Guerrilla History - The Adnan Husain Show: The Longue Durée: Palestine in World History

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

For the next two weeks, we will be introducing (or reintroducing) our new sister shows.  This week, we will be presenting Part 1 of a 7 part series on The Adnan Husain Show titled Palestine and the World.  Next week, we will present the introduction of a new 25 part series that Henry is cohosting with a Russian historian on Russian history titled Tsars and Commissars: From Rus to Modern Russia.  Be sure to subscribe to Adnan's show and to stay tuned for Tsars and Commissars updates from Henry on twitter (@Huck1995). Also, please note that Guerrilla History now is uploading on YouTube as well, so do us a favor, subscribe to the show and share some links from there so we can get helped out in the algorithms! Part 1 of Palestine and the World: History in a Time of Genocide (Denial) examines the premodern paradigms of Latin Christendom's relationship to Jews and Muslims, Judaism and Islam, over centuries since the time of the Crusades and the establishment of the Latin Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Dr. Ariel Salzmann and Adnan discuss a Mediterranean history from the medieval crusades to the "Reconquista" in Iberia into the early modern period and reflect on the transformation in the Latin West from religious difference between Christian and non-Christian as predominant to the elaboration of new ethno-racial forms of exclusion in the shared roots of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racism.

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is co-host Henry. I'm letting you know that for the next two weeks on the guerrilla history feed, we are going to be introducing and reintroducing new sister programs of the show. Today you're going to be listening to an episode of Adnan's other show, the Adnan Hussein show. Adnan has a really terrific program and has a very interesting series that's coming out right now called Palestine and the World, which is coming out in seven parts alongside a guest of guerrilla history, multiple-time guest of guerrilla history, Professor Ariel Saltsman. Very important work that Adnan and Ariel did in that series, and it is actively coming

out on the Adnan Hussein show now. Be sure to subscribe to that show on YouTube, and you will be listening to episode one of that series on the guerrilla history platform today. I also would like to let you know that next week, you'll be hearing a combined Introduction in Episode 1 of my new show, which is going to be starting around the time that next week's episode comes out, called Tsars and Commissars from Rus to Modern Russia. It's the History of Russia in 25 parts, co-hosted by myself and a professor of history that I work with, Dr. Gennady Safanov.

We are looking at pre-Rousse Foundation, so prior to 862, all the way to the modern day, In 25 parts, we're already done recording four episodes of the series and have the rest of them already planned out. Very exciting things. So if you're interested in Russian history, you can find Tsars and Commissars on YouTube, although I haven't promoted it yet. And also it will be available on podcast apps. If you want to keep up to date with what's happening with Tsars and Commissars, follow me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-1-995. and I will of course update you any time that an episode of Tsars and Kama Stars comes out

which will be once per week over the course of the next 25 weeks and I should also mention there will be some listener questions specials thrown in along the way as we collect questions from listeners about what we're talking about on the program. The last note that I'll make before I turn to this episode of the Adnan Hussein show

is that I want to make sure that all of our podcast listeners are aware that guerrilla history now has a YouTube channel as well. Don't worry, listeners. You don't have to see Adnan and myself. It is an animation that we have commissioned from a Vietnamese Marxist artist. She really did a terrific job on the animation, but we're actively uploading episodes from our back catalog onto the channel now. And new episodes will also be coming out simultaneously on the YouTube channel, as well as our podcast feed. I'm letting you know that because the YouTube channel is brand new, and therefore we have basically no subscribers yet, which means YouTube's algorithm is not going to be very kind to us.

If you can, subscribe to the show, which will be linked in the show notes below, and if you know somebody who prefers to consume media using YouTube rather than going through a podcast app, you can let them know that Gorilla History is now going to be uploaded on YouTube as well and share them a link from our show. Like I said, we have about 10 episodes up on the channel already and I am actively uploading about two per day from our back catalog. So by the time that you hear this, there will probably be more than 10 out and by the time next week rolls around, hopefully there will be close to 20. So please subscribe and of course like the videos. I know that everybody hates hearing like and subscribe because it is used everywhere, but unfortunately

that's how these algorithms work. So help us out, subscribe to that show, share, the links with people, let them know. And now, without further ado, I will turn it over to Adnan on this episode of the Adnan Hussein show and the first episode of the series Palestine and the world. Hello, peace to you all. I'm Adnan Hussein, and I have some exciting news for you about this upcoming series, of which this is the first episode that I'm introducing. But I wanted to tell you a little bit about this series. It's called History in the Time of Genocide Denial, Palestine and the World. It's a seven-part series about the history of Israel-Palestine. It begins broadly speaking with the Crusades and Islamophobia and anti-Semitism through to Ottoman history,

but then really gather steam when we come to the 19th century, and it traces and discusses the relationships between Jewish nationalism and Palestinian resistance in the history of the region broadly from Eastern Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean. So I think you're going to find it a very interesting series. It's basically a dialogue, in some cases, mini lectures, from my friend and esteemed colleague, Dr. Ariel Salzman, who was teaching a course last fall about this very subject after discussing with her approach and what kinds of arguments she makes about how to reframe the question of Palestine. I thought it would be really useful to make this available in some form to a wider audience and not just her students in that particular

class. So we were recorded in December for many, many hours and had some wonderful discussions and a great dialogue where she had the opportunity to summarize some of her key points in this history from her course. In certain cases, she refers to slides. Unfortunately, we weren't able to share screen when we were recording and approved too cumbersome to find where we could splice these slides in so there's a visual component that she sometimes was referring to that isn't available to you but no worries her descriptions and analysis of these certainly will give you a sense of what was being referred to so just ignore the references to the slides but i do think you're going to find this a very very useful and important

resource in thinking about the question of Palestine. And although we recorded in December and since that time now it's March in 2025, there have been a lot of very important developments. In fact, you could say that the ongoing situation is constantly writing a new chapter in this story that we need to engage with and analyze. But I think this long-dure history and background will give you very valuable resources and tools for conceptualizing and contextualizing the genocide that's been taking place in Gaza. Now, as I mentioned, this is a seven-part series. If you're watching on YouTube, this is the first episode and you should look out for more episodes unfolding over the course of the upcoming weeks in seven weeks time you will complete the series and

