Enlightenment and Prophecy: The Jews and Neo-Hellenic Nationalism

ABSTRACT

Even before the rise of nationalism and its counterpart anti-Semitism sensu stricto, anti-Judaic prejudices and stereotypes were widespread in the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. These attitudes arose mainly from the commercial antagonism between the Christian and Jewish communities during the crisis that beset the empire from the seventeenth century onward. To examine these attitudes more closely, this article first focuses on the extreme anti-Judaic discourse in the sermons of eighteenth-century Father Cosmas Aitolos (Cosmas of Aetolia; d. 1779), an itinerant monk, who was canonized in 1961. It then turns to Rhigas Velestinlis’s enlightened vision of a tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic, which gradually replaced the Sultan’s oriental despotism, in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians were to be equal citizens. But this vision sank into oblivion, as the aspiration to national independence and to ethnical homogeneity prevailed in Greece, as well as everywhere in the Balkans. Although the early advocates of enlightened Greek nationalism embraced the language of citizenship and emancipation, they excluded from it the proviso of multi-ethnicity. Accordingly, they perceived the “Jewish Question” as one of gradually integrating a “foreign” religious minority into the Greek nation by “re-educating them in the values of Hellenism,” in the words of Adamandios Korais (1748–1833), and according them full citizenship only in the generations to come. All three distinctive attitudes towards the Jews are traceable in subsequent ideological trends and conflicts in Modern Greece.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• Jews
• Neo-Hellenic nationalism
• intolerance

Notes

1. Menounos, ed., Cosmas Aitolos: “Poison and double-edged sword to the Jews and the Devil” for the death of Jesus (23); “Jews [are the] offsprings of the Devil” (33); “the Jews are predestined to go to hell” (34). In almost all the stories and “miracles” Cosmas narrates, all evil persons (intriguers and unscrupulous counselors of Kings, wizards, ruffians) are Jewish (37–38). They are yet again named the “children of Satan” (46).

2. Ibid. “He has the devil in his heart and he does not leave him to laugh spontaneously. Now look at a Christian’s face, no matter if he is a sinner, his face is sparkling clean, thanks to the grace of the Holy Spirit” (55).

3. Ibid., 55–56.

4. Ibid. “Thus my brethren, whoever has done wrong to Christians or Jews or Turks, should make up for it and compensate them, because this unjust benefit is cursed and you would not thrive with this” (42).

5. These expressions appear in Neophytos Kausokalivites’s Debunking of the Religion and the Habits of the Jews, on the Basis of Both the Old and New Testament, printed in 1834. This text gave a written and “argumentative” form to the beliefs already ingrained in the minds of the people. That Neophytos was an ex-Jew who had converted to Christianity and become a monk was taken as further evidence of the received ideas. He was also a teacher of Father Cosmas in the Athonian Academy (Mount Athos), and the first director of the School.

6. See Chrysostomos, Against the Jews.

7. Efthimiou, Jews and Christians, 111.

8. Ibid., 111–12, 114.

9. Ibid., 120–21.

10. http://www.theottomans.org/english/glossary/index_9.asp. Until the sixteenth century the Ottomans used the Timariotic system for land management. Timar was a fief with an annual value of less than 20,000 akçes, whose revenues were held in return for military service. It was a non-hereditary form of land management. As the Empire began to collapse, powerful military officers started to claim lands for themselves and the right to bequeath them to their sons, thus creating the Chiflik.

11. Efthimiou, Jews and Christians, 122–13.

12. Giolias, Cosmas and His Era, 34, 37, 226–28.

13. Ibid., 130.

14. Gerber, “Jews and Money-Lending,” 100–118. See also Kobrin and Teller, eds., Purchasing Power.

15. Efthimiou, Jews and Christians, 126–27.

16. Eugenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) was a prominent bishop and educator and a leading figure in the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. He translated works of John Locke, Voltaire, Christian Wolff and Antonio Genovesi. After the failure of the Athonite Academy, he accepted Empress Catherine II’s invitation and became bishop of Kherson (Ukraine), working also as librarian at the court, and spent his last years in Alexander Nevsky’s monastery.

17. In Nation-Awakening or Nation-Genesis, Rotzokos criticizes the anachronistic understanding of premodern terms such as “nationalist” in the historical “nationalist narrative” (38–84). In State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities, Doxiadis describes the ideological developments of the period as “proto-nationalist” (23).

