Millets and Madness

Today I read, once again, about the millets of the Ottoman Empire. "A millet was a religio-political community defined by its adherence to a religion. It's members were subject to the rules and even to the laws of that religion, administrered by its own chiefs, naturally, in so far as these did not conflict with the laws and interests of the state. In return for this measure of religious freedom and communal autonomy, non-Muslim millets owed allegiance to the state and accepted the limitations and disabilities of dhimmi status." (Lewis, pp. 321-2) Ottoman Turkey recognized four millets - Muslims, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews (in decreasing rank order). I'm especially interested in them today because their status THEN determines, in part, their relation to Turkey today. In particular, I'm struck by the differing experiences of the Greek and Armenian millets, especially in comparision with the Muslims and Jews.

The experience of the Muslim millet, I think, is summed up in the experience of the Ottoman empire. And the experience of the Jews within the Ottoman Empire is more properly analyzed in connection with the creation of the state of Israel. Both these issues are better addressed separately (and later). But the experience of the Greeks and the Armenians are interesting to me today because their experience is directly related to current, urgent issues - for one thing, to the Turkish request for admission to the EU, and for another, to the accusation of an Armenian massacre by the Turks. Dare I even approach these questions?

I fear I've already bitten off more than I can chew, at least in a mere hour or two. How to whittle this down? What is the immediate interest I had? It struck me, as I read my notecards, how much it mattered whether a millet was down or up in the social order. The fact that the Armenians were the advancing and, to some degree, already the well-off minority at the turn of the century meant that their rebellion was more onorous to the Ottoman's. Furthermore, the fury of the other minorities, such as that of the Circassians and the Kurds, was unleashed against them because they WERE a success. But I've already gotten ahead of myself.

The Greeks had the advantage of being a well-respected part of the Ottoman Empire, so much so that when the reform edict of February 1856 abolished the ranking of the minorities, the Greeks wanted no part of such an equality. It would mean they were equal with those down below! As Lewis says (p. 324), a symbiotic relationship had sprung up between the Greeks and the Ottomans. The Phanariots, a patrician family living in the Phanar district near the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, had monopolized many positions in service to the Sublime Porte, including that of the Grand Dragoman. Nominally just the interpreter, he was in effect in charge of foreign affairs for the Empire. This goes along with an earlier essay I wrote, on the decline of the sultan's power as it got transferred to the bureaucracts. Greek interpreters often accompanied Ottoman ambassadors abroad, and Phanariots held two governorships in the Danubian provinces. So - they had much to lose when they lost the confidence of the Ottomans, even as some of them gained the security of having their own homeland.

When Greek demands for independance were raised, and wars were fought for their nationalistic aims in the latter half of the 19th century, their status as trusted and powerful friends of the Ottomans was over. Furthermore, their disloyalty raised doubts about the reliability of ANY of the non-Muslim subjects. And, as they say, hell hath no fury like that against one once loved.

Oddly enough, the Jews in the Ottoman Empire had fared quite successfully, even before the Greeks rose to prominence. In the 16th century the Jews were the only community in the Empire possessing European knowledge and skills. Subsequent sultans increasingly relied on them, finding them useful in economic and political matters. Rarely were they suspected of sympathy with the European enemies of state (of which there were many!). But gradually they were supplanted (beginning when?) by the Christians of the Balkans, the Greeks and the Armenians, as the Europeans found favor with them, and turned their trade over to them. So the Jews became subject to the same fate as the Ottoman Empire, though their decline preceded that of the Empire itself. As Lewis writes (p. 325), they did not have the favor of the European merchants, nor the protection of the European governments, and they failed to experience an educational or intellectual revival, like the newly-wealthy Christian communities, until late in the 19th century.

The Armenians, on the other hand, appear to have been caught in the aftermath of the agony of Greek independence. The Armenians had the misfortune of having spread widely in the Ottoman Empire, in Iran, and in the Russian provinces. Nowhere did they form a majority. Furthermore, they differed from their near neighbors by religion and language, and did not have a cohesive community. In other words, they were successful at what we would today call integration. In the Ottoman Empire, they rose to the top for several decades. However, this came to haunt them, it appears, for when the Ottoman Empire unravelled, and the fury of the authorities and minorities was unleashed, it was the Armenians who paid the price. When the Sultan, hoping to impose order on his rebellious realm, ordered the Armenians deported from Anatolia, millons were massacred in the chaos of that deportation.

Is it fair to accuse the Turks today of the massacre motivated by this melange of events in an Empire long gone? And should the treatment of the Greeks be held against them too? Well, I guess I've barely scraped the surface, and perhaps raised more issues, and answered fewer questions, and with more inaccuracies that I could have possibly intended - but, at the least, this has allowed me to voice concerns and open avenues of inquiry that hopefully I may one day more properly pursue!