likewise if you're an audio podcast listener you also will have an episode each week for the coming period of time however if you would like to listen to all of them all at once in one go you're the kind who likes to binge watch or binge listen you can have access to all of them. At this time, they're available for Patreon supporters and subscribers. You can go to patreon.com slash Adnan Hussein, A-D-N-A-N-Hus-A-N-H-U-S-A-I-N. Become a paid subscriber, and you will have access to these immediately to start listening to learning from and enjoying. Of course, these will be available. This is an important resource. It will be available to everyone in due course unfolding as a serial series taking place over the next

couple of months. Anyway, I hope you will enjoy this series and enjoy this first episode. Until the next episode, Salam, Peace, and Solidarity to you all. So welcome everyone to this very exciting series of conversations and lectures, essentially, that will be boiled down into what I think is going to be a very useful and fascinating series on the situation in Palestine, its historical background, and with us, to take us through this is Dr. Ariel Salzman, close friend, a cherished colleague here at Queens University, who has been teaching a course on exactly this subject and has offered to come and share

her knowledge and wisdom and her unique analysis about how to reframe a lot of the discussion through a different and more global perspective on the history of Palestine and the region. So I'm really delighted, Ariel, that you could join us for this series, this extended series. Welcome. Thank you very much, Admon. I'm thrilled to be here, and I'm glad we're doing this. You know, it's so important at this moment in time to both tell what's going on now, which is really horrific. We are living and teaching in a time of genocide. It goes on. The television cameras have switched to other parts of the Middle East, to Syria, to Lebanon. But every day, dozens and dozens of people are killed. They're killed in North Gaza.

They're killed where they're seeking refuge in central and southern parts. of Gaza. And, you know, again, we don't, you know, the camera turns on and off, the brave journalists in Gaza, the citizen journalists of Gaza, 150 of whom have been killed, keep trying to keep us focused on what's going on. But it is a time of genocide, and it makes our responsibilities as educators, as academicians, you know, it gives them a new importance, but also a new heavy weight that we bear with our students who bravely come to these classes in a time of silencing and censorship. Well, on that note, I think you had wanted to dedicate this series to a scholar and an activist from South Africa whose case really exemplifies not only the interconnections between these two settler colonial societies and the struggles for their liberation, but also what you just mentioned, which is a, you know, that we are also living both at the university and in wider society during a time also of censorship and suppression of academic freedom and political speech when dealing particularly with this topic. And so I wondered if

maybe you could talk a little bit about to whom you're dedicating this series. Yeah, I don't like to dedicate this to Fred Dubay. Fred Dubay was a young academic. He was a recent academic had been hired by Stony Brook University. He was a psychologist. He had been in prison in Robbins Island in South Africa and had done his PhD at Cornell University in psychology and was teaching a course on racism, on the psychology of racism. And he dedicated one of his lectures to basically what he called reactive racism. And there he gave two examples. One was what was happening in Palestine and the role of Israeli Jews, some of whom were survivors of the Holocaust or had family members who died in the Holocaust and who were redirecting racism toward Palestinians. He saw

that dehumanization then. He also saw it among his colleagues in the ANC, in the African National National Congress. So he was criticizing them as well as being reactively racist toward whites for what they had suffered. And for his honesty and his foresight, he would be punished. There was a scholar, a visiting scholar who took his syllabus, showed it to the authorities, ended up going to the Board of Trustees, one of whom was the current secretary Blinken's father, the Jewish community and there was basically a witch hunt against him. They made life impossible. They called him an anti-Semite. And as the New York Times announced in 1987, this was 1983. So this was shortly after Israel's horrific invasion then of Lebanon. In 1987, he would then be denied tenure.

Truthfully, I do not know what happened to Fred Dubay, but, you know, we feel all of us now, and then kindred spirits and ashamed, I personally, as a Jewish person, that anti-Semitism is used to silence, but not only silence, in this particular context, it is a form of genocide denial, the invocation, the false invocation of anti-Semitism. Semitism is actually a form of genocide denial. Absolutely. Well, thank you for telling us about Fred DuBay. And, you know, we're making this as a resource for people who want to find out more about the history and the politics involved, particularly of those histories of racism that I think we're going to be talking about quite a bit in this initial episode. But before we get into talking about that kind of set of issues about Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, you know, these kinds of questions, very often when discussing Israel-Palestine or the question of Palestine, the framework is very limited in terms of the geographies and the interconnections with a larger regional picture and from global perspectives and even the

region is often called, you know, the Middle East conflict. And there are other ways of framing and talking about the region, southwest Asia, Middle East, North Africa, and so on. But one of the problems has been, typically, is thinking about this just as a national struggle and of two, you know, over the status of a nation state. And in general, when you take a longer do they look at history, you see the artificiality and in some senses, some of the destructive consequences of the formation of a nation state that often produces a sort of history or a perspective on history that's very limiting and cuts off a lot of the analytical possibilities for really reframing identities, struggles, politics, and so on. And so I wanted to ask you in your work

and in your way of thinking about these issues, I know you like to think outside the nation-state box and wondering what other approaches you like to use in framing your communications, lectures, and discussions with students about how to approach what we call the Middle East, but outside the nation-state box. It's interesting because I think in the Middle East itself, there's been a rethinking, you yourself did a conference on the caliphate and thinking about the dissolution of the caliphate 1924, well there's been a lot of soul searching I know in the Middle East and broadly about what happened

to the Ottoman Empire. Could the Ottoman Empire have been a model that would have carried the Middle East into the 20th, 21st century? And so my perspective is grounded in my own training as an Ottoman historian. And I think, you know, when we look at the wind of history that defines the nation state, it's rather short with respect to the multi-religious empires that existed before that. And not just in the Middle East, but also within Europe. And those empire states or multi-ethnic, multi-religious states were actually undergoing transformations the late 19th century. I'll talk more about that. But they were undergoing some very interesting transformations that may have led to a very different outcome.

And so thinking about the nation state has locked us into, whether it's, you know, Zionist historiography, Israeli historiography, or for that matter, Palestinian historiography has locked us into a teleology, a teleological framework, which makes the end point for self-determination only in terms of a nation state. And so one sees very detailed, very important work by many Palestinian scholars about this subject, but nonetheless missing, I think, important conjunctures when things might have turned otherwise. And in this, I was inspired and influenced by a very well-known Indian historian, Rata Kumar, who chastised me one time. I had a conference at NYU and said, and said, you know, I don't want to talk about what happened. I want to talk about those moments when things could have been otherwise.

