Orthodox Christians and the Ottoman Authority in Late-Seventeenth-Century Crete”.. The Eastern Mediterranean Under Ottoman Rule: Crete, 1645–1840 (ed.) A. Anastasopoulos, Rethymno: Crete University Press,, 2008, 177-201 (original) (raw)
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The 18 th century Jerusalemite society, and rather precisely the Christian population, is a fundamental historical factor that is worth the scholars' attention. As Ottoman studies focus on certain historical elements more than others, details of the day-today practices, social and economic transactions, and the general conditions of the Christian population continue to be unperformed. In addition, the influence of the Christian holy sites remains obscure. A situation that puts the researchers before a tacit feature of the Ottoman social history, that, if examined within the sphere of the archival sources and chronicles, would help to widen our perspective of the transformation process of the Christian communities and their holy sites, all within a period that once was believed to be a period of decline and decay. Hereafter, examining the primary sources, it is significant to survey for detailed information about these communities, then search for the possibility of viewing them in a revisionist consciousness of the early 18 th century, while focusing on a critical period that encompassed its first years of the century, prior the eruption of the revolt of the Naqibu Al-ashrāf. And further investigating the potential role of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as a significant religious site that might have attained influence in the social and economic transformation of the Christian communities. Along which, questioning the applicability of the classical paradigms of "autonomy", segregation, and "Millet System" in the case of the 18 th century Jerusalem. Proposals and arguments that this study attempts to tackle and dwell on, hoping to serve a new perspective in the social study stance of the socioeconomic history of Ottoman Jerusalem.
Christians and Muslims in Early Ottoman Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki was the biggest city conquered by the Ottomans before Istanbul. Furthermore, it was conquered by force. Thus, this city is a good example for researchers to understand how the Ottoman state transformed a Byzantine metropolis into an Ottoman one, starting from a zero point -in terms of the population -in 1430. This paper, based on a meticulous analysis of the three extant Ottoman tax registers of the first Ottoman century and a variety of other sources, tries to discern the urban and demographic development until ca. 1530, when the Ottomanization process had been accomplished and Thessaloniki became an Ottoman metropolis, having, together with Edirne, the highest population in the Balkans.
Public Reconvertions to Orthodox Christianity in the Ottoman Empire, 1730-1820
Mihai-Dumitru Grigore (ed.), Orthodoxy on the Move: Mobility, Networks, and Belonging between the 16th and 20th Centuries, Cluj-Napoca: Babeș-Bolyai University Press [Studia Universitatis Babes Bolyai - Theologia Orthodoxa 68:1], 2023
The christianization of Muslims turned upside down the one-way logic of religious conversion under Ottoman rule, which dictated that a non-Muslim (Christian or Jew) could become a Muslim, but a Muslim could not abandon their faith. The conversion of Muslims to Orthodox Christianity constituted thus an act of defiance of Ottoman political order, and the converts were exposed to the charge of apostasy that could cost them their lives. Given the above, it is not surprising that abandoning Islam for Christianity was a marginal phenomenon; it occurred either outside Ottoman territory or after losing an Ottoman region to a Christian state. However, the period between 1730 and 1820 saw the emergence of a particular form of Christianization that was a double conversion; namely, the public renouncement of the Muslim faith by Christian converts to Islam who proclaimed their return to Christianity wishing to wash out the sin of apostasy with an atoning death. Several of them were executed and were hailed by Greek-Orthodox subjects of the sultan as martyrs for the faith. In this study I analyze the dynamics of double conversion from three points of view: that of the makers, that is, of those who promoted reconversion to Christianity at the price of death, provided it with a theoretical framing, and formed networks of training and support for the double converts; that of the actors, namely, of the double converts themselves, of their social backgrounds, and of the reasons behind their fatal decisions; and that of the public, of the various social groups and individuals who witnessed this liminal form of conversion, assessed it and responded to it. The interpretation endeavours to shed light on a radical aspect of Greek-Orthodox confessionalization at a time of intense sociocultural conflict and political upheaval, and to highlight the complexity of responses to, and instantiations of, modernity.
Jewish History, 2024
This article discusses the relations between Jews and Christians in Edirne during the late Ottoman period. At the time, approximately half the city’s inhabitants were Greeks, and at least ten percent were Jews. The Jewish quarter of the city was surrounded by areas with a Greek majority, while a few Armenians also lived alongside the Greeks and Jews. Drawing on diverse sources from the Ladino, Hebrew, French, English, and Greek press, I argue that an ambivalent coexistence prevailed between Jews and Christians in Edirne, where hostility and enmity acted as catalysts for, rather than obstacles to, transculturation. Analysis of two case studies illustrate this ambivalent coexistence. The first concerns the reflection of the blood libel waged by Greeks in Istanbul in 1874 in Jewish and Armenian discourse in Edirne. The second is the discourse on the historical symbiosis between Jews and Greeks embodied in lectures by the maskil Abraham Danon in 1892 to a Greek audience in the city. Both issues sparked considerable interest among Jews and Christians, not only within the Ottoman Empire but also throughout the global Jewish and Greek diasporas.