Was Religion Important in the Destruction of Ancient Communities in the Balkans, Anatolia and Black Sea Regions, c. 1870–1923?

Abstract

Before 1923, the Balkans, Anatolia and the Black Sea regions had been home to a large number of religious groups, who had preserved ancient practices, languages and beliefs for centuries. Muslims were driven towards Anatolia with the expansion of the Russian Empire and the emergence of new states in the Balkans. This process often involved considerable violence that often had a quasi‐religious element to it. Similarly, the position of Jews in Imperial Russia deteriorated rapidly during the reign of the last two Romanov Tsars, with waves of pogroms that hit Odessa very badly. By the Civil War, whole Jewish communities were threatened. Ottoman Christians were simply killed or expelled in a long wave of violence between 1913 and 1923. Many contemporaries regarded the destruction of these communities as a predominantly religious phenomenon, but the crisis created by the increasing globalization of world trade (which was greater before 1914 than in the interwar decade) and attempts to create autarchic states should not be overlooked.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Rajko Muršič, Božidar Jezernik, Richard Maguire, Jim Casey, Andy Wood, Daniele Conversi, James Gow, Bojan Baskar, Djordje Stefanović and Ben Lieberman for their comments on this work.

Notes

[1] Henry Abramson (1999: 110), in his monograph A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920, gives a lower number of 50,0000–60,000 from Nakhum Gergel, though he adds that this estimate could be doubled or tripled. This lower estimate still represents approximately 4 per cent of the total Jewish population.

[2] On the recurrence of violence against Muslims in Bosnia and the symbolic elements within Serbian nationalist discourses, see Sells (1998).

[3] In the later nineteenth century, traditional superstitions between communities are radicalized by racial theories that delegitimize the presence of certain groups by origins or racial ‘attributes’. In the Russian case, antisemitism as a discourse was augmented by racial theories; in the case of anti‐Armenian sentiments, by pan‐Turanism and by a kind of Orientalism against Muslims in the Balkans.

[4] A case for drawing parallels between the situation of Muslims with other religious groups in Europe in this period has been made by Justin McCarthy (1996) in his monograph, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922.

[5] It is likely that Talât was referring to Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1888), which does contain extensive passages on the methods of torture used and their outcomes. This well‐known book was available in translation, including a French version from 1902 and a German edition that appeared in 1908. Tales from the Spanish Inquisition were clearly an important element in European mythmaking and literature about the past by this time.

[6] Jews were thrown into the Dneister in 1941 with constant taunts about wanting to see the miracle of the Red Sea re‐enacted (Levene 2002: 450).

[7] It has been argued that violence against animals can develop into violence against man. For a discussion of this view, see Passmore (1975: 201).