And I think the, you know, and the most successful models that came after, I think, and again, we'll talk about one of those, the greater Syria, the effort to create a greater Syria, were modeled not on the nation state as it was formed in Europe, but rather grew out of the Ottoman experiment, The Ottoman experiment went sour.

It was destroyed in the end by nationalists, actually, by Turkic nationalists. But there was an Ottoman experiment that tried to bring together people as citizens of a multi-religious state, if not a multi-ethnic, but it was composed of people of different ethnicities and languages. So I think there's two reasons to break out of the nation state. One is this teleology that makes it inevitable

that that's the only place for self-determination rights, human rights, minority rights to go. And the second is to remember that there were moments and there are moments in history when things could have taken another turn that might have led to more broad-based liberation, the dignity of all people, And of course, broad raging human rights and respect for not only human beings, but our environment as well.

Yes, well, I'm really looking forward to hearing about some of those episodes that you think are those important turning points in Ottoman history. But just back to this kind of question of the nation state box, I think it's a really important two issues that you raised about it. And it makes me remember the fact that, of course, I mean, the nation state in this region is, you know, not a product of some kind of organic historical development. I mean, the kinds of political structures that typically had existed were not nation states in the Middle East, you know, throughout its long period of history. And it's as a result of empires or larger scale kinds of units of political affiliation and organization. that made a place a region that is so much of a crossroads for transit and trade that also fostered cosmopolitan variety and difference that's very mixed populations that don't resolve themselves very you know successfully you might say into a narrow nation state type project and that this is something that's of course very important for other regions in world history where there were empires like the Russian Empire or even South, you know, Eastern Europe, the Austro-Hungarian

Empire and so on. And the era of the nation state has, you know, as a result, caused a lot of political conflicts and difficulties in which we might situate as we go forward some of the events and some of those turning points. And the other point about these turning points and endings, not just what happened, but, you know, where those turning points were and what they say about the possibilities for how things could have been otherwise and trajectories towards different futures that we want to potentially recover or at least think through. It also puts pressure really on where does one start one's analysis, not the origins necessarily, but the beginnings, the beginning point for a historical narrative.

And so maybe as the opening, after that introduction about the framework, getting beyond nation-state box in terms of our historical approaches to the Middle East, the question is, is where does one start the story? You know, where does one begin, knowing that it's not necessarily the origin, and there could be other beginning points, but each beginning point, you know, unfolds a new vantage and how to reframe, and think about these histories and the contemporary legacies that we're dealing with. And so I'm wondering, you know, maybe we might turn to a long-dure sort of appreciation

of the question of Palestine and the histories into which it is situated. So how far back should we go, at least in your sense of analysis, to have a relevant context for thinking about some of the processes and processes, and problems that frame the question of Palestine and the question of Zionism? I think this is this is where, you know, the nation state begins its distortion. Certainly for Zionism, you know, it's looking back, you know, 5,000 years to an ancient Israel and scouting for those remains to lay claim 2,000 years later or 3,000 years later to a territorial claim. And of course, Palestine is no ordinary piece of real estate, but, you know, one has to center beyond these ancient kingdoms, Assyrians, the ancient kingdoms, the Jewish kingdoms, the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, that for the longest period of time, we're talking about a place that has been a spiritual home and not a national home.

And it, you know, became a spiritual home to three religions, you know, over a thousand years ago and more offshoots. We can talk about Baha'i and offshoots of Islam. So it's a spiritual homeland for many peoples and at least three of the world's largest religious communities have affinities for that place and have holy sites in that place. So as such, it's not just a question that it was absorbed into a variety of different empires, but it had several layers of existence that we tend to forget. And that kind of affinity, that kind of religious affinity, spiritual affinity, was felt by a people's all over the world, both sides of the Mediterranean, across North Africa, going into, of course, Asia and Central Asia, without territorializing.

that sentiment. And this is true, especially for the Jews. I mean, it's very, very interesting to see how in the 19th century or even earlier, that the symbol of Jerusalem, you can find it on a lot of places. This is actually the dome of the rock. You know, it's, I mean, that's the standing architectural feature that symbolizes Jerusalem. And again, it is a spiritual homeland. And it's this layers of spiritual. spirituality on top of, you know, the central area. And I believe your research to Adnan on the Holy Fire and the way that communities accommodated one another but participated in one, one another's sense of holiness and religiosity is a fantastic example of moments and probably for the longer period of the last 2,000 years of mutuality.

and sharing of tombs of holy figures, whether it's in Hebron, Khalil, or whether it's other parts in Aleppo and other parts where Muslims, Christians, and Jews would worship at the same places. But in the case of the Holy Fire, where Christians and Muslims participated in a very important ritual of Christianity, perhaps you could say some more about that as an example. I think you're absolutely right that it's an excellent. example of something that was a larger phenomenon of shared holy spaces, practices, memories, pilgrimage sites, and so on because of, you know, a shared common connection of their monotheistic theology, but more than that, of their sense of valuing a similar, you know, historical or religious historical salvation history of, you know, biblical patriarchs and prophets who are as much and importantly significant for Muslims as well,

right? So that's a kind of wider and broader phenomenon that made the sacred geography, you might say, something that was shared and had those multiple layers that you're talking about. The actual miracle of the Holy Fire, I think, begins with actually an attempt to, you know, as a compensation for the loss of exclusive religious sovereignty over the city when it was under the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire's control. And it was a Christian city. And for hundreds of years, there was a policy of excluding Jews from living in in Jerusalem. And when Muslims conquered, did the Arab Muslims conquered under, you know, the famous caliph Omar. In the 630s, there changed a policy to open it up, not only, of course, to Muslims as

sovereigns of this holy city that had been a Qibla or direction of prayer for Muslims early on before Mecca became the direction towards which all Muslims prayed. And also, of course, it had been the site of a spiritual journey. that's very important in Muslim devotional context and literatures, but it was also opened up to Jews again for the first time in hundreds of years. And this, of course, produced all kinds of anxieties because there was a sort of theological investment in Christian supersessory salvation history of displacing the Jews. So it ended up being a multi-religious city again and having that for several. hundreds of years. And the Holy Fire miracle was something like a spiritual, a miracle that was meant to symbolize spiritually the resurrection of Jesus. So the lights that normally are extinguished

in the church during the Easter celebrations are then relit on Sunday, liturgically speaking, with a new fire, a fire that's newly kindled to symbolize. you know the rebirth or resurrection of jesus in the uh holy sepulchre in the church of the resurrection by contrast that liturgical practice of extinguishing the lights was relit by a miraculous holy fire that descended right and this is a miracle that seems only to have emerged in the context of the post-muslim conquest of the city and it was something like a way of of still asserting some kind of spiritual connection and sovereignty over their holy places, that even if this city was now no longer an exclusively Christian city and maybe even more

importantly, a Christian governed city that nonetheless, you know, Christ reigns supreme on some level, right? But over time, what's so fascinating about it is that that pressure, you might say, of spiritually shared space ends up turning Muslims who have no theological commitment to the resurrection of Jesus, turn this miracle into something that becomes part of the local Jerusalem, popular religious experience. And so they start participating and attending. And even the emir of the city, we have documentation that shows that the emir of the city and the imam of the Aksa Mosque participated in the performance of the Holy Fire. They guarded the tomb once it was closed up.

