; he had assumed that the church would be an entirely Christian space.Comparing the Middle East - where Christians and Jews had lived as religious minorities under Muslim rule for centuries - to the Balkans and Anatolia suggests that religious tension and even violence was more likely in unstable situations. Muslim communities comprised of recent converts, for example, had a very different relationship to their Christian neighbours than did those where identities and communal boundaries were long established. Finally, there was probably a spatial component to coexistence. Conversion and religious mixing in the countryside elicited less attention than similar practices in the cities of the empire.
In the Ottoman Empire people defined themselves as members of a religious community. Thus social conflict was always expressed in religious terms. A very violent event in 1770 brings together these themes, of episodic religious violence, the unsettling nature of war and the relationship between social change and conflict between groups that defined themselves in religious terms. In 1770 the residents of Izmir watched the Russian destruction of the Ottoman navy right in front of their eyes. The attack came in the course of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, which introduced new, and unwelcome, changes to the empire's internal and external situation. Among them, the appearance of the Russian fleet in the eastern Mediterranean heralded the return of large-scale naval warfare to the inland sea for the first time in two centuries. At the same time, in southern Greece some armed Christian groups rose up in support of the Russians.
The French consul Peyssonnel in Izmir described the scene in vivid terms and is worth quoting at some length:
The news of the total destruction of the Ottoman navy reached Smyrna on Sunday July 8, 1770, at 4 o'clock in the morning. We had already expected it... because we could clearly hear the bombardment as warships were blown up into the air.
The reality of such an unprecedented event, which people found hard to believe, shattered the Muslim population of the city and caused great despair.[145]Peyssonnel then relates how these Muslims, encouraged by one Ibrahim Agha, who was a customs official at the port, proceeded to slaughter 1,500 Christians who worked at the port, most of them Greek.
In addition to the obvious catalyst of war, it is important to note that the protagonists and the events themselves were all connected to the port. Christian neighbourhoods and their churches were left alone. In this rapidly growing city - an insignificant town in the early seventeenth century, it had become one of the premier ports of the Mediterranean by the time of the Russian attack - the port was at the very epicentre of social and economic change. Ottoman Christians were very prominent in the city's trade with its European partners, and the unusual strength of the Christians, both local and European, in Izmir had earned it the name ‘gavur Izmir' or ‘infidel Izmir'. Communal leaders of all religious persuasions lacked the control over these new commercial spaces that they enjoyed in the older neighbourhoods.
At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned the question of periodisation and the fact that blanket declarations of a tolerant (or intolerant) empire are insufficient, considering how many centuries the Ottomans lasted. Among Ottoman historians there is a growing consensus that something changed for the worse in the eighteenth century. Within this paradigm, the events at Izmir in 1770 are seen as a microcosm of the changes occurring in the empire as trade with Europe increased. It established the pattern for the future. As Ottoman Christians prospered, the empire's Muslims became increasingly resentful. The state increasingly viewed its Christian subjects as disloyal.[146] All of this set the stage for a new type of violence of which the killings in Izmir were a portent.
But once again this broad claim needs to be placed in local context. In those areas untouched by global trade, such as the rural areas of the Balkans, conversion to Islam continued, as did mixed marriages between (recently converted) Muslim men and Christian women. Such practices make it difficult to argue that, empire-wide, Muslims and Christians were increasingly heading towards confrontation. In the Middle East the same comfortable religious practices discussed above continued uninterrupted. And even in the Morea (southern Greece), the location of the 1770 uprising in support of the Russians and thus a prime site for nascent Greek nationalism, a recent study has shown what a mistake it is to see a community divided along religious lines. Certainly not all Greeks participated in the uprising and some actually assisted both the Ottoman officers trying to put it down and their Muslim neighbours. The accounts of different Ottoman officials show that they held contradictory views of certain key actors and had a difficult time discerning where their loyalties lay, which also suggests a more complicated picture than conventional patriotic interpretations. When Russian-backed rebels attacked the town of Gastun on the west coast, for example, Ottoman officials and Christian peasants attempted to flee together but were stopped by a local (Muslim) official who demanded cash before he would let them leave. Everyone was shocked by this. Personal interests and local rivalries seem to have been just as important as religious identity in explaining behaviour during the uprising.[147]
The management of religious diversity in the Ottoman Empire, then, was not uniform across either space or time. Intercommunal tension was on a spectrum that ranged from the exceptional violence in Izmir caused by changes brought in from outside to the everyday enmities and squabbles that divide any community. In some parts of the empire religious difference was a fact of life, including mixed marriages and different religious identities within one family, while other areas were far more homogeneous. In the eighteenth century the mechanisms for social peace still held, by and large. But it is certain that rapid economic change amplified traditional antagonisms. In the Ottoman Empire antagonism and anxiety about change was expressed in religious terms. Izmir was one such site of change. In the nineteenth century, as economic change accelerated and created social upheaval, the number of such sites spread out across the empire.