18. Giolias, Cosmas and His Era, 118.

19. Cosmas maintained that the Hellenic “genus” (something between race, phyli and nation) was bestowed by divine providence, which was why the Ottoman rule was seen as the expression of God’s will: “300 years after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord sent us saint Constantine who founded a Christian kingdom. And the Christians have maintained the kingdom for 1150 years. Then He took it away from the Christians and He brought the Turk and gave it to him, for our own good, and the Turk has been holding it for 320 years. And why did God bring the Turk and not another genus? For our own best interest, and because the other nations would do harm to our faith, while the Turk all he wants is piasters; give him piasters and you can do whatever you wish” (Menounos, Cosmas Aitolos, 36 [emphasis added]).

20. Jethopoulos, Orthodox Neomartyrs, 357. For the record, Father Cosmas was arrested and executed by the Ottomans, following a plot of those who saw his preaching as a threat to their commercial interests. He was canonized in 1961 by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and is now a Saint of the Eastern Church.

21. Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution, 126.

22. The Millet system of integration of religious communities only became a true “system” in the nineteenth century. This was a result of the Tanzimat reforms, a series of edicts between 1839 and 1876 intended to preserve the Ottoman Empire by liberal reforms that recalled the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). The aim of these reforms was to create a unified Ottoman identity irrespective of religious beliefs, and simultaneously to recognize and formalize the structures of the Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Millets, which reminded its inhabitants of their duties both as Ottoman citizens and as members of their communities. See Rodrigue, “From Millet to Minority,” 238–61; see also Naar, Jewish Salonica, 43.

23. Rotzokos, Nation-Awakening or Nation-Genesis; Doxiadis, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities, 23.

24. See Pierron, Jews and Christians in Modern Greece, esp. Benveniste’s “Introduction.”

25. Rhigas Velestinlis, New Political Constitution of the Inhabitants of Roumeli, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Aegean and the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (1797).

26. The Phanariotes referred to the Greek-Orthodox elite diplomats and high-ranking officers of the Ottoman Empire. The name derives from Phanari (Gk. lit. lantern), the quarter of Constantinople where this elite lived and which was the seat of the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate. Today this quarter is known by its Turkish name Fener.

27. Besides his native language, Rhigas spoke Italian, French, German, Arabic, and Turkish. See Woodhouse, Rhigas Velestinlis, 32.

28. For a thorough discussion of Rhigas Feraios’s biography and political project, see Axelos, Rhigas Velestinlis. Rhigas’s opposition to oriental despotism was also inspired by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes.

29. As stated in article 7 of his New Constitution: “The right to reveal our opinion and thoughts through printing, as well as in many other ways; the right of gathering peacefully; the freedom of all religions, Christianity, Turkism [sic], Judaism and others, are not restricted under the present administration. When these rights are restricted it is obvious that this is due to tyranny or that it is still a remembrance of the ostracised despotism that we dismissed.”

30. Kitromilides, Rhigas Velestinlis, 56, 60.

31. Stathis, ed., Constitution and the Battle Hymn of Rhigas, 186, 188.

32. See Manessis, “L’activité et les projets politiques.” Axelos, Rhigas Velestinlis, 467. Although there is only one reference to Judaism as a religion to be constitutionally tolerated and respected in his envisaged polity, and although he repeatedly refers to all the other subjugated Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire, that he does not consider the Jews as potential allies to a movement subverting Ottoman rule does not necessarily mean that Rhigas’s view differed from Cosmas’s only in language. We therefore partly disagree with Doxiadis’s statement in State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities that Rhigas “created two sectarian groups locked in opposition to each other in which Jews were assigned to the hegemonic Muslim one, just as Cosmas had done”, 28, (emphasis added).

33. See, Axelos, Rhigas Velestinlis, 398.

34. In “Enlightenment in the Greek Orthodox East,” Makrides argues that the Hellenization of South-East Europe “was not imposed from above and was not based on any nationalistic claims or goals” (17).

35. On the gradual reception of Enlightenment political ideas, see Myrogiannis, “Civic Radicalism in Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment,” 41–68.

36. In 1798, the Patriarchal printing house published the Sultan’s reactionary apology, Paternal Instruction, written by Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to which Korais responded the same year with his Fraternal Instruction, a manifesto against oriental despotism.

37. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity.

38. Tsolias, “Pamblekis, Kairis, Sofianopoulos,” 96–102. Pamblekis, like Cosmas, had studied at the Athonian Academy under Eugenios Voulgaris. Disappointed with monastic life, he moved first to Paris, and then to Vienna and Leipzig.