And once the fire arrived, they were the first to verify that the Holy Fire had arrived. And, fascinatingly, were the first to light their lamps and then take the Holy Fire and light the lamps of Al-Axa with it. So it shows that there was multiple layers of shared spiritual engagement. and connection, what's interesting when you talked about the overlapping and shared spiritual homeland or the idea that it was a sacred space to multiple religions and the consciousness of this, while there was always, of course, some competition and, you know, even the miracle itself is born of, in my argument, an analysis out of some kind of polemical response to the loss of political and spiritual sovereignty, that what changes really fundamentally,

in this history, and maybe this is a good beginning point for our discussion, is when it became territorialized in a new way. And this is the thing that is so profound about the Crusades and the new era that emerges, which is that, you know, there were some early disparaging remarks, Anselm of Canterbury, very famous and important kind of theologian and philosopher who became Archbishop of Canterbury, but was known, you know, for his writing. you know, and a famous proof of God, you know, that people even in history of philosophy departments still study today. He said, Jerusalem is a spiritual place. You know, the earthly terrestrial Jerusalem doesn't matter. I mean, this is a heavenly Jerusalem that we're attempting

to connect to. And of course, we go and we visit and go on pilgrimage so that we can be reminded of that history. But he was opposed to the territorialized. of the Christian imagination of their inheritance of Jerusalem to it being an earthly territorial kingdom that needed to be founded and controlled exclusively by Christians. He said, it's a spiritual homeland, as you were saying before. However, what the Crusades did was they asserted a historic ancient right of control over the land as a territory, which is something that should remind us a little bit when we're thinking of resurrecting ancient claims of history for a sacred territory that has to be territorially

bound, you know, not necessarily bounded, but it has to be controlled as a territory and that you have to have religiously based political sovereignty over the land itself rather than, you know, it being a kind of more abstract, spiritual engagement and connection to that land, is this This is the outcome of the Crusades entirely, is that they took a kind of biblical history themselves and argued that because they had displaced the Hebrews and the Israelites and because those Jewish kingdoms had been destroyed around the time of the era of the coming of Christ and had the Jews had gone into exile and diaspora, that therefore the Christian community had displaced. and not just at a spiritual level, but now they had displaced them and that they themselves were the new Hebrews and that they should actually take precedent and examples of David as a kingly ruler, not just as an emblem of Christian kingship, but actually they should rule over those lands and that it was an affront that they were in the hands of non-Christians,

something that motivated the Crusades. If one looks at Urban the Seconds, announcing of the Crusades in 1095, this is the kind of idea that is being propounded. And, you know, also there is a corresponding idea that it is both the spiritual homeland and it is also a land without a legitimate people there. It is a land of milk and honey that is waiting to be restored through Christian sovereignty over it and cleansed of the impure and polluting presence of the non-Christians usually characterized as pagans, of course, because they didn't have a kind of concept in the earliest period of the theology of Islam, that it was a monotheistic religion. Gradually, they came to understand that, but this initial idea is that it's being

polluted by a pagan defilement, and it needs to be cleansed, and it needs to be territorialized as Christian sovereign space. But it also becomes, the Crusades becomes the model for future colonization globally. Absolutely. That's definitely dehumanization, the turning of indigenous inhabitants into, you know, heathen, pagan, who can either be killed or converted or enslaved. And the Crusader message, I mean, it's the Crusader license to kill, to enslave, to conquer, and to loot, which becomes the uh basically the the terms for the transatlantic uh expansion um in the 1450s these are all neo crusader you know licenses issued by papacy all with the idea of bounding christendom against the other

and within that new boundaries of christendom the other can be subject to you know all sorts of you know, horrors and expropriation and expulsions, et cetera. So the Crusades are this microcosm of early colonization. They don't succeed. And what follows in its wake, of course, is a reassertion of the Islamicate, what Marshall Hudson called a society in which Muslims rule, but which accommodates, and we don't say it's a utopia, but definitely accommodates non-Muslims under its rule.

And Saladin, Saladin is the one who revived that. He does something completely different after the First Crusades, the First Crusades, as you well know, slaughtered everybody. Muslims and Jews were slaughtered for purification of Jerusalem. When Salahadine comes, he doesn't slaughter the people, the people. He doesn't turn the Holy Sepulch into a stable as the Crusaders had done with Muslim and Jewish holy places, right? And instead, he makes that,

he brings the Jews back. He calls them back to Jerusalem to resettle in Jerusalem. And he starts again to practice what had been in place before the Crusaders, which is to open Jerusalem as a site of pilgrimage for all faiths. and the Ottomans continue this. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that's important to see the contrast between the crusader idea of purified, even though, of course, they couldn't actually eliminate the indigenous inhabitants.

Of course, they actually also needed them to exploit their labor. And you pointed out that, you know, they enslaved. Well, outside the city. Yeah, outside the point was that there were certain spaces that did have to be pure Christian spaces and also the very, there was a legitimation of that kind of genocidal production of a pure Christian space that was authorized by the Crusades and was very much at variance with the characteristics of Mediterranean society. Both of us are people who like to characterize ourselves as, you know, Mediterranean historians. You know, typically what I think one means by that is talking about the paradigms and patterns by which you have multiple, you know, faiths and ethnic, linguistic groups finding a way to collectively, you know, live and produce and work and so on.

And so it's this kind of diverse, multi-religious and multi-ethnic and multilingual kind of space that is typical and finding ways to normalize this as just a part of the societies in the Mediterranean that the crusader states and increasingly what happens in Europe, and one could argue that it is, in fact, actually the project of crusade and crusading and then the experience within the crusader states as an early settler colonial project. that, as you pointed out, didn't ultimately succeed, but was the incubation for practices and policies and ideas that not only repatterned Europe's kind of relationship to its own minorities and the problem of religious difference, but then gets exported as a method and a

mechanism of more global world conquest and colonization with major legacies for global history that I'm sure we could talk about. But I did want to ask you a little bit about, you know, the status of Jews in, you know, we were talking a little bit about these ideas of, you know, finding, I think as a prelude to really analyzing and reframing, you know, what Zionism is and, you know, how it, you know, comes about this idea of territorializing a spiritual homeland. comes, you know, in the 19th century out of the context of a much longer history of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish sentiment and persecution that we could, you know, certainly connect back to the processes

we were talking about, you know, maybe not a sort of simple line. But if we want to, you know, have a beginning point, the Crusades are actually the context and the preaching of the First Crusade and every subsequent major crusade is the context for major outbursts of anti-Jewish violence. The First Crusades rather famously involved huge massacres of Jews, not only in the Rhineland, but most famously in the Rhineland, but other parts of Western Europe, and then on the pilgrimage route of the armies on their way overland through South and Eastern Central and then South Eastern Europe is slaughtering Jewish communities. along the way as they plundered and actually committed violence against their eastern,

you know, Orthodox, Christians, and so on. But that, you know, there's a real intimate and deep connection of a long period of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence that is connected to crusade and crusading, which is, of course, the paradigmatic form of anti-Muslim violence and warfare. So I wonder if we would talk maybe a little bit about something like a major problem that you've recognized and noticed in a lot of the discussions today about anti-Semitism that try and erase this longer history and displace it and transpose it upon the Palestinians in order to justify for a European audience, for the Western audience, a similar displacement of amnesiac, you know, forgetting of an active amnesia.

of forgetting the deep and long roots of the persecution of religious minorities and particularly Jews inside of Europe as a fundamental and long-lasting feature of European history with lots of political kinds of consequences. So when there is something you've called Holocaust deflection, you know, it has these deep roots. I'm wondering if you would want to discuss and comment about how that transformed. Well, if you think about the way that, I mean, you know, and there is a discussion that racism is not a modern phenomenon. Racism goes back at least in the medieval period. And there are scholars who look at, you know, Greek and Roman authors, you know,

in terms of what they see about Africa. But in terms of the sort of very specific interface between anti-Jewish prejudice within Western Europe and christened more broadly, but it takes a very acute form in Western, in the Latin Christian West. And Islam, there is this paradigm of the other that is created out of anti-Jewism that is ethnic, that is racial, in which Jews and Muslims are racially tied,

in which Jews and Muslims and the early visions of Islam are also extended as an ethnic formation in the sense that they both practice circumcision. They have dietary rules. All the things that Paul issued that he said, you know, Christians don't have to do, Lisa, you know, in catering to the Gentiles. We don't need these, what are called the carnal aspects of Judaism. We're going to renounce them. And they saw those in Islam and Judaism. So out of this hybrid of Islam o Judaism, we've We find these stereotypes that are ethnic and racial.

They're considered ethically, racially, or in terms of their genealogical heritage, Jews and Muslims are considered to be of the same stock. Shem. That's right. Yeah. So there's a paradigm of otherness that comes out of this amalgamation of the two. And of course, seeing Islam as the greater threat, however, as Jews as their partners. And so, you know, it's not just that, you know, there's opportunism involved in terms of looting

and pillaging and killing off communities en route to the Crusades, because many of the Crusaders were self-funded. So they went after, you know, whatever wealth they thought they could be legitimate. It's not like there was logistics, you know, when they're in Hungary and Eastern Germany. Yeah. Right. So, but there was a legitimacy to doing it insofar as the. these were considered not only, you know, relatives of the Muslims in on these various levels,

but also, you know, as would be the accusation for much of the medieval and early modern period that they were actively in collaboration with Muslims. I mean, Genoa would, you know, every time there was a war, you know, with North Africa, the Jews would get expelled. And, you know, at the very end of the Crusades, and there's something I note in the book, that's forthcoming is in the 1290 after the fall of Acre. There's a rash of expulsions that take out Jewish communities, the Jewish community of England that had been there for centuries. Across France, they're expelled 1306, but of course also the destruction of Lucera, the last Muslim village or town within Italy itself and within Sicily and

and southern Italy in 1,300. And there is a connection there. There's a connection, the fall of Acre, and Dante makes it very clear. And he talks about, you know, Jews and Muslims are being in cahoots and them being the beneficiaries of the fall of the the last crusader outpost.

And, you know, at that point, the connection is theological. The connection is in terms of ethno-referential. racial, if you will, it's religious, and now it's become increasingly economic. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. We should talk about the economic in a moment, but I did want to go back to that point of how the racialization and ethnicization of religious difference starts to take place already in these very early periods. They're not fully distinguished. And of course, in talking about the history of racism, we do want to acknowledge that there, you know, there's

different ideas of ethnicity, modern race is a bit of a, you know, the scientific and so on. And they're not always easily distinguishable, but there is the slippage that is relevant and the ambiguity of the nature of difference that sometimes was imagined that it could be cured, as it were, and altered through conversion, but increasingly over the period of the Middle Ages, is there's less and less willingness to think of a Jewish convert to Christianity as somehow having abandoned their Jewishness in some way. You know, the immutability of the Jew becomes something that you find ideas about that. You find practices that suggest that it's impossible. And of course, these are very important when it comes to large scale or mass conversions where, you know, you have a whole host or a whole

group and community that has been forcibly converted or converted under massive missionizing pressure and threats of violence that, of course, this undermines the idea that conversion religiously was enough to really integrate and assimilate people. And so lines of difference tend to move them to culture, ethnicity, and ultimately to racial points. But the circumcision It's a fascinating point to note that, of course, because Islam and Judaism both have these practice stemming from, you know, it's the covenant. The covenant is established, right? You know, Abraham establishes conversion.