39. Tsolias, Critique of Religion, 55–77.

40. See Iliou, “The Silence over Christodoulos Pamblekis,” 387–404.

41. Anon, Hellenic Nomarchia, 28. “Nomarchia” (nomos and archi, lit. law and principle or authority) means the rule of law; it is an anagram of monarchia, which literally means “one-man rule.”

42. See Korais, “On the Holy Light in Jerusalem,” 330.

43. Ibid., 350, 352.

44. On the influence of the Philhellenic movement on the self-image of the Greeks, see Karafoulidou, “This Great Idea.”

45. Even in Jakob Fallmerayer’s studies in the 1830s that questioned the racial continuity of modern Greeks with the ancient Hellenes, racism, or any kind of racial ideas, were not yet part of the dominant national ideology. See Fallmerayer, Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea; and Fallmerayer, On the Origin of Modern Greeks. One should be cautious not to identify nationalist ideology with racism, even when racial discriminations are used in the demarcation of national identity. See Lekkas, The Nationalist Ideology, 123. In fact, the word race (phyli or genus), though commonly used, had not yet been clearly distinguished from “nation” or even Millet, which is why the term “anti-Judaism” is preferable to the racially-charged term “anti-Semitism.” Skopetea, The ‘Model Kingdom’, 171–72.

The question whether this nineteenth-century eclectic mixture of modernity and romanticism, the emblem of the Greek nationalist ideology, encompassed the alleged radicalism of pre-revolutionary Enlightened ideas continues to be much debated. In her groundbreaking “This Great Idea,” Karafoulidou explores the scattered germs of the nationalist ideology before its crystallization as “the great idea.”

46. See Makrides, “Enlightenment in the Greek Orthodox East,” 43.

47. With the exception of Voulgaris (see note 16), the other monks later formed the group named Kolyvades and published the Philocalia (Love of beauty), an anthology of patristic and ascetic texts, as an antidote to the Enlightenment that had been imported from the “untrustworthy West.” Nevertheless, they were influenced by and tacitly shared Enlightenment concerns, such as the importance of education, the emphasis on virtue, and a partial adoption of scientific language. See Moschos, “An Alternative ‘Enlightenment’,” 63–72.

48. Taking a stand on this issue would have challenged the delicate balance among the Millets and thus disrupted the established order.

49. Anon., Hellenic Nomarchia, 182–83.

50. Even the European Enlightenment lacked such an agenda, but rather seemed to have “modernized” traditional anti-Judaism into anti-Semitism. See, for instance, Hertzberg, French Enlightenment and the Jews. In any case, it would be anachronistic to project or apply the twentieth-century language of minority rights to the eighteenth century.

51. As Lekkas states in Game with Time: “Nationalism does not just bear and express the notion of Nation, but produces it” (98): thus nationalism precedes the Nation.

52. Provisional Administration of Greece.

53. Korais, Notes on the Provisional Political Regime, 8.

54. Ibid., 12.

55. Ibid., 12–13 (original emphasis).

56. Ibid., 13 (emphasis added).

57. Ibid., 14 (emphasis added), and note 1.

58. Until recently historians have tended to describe the Jews under Islam as living in some kind of interfaith utopia that was only disrupted by Western colonialism and Zionism. Korais’s article is thus more in line with more recent work on the different kinds of Jewish-Muslim relations, Jewish-Christian relations, and Jewish life in various parts of the Islamic world at different periods. See Lehmann, “Beyond the ‘Jews of Islam’” (133–34).

59. As Lekkas reminds us in Game with Time: “The national idea” aims at “the absolute identification of the cultural and the political community” (101).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dionysis G. Drosos

Dionysis G. Drosos is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. His publications include The Market and the State in Adam Smith: A Critique of the Retrospective Foundations of Neoliberalism, Virtues and Interests; The British Debate on Morals at the Threshold of Modernity; and The Gentle Commerce of Sympathy: Moral Community and Civil Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (all in Greek). He is the founder and chair of The Mediterranean Society for Enlightenment Studies.

Maria Kavala

Maria Kavala is Assistant Professor of the History of Exclusion and Discrimination in the Modern World, at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her recent publications include “The ‘Final Solution’ in Thessaloniki and in Sofia: A Comparison” (2019); “The Scale of Jewish Property Theft in Nazi-occupied Thessaloniki” (2018); and The Destruction of the Jews of Greece (1941–1944) (in Greek) (2015).