And so it's a very liberating, you know, Paul when he says, you know, be circumcised in the spirit and not in your body. It's that rejection of a kind of bodily and ethnic kind of understanding and identity. of Christianity as something different from Judaism and a rejection of it. But, you know, in the Urban II propaganda in preaching the Crusades to motivate, you know, religious enthusiasm for the violence to come, it's very interesting that the connection is made, even though he doesn't explicitly characterize them as Jews or similar to Jews. He's, of course, trafficking in the sense that they are pagans and thus they are an ethnicity of their own, you know, a kind of

other that comes from culture, ethnicity, rather than a religiously based difference, you know, besides idolatry versus monotheism. But this idea that there are a people, a nation, pagan people and nation, he does talk about their circumcisions and that they use the blood of forcibly circumcising Christians who are martyrs and recalling early Christian history and trying to frame contemporary events within that late antique early origin story of Christianity as persecuted by this major, you know, powerful empire and that they are victims. And it's always very important to see the way in which victimization is being mobilized here, that they forcibly circumcise Christian youth and then defiled holy altars with the blood of circumcision.

So it's just such a bodily kind of disgust that is also being mobilized and provoked in the audience that is part of seeing the difference, even in bodily terms. And it's the idea that we have to save our Eastern Christian brethren because they are like, us embody, you know, that the Christ's body, because they share the Eucharist and they have similar liturgical, you know, moment in the liturgy in the mass, that they, we are of one body that I would suggest and argue that this is on the path to a kind of ethnicization itself of Christianity. So at the one time that they're marking the difference as a proto-ethnic and racial division with the non-Christian, they are at the same time starting to really create a sense of the

ethnic identity of Latin Western Christians that is on the path to a physical or bodily or racial kind of whiteness as the marker of difference. And so I think that's very important when we, you know, are thinking about the complex of ideas and practices that are Well, it also is part of the intervention, the motives of intervention that show that line of continuity from the Crusades onward to the 19th century. Well, it's a humanitarian intervention, you know. I mean, it's the right to protect, the right to protect, but only toward like Christian. That's right.

That's right. And so that will be, you know, the demise of, you know, that will be the excuse the French in the 1920s to terminate and experiment in democracy and multi-religious democracy in Syria. Yes. Well, we're going to have to get to that subject. So there, yeah, no, but there are these lines of continuity. So you've got that nucleus of colonization, which includes, of course, preventing those people who were formerly Jews or of Jewish stock or of Muslim stock from going to the Americas.

This is very clear in the early colonization effort. And when people talk about the expulsion of the Mariscos, they are indelibly Muslims. They cannot become Christians. And the same thing with the conversos. I mean, there was a different way of dealing with them in 1492, which was to get rid of the last of the unconverted in the hope that the mass conversion of Jews that had happened in the 1890s could be contained and they would fully Christianized. But as you noted, Jews could never be fully Christians.

Disraeli could never be fully Christian. So there was no way to shed it. It had the past, the ethnicity, the religious ethnic identity had become racialized and a part of heredity. It was no longer simply something. you took on conversion, you know, was a far more complex animal at this point. But the other thing I wanted to mention before, I talk a little bit about what would happen during the Ottoman period. And I have, you'll see later a slide up about the way that Ottoman Sephardim portrayed

the mass exodus from Spain toward the Ottoman Empire and the fact that the Aza of the second would welcome them in as a sort of, as a savior, as a new Cyrus, even. But, you know, I think that we have to think about the second part of this, which is the what happens with Protestantism and how Protestantism, the roots of Christian Zionism, are then born in the 17th century, and very distinct from the sort of older Christian Catholic way of, of seeing Palestine. And there in the 17th century, what you get with a lot of these splinter groups,

you know, the Puritans, the Fifth Monarchists and stuff, you get this new phylo-Semitism that's emerging in England in the 17th century, which actually sees, again, with this notion that we are the new Jews, we are the new Hebrews, but also sees this, foresees this transformation. that requires the Jews to return to a territorialized Palestine, one that is separate from an outside of the Muslim realm. And this beginning of this support for these early proto-Zionist

projects, including that of Shapsid Tfi, the false messiah in the middle of the 17th century, who actually had this project of trying to form a new Jewish kingdom. Of course, he would be the head of it and claim that he broke off from traditional Judaism. He had enormous amounts of followers around the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe and would eventually end up converting to Islam and create a sort of subsect of Islam, the what were called derogatively with Dern May, but the followers of Shotsight's speak. But his program was widely followed in the Protestant world because he sought to re-found some sort of Jewish political presence, a breakaway state within the Ottoman Empire.

Of course, connected with this messianic notion. But there you find again in the pre-modern period we're talking about, so you find the elements, the early elements of of settler colonialism on the project, racialization, the close connection between a Jewish Muslim other, you know, with all these sort of features. And they will be connected well into the 20th century, you know, of this relationship, or at least till the end of the 19th century. And then finally, you know, during the early modern period, this other notion of a sort of Jewish, Protestant alliance in order to create a breakaway new Jewish state, which serves the interests of this evangelical or proto-evangelical Christian notion of end times and rebirth,

et cetera. Right, right. Now, that's a very interesting issue, maybe for people to really appreciate what is changing and what's different about this kind of concept that proves to be extremely important and influential on subsequent history of, as you're pointing out, Christian Zionism and its support for other forms of Zionism, is that what it reverses is the idea of the Augustinian doctrine of witness that understood Jewish presence almost universally around the globe as providing the theological and technical, you might say, basis forced establishing the truth of Christianity globally because a theological truth. That's right, that their enforcement around the world actually, you know, helped prove the

truth of a spiritual reading of the Old Testament, as they called it, of the Hebrew Bible, that validated Christian faith and Christian salvation theology, that they themselves couldn't see it because they were very carnal. They didn't have the spiritual reading, and they'd missed the historical boat. Talk about turning points where things could have been different. They missed the boat in recognizing Jesus as, you know, the Messiah. And as a result, they were then condemned into this position of being frozen outside of history and time, maintaining the literal truth and the literal text of the Hebrew Bible that, of course, now needed to be read in light of Christ as having all of this,

you know, spiritual, you know, readings and allegories that they themselves bore witness to, even if they themselves could not see it. And so there was a useful function for the Jewish diaspora, for that post-biblical, post-Jewish kingdom, post-Jewish sovereignty position. And in fact, there was the idea that, you know, they had lost sovereignty and was very important for Jews in various ways over the course of the next millennia to establish that there still were, emblems and moments and experiences of sovereignty that would be reconstituted in order as a polemic against the Christian theological idea that the loss of the Jewish kingdoms meant that forever they would not be a people constituted as a nation with a kingdom or with political

power and political sovereignty because that had been displaced now by the Christian era and that the end times would be a result of an in-gathering but as a as part of their elimination and conversion, right? So this is the kind of doctrine of the old Catholic theology that tolerated Judaism as and Jews as subordinate servants to Christians in society and also serving this kind of useful function of demonstrating to the rest of the world

that Christianity has to be true. The trial evidence is there in the Hebrew Bible that proves Christian salvation doctrines. So it's interesting. interesting what, you know, there's a lot of things that change, obviously with Protestantism, but usually this position, this way, you know, it's about faith, not works. It's a, you know, no indulgences. It's about, you know, your spiritual, you know, kind of election or, you know, it's about the scripture alone and not these intervening commentaries of Catholic, you know,

theologians and their doctrines, but going back, sola scriptura, you know, getting rid of a Catholic mass and rituals, you know, and making fun of, you know, hocus pocus, hocus, corpus maim. So very often the discussion about what Protestantism is in, you know, its rejection of Catholicism. In other words, a heresy, there had been other heresies, a heresy that comes to be its own sect because it's successful, you know, for a long time, of course, the Counter-Reformation was just still trying to say that these are just heretics who need to be suppressed if we can. But that's usually framed within this kind of very theological idea about Christian doctrinal questions. That's true. That's true with Calvinism and Luther, but it's not true by the 17th century with

these new. Well, that's what's interesting. What happens to create these kinds of movements that really reframe the Christian relationship to Jews in salvation. And they are very influential. They will be very influential in the 19th and early 20th century. Not that they want an in-gathering. I mean, Cromwell will readmit the Jews, right? So it's during that time of the upheaval, you know, before, you know, the end of the 19th century, when Jews are, you know, in the middle of the century, which coincides with, of course, Chop Sites viz movement, which they follow very closely, British. Protestants or English Protestants. But, you know, it'll be influential throughout the 19th century in promoting a territorialization of Palestine involving Jews, where the Jews become the stepping stone for the eventual, you know, Messianic age and, you know, and that literally. But they'll be seen as allies in another project. And the way that, you know, the British, there's some really interesting studies now, especially intervening.

you know, where Catholics are there backing in parts of the Middle East, the Maronites, or even parts of the Armenian because they're Armenian Catholics, the British will find the other groups of Christians, whether it's Greek Orthodox, and in Lebanon it's Druze, and in North Africa, it's Jews, as their wedge issues into colonial positions. So defending Jewish rights. in certain circumstances, you know, the British and Lebanon allying with the Jews as opposed to the French who are aligned with the Christians, marinites in particular. And so this will all be tied in with a sort of minorization of the way that imperialism plays out in later periods, but it will have these deep roots in the 17th century with a type of Christian Zionism, Protestant Christian Zionism that's emerging. that in some cases is favorable to Jews becoming, you know, coming into England and participating

in English society, in other cases as an instrument into territorializing, colonizing Palestine, you know, as part of that project, apart from, you know, the general ideas about carving out space in, you know, what later will be seen as a declining Ottoman state. Well, I'm going to want to ask you in a moment maybe about that era of British, French, Russian kind of patronage, you might say, and undermining the sovereignty of Ottoman governance by having patronage and claiming patronage over these different religious minorities of the East that recalls that question that, you know, we had about the, you know, the fame. article by Jonathan Riley Smith about crusading as an act of love because with an act of charity in order to protect, you know, Eastern Christians that they had a special responsibility for, that we were sort of talking about and humanitarian intervention. But before we get to that,

just to come back a little bit to another moment, an episode you mentioned, but I wanted to ask a little bit more about as we go forward and think about what's happening in the Ottoman Empire. Jews and other religious groups in the Ottoman Empire as a major contrast to what we were discussing in that European landscape of, you know, religious purification that turns into a kind of racial, ethnic and racial purification of political space and political rights, is that episode you mentioned that, you know, as a consequence of the expulsions and forced conversions that are part of, you know, the unifying of most of the Iberian Peninsula and the two Spanish kingdoms in 1492, Castile and Aragon and so on, that there was, Muslims were subjected, you know,

over the course of a couple of hundred years, but all the remaining Muslims in the, you know, in the peninsula and the Emirate of Granada are now subjects to these Spanish monarchs are ultimately forcibly converted and not accepted and integrated. They're always regarded as outsiders. But there was expulsion earlier expulsion of Jews. And you mentioned that Biasid the second Ottoman emperor welcomed them into the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps we could talk a little bit more about what were the kinds of conditions of religious groups and minorities in the Ottoman Empire. We've alluded to medieval Islamic kind of conditions of incorporation in various ways as part of this Mediterranean-wide pattern, but maybe it's worth as a backdrop to understand a little bit more. What was the kind of

pattern, you know, of religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire? And why did they welcome all of these Jews from, Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula? The Ottoman, you know, patterns of conquests actually replicate many ways the earlier patterns of expansion of the Arab invasions because they were not intent on mass conversion and you know slowly grew out of you know over several centuries of this the smaller states that were sort of nestled to the east of the Byzantine Empire and whenever they took a city they didn't again forcibly convert the population there would be Greeks living there. There would be Armenians living in their midst as well.

And they were part in many ways, you know, the conquest of the Balkans, again, it was very similar to that of the conquest of Andalusia. They were invited in by rival Christian groups in the same way as the North Africans came into, North African Muslims came into Spain in 1750. 750. So you see this kind of expansion. And in that case, it's also in tandem with Sufism. Sufism plays a major role in sort of forging out, creating new beachheads, cultural beachheads,

and slow conversion processes, especially in southeastern Europe and in parts of what is today, Western Turkey. So you have this pattern that's established before the Ottomans even get to, conquer Constantinople in 1453. And at that point, yes, they converted many churches into mosques, but they left many in place. And in many respects, they replaced the Byzantine arrangement with the Greek church where the Sultan took the place of the Byzantine emperor in even appointing or recognizing the head of the Greek church. So there are many ways. in which they inserted themselves in this situation. So there was an established pattern there in place in 1450s.

And as they expanded, I would almost argue that they maintain that polytheistic, you know, multi-religious frontier as a way to safeguard against the exclusionary nature of Western Europe. And so you see these borderlands that they conquered, they were able to conquer areas, in which they were opposed to Catholics, you know, the Bosnian Christians. And so these became borderlands or splinter Christian groups who found themselves, you know, better accommodated under Muslim rule. In fact, at one point, Luther said, better the Turk rule by the Turk than the rule by Rome. There was actually a coin printed like that.

Well, that certainly was the feeling of any Eastern Orthodox, you know, that were subjected in places like Crete or whatever under Venetian rule to, you know, they preferred the Ottomans, you know, to the... Well, and Greece and the Peloponnesist, yeah. So this is a situation, you know, there were indigenous Byzantine Jews. There were Arab Jews in the areas after early 16th century that were conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt. And Iraq. Iraq came later. Yeah, in the 1550. In 1550, but a huge Jewish population.

Yeah, a huge Jewish population in Baghdad. But, you know, so in the, you know, when the Jews were being expelled from Spain, which clearly was a policy that was timed with the conquest of Granada. You know, that it was clearly an ethno-religious policy. Now we're going to tackle Muslims. We want to get rid of the last of the Jews. And it wasn't just, as people have argued, for the sake of, you know, facilitating the inquisition and confining converted Jews. But it was because of this feeling that we have yet another population to assimilate and, you know, and they eliminated them.

And I think also to intimidate the Muslims and saying this is the alternative, right? And, you know, and a few years later, they forcibly converted all the Muslims. So you have this mass migration in 1492 that really was a miserable situation. But Jews did not go directly to the Ottoman Empire. They went in stages. But the Ottomans were very aware of this. They were very aware of what was happening in Andalusia. They would be very aware when the Spaniards went to expel Muslims in 1609.

And they actually tried to figure out some way where they could coordinate with the Protestant provinces to the north of what had been, you know, part of Habsburg, Spain, and make a sort of common front against Catholics. So they were very aware of this religious dynamic within Europe. And I think had a lot to do with, in addition to a sort of principled relationship that owes to Quranic values about non-Muslims, but particularly people of the book, other monotheists, but was conjoined with a politic, a pragmatic politic, toward a multi-religious state. And so when Jews found themselves, you know, without homeland, some of them trickled, they trickled into Italy. There were many who settled there. There was eventually a larger wave that went into the Ottoman Empire,

and they were resettled in cities where the Ottomans felt that they could breathe life into cities that had been depopulated had once had large Greek populations. And one of those, the most important of which is today called Thessaloniki, Solonica, according to the Ottomans. And for many centuries, it had a Jewish plurality. It had more Jews in one urban center than any place on earth. And then there were communities in Istanbul, in Izmir. And then, as I said, And it's these Sephardic communities that eventually basically overwhelmed the earlier Greek Jews who were smaller in number and lack the kind of influence.

And many of these early Jews who came there, especially those who had mercantile connections, served the Ottoman Sultan and the Ottoman court directly in a variety of different capacities. But one more thing I want to say there, because I think the Ottomans always had their eye on this persecution that was going on in Europe, whether it was Protestants in Hungary. They were very much involved in the Reformation. They recognized that they could find allies among Protestants, but they also... And other groups like that. Yeah, but they also, and I think this map might that you will see

later on that was done by the Sephardic Jewish community of the Ottoman Empire in the early 18th century, probably had to do with some kind of petition to help core religionists in the Hobsburg Empire. Because in the 1730s, the Habsburgs were about to expel the entire Jewish community of Prague. And according to one Austrian historian, it was a letter from the Ottomans that dissuaded them because they said, look it, and you clearly, there was a Jewish influence, you know, a Jewish petition going to the court. But you, you know, why are you expelling these people who are, you know, bring prosperity, you know, are hardworking and stuff like that? And if you don't want them, we'll take them. We'll take them again. I mean, they make reference to the

expulsions in Spain. In fact, that's a refrain that you see go from this period onward in Ottoman history and in Ottoman Jewish history. That's interesting. Yeah. So you're suggesting in a way that it does become part of Ottoman self-conscious political culture that we are more tolerant and receptive to Jews who are being persecuted in Europe. And if they want to leave, they could come, you know, to the Ottoman land. Protestants too. Yeah, and Protestants. Yes, right. That's right. Interesting. Protestants in the wars of the Ugonauts. Yeah, Ugonauts will find their way to the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, Hungarian Protestants, and then the 1840s, 1848, the Ottomans taken the refugees from the revolutions, you know, and from the Balkans,

from Hungary, from Germany, and some of them will stay on, convert to Islam, or become part of the Ottoman administration. So it is, it is, you know, you're saying there is a pathway of revolutionary left to Muslim that happened. Because 1848, those were major revolutions that are very important part of. Yeah, and they, yeah, and those refugees, Italians, the Ottomans were one of the, you know, one of the, the countries to which, you know, in trying to rid this population of revolutionaries, they were peeled. So there was actually thousands of migrants into the Ottoman Empire after 1848. in these multilateral negotiations about sort of removing the revolutionaries from Europe and putting them someplace else. So, yeah, I mean, the other thing I have to say that I think is very important is because two, seven things happen because of the nature of the anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim persecutions that happened from the medieval period from the First Crusade onward.

The first is Europe is eventually purged of all of its indigenous Muslim populations up until the Balkans. The Balkans remain because they're under Ottoman rule from the 14th century onward. So there's no more Muslims except in one condition, which is as slaves, yeah, and particularly as galley slaves. The second is that Jewish populations are not in Western Europe. They are completely, you know, the French expel them. They allow them to come back. Then they expel them again. Then there'll be small communities in the south, in some of the training cities.

But Italy will be an exception and will have eventually will ghettoize their Jews, whether it's in so-called cosmopolitan. That's the reason why it's famous for having the new institution of the ghetto is because they're almost a place where there's still Jewish communities, right? Yeah, and in Germany, but there'll be repeated purges during the 18, during the 1350s, there will be mass murder of the Jews during the bubonic plagues. And what eventually happens from the 14th century onward, and then Spain, which has a huge Jewish community, forcibly converted in 1390s, expelled, you know,

1492, the rest subjected to the Inquisition, is this migration eastward to Eastern Europe. And again, I think it's no coincidence that Eastern Europe remains more diverse because of the pressure of the Ottomans on their borders. And so the majority of the Jewish communities of Europe are not in the West at all after 1500. They are in Poland, and in these areas between empires. Ukraine means frontier. Yeah, these frontier, there'll be a mass murder in the 17th century. There will be pogroms, and it's after those pogroms that the Ottomans conquer

that part of Ukraine slash Poland, Podolia, and are welcomed by the Jews as saviors. So, you know, what we're talking about, wait one sec, sorry, the European Jewish community is not a Western European Jewish community. That's a sort of fallacy. It is an Eastern European. The majority of Jews are saved by moving east and end up in sort of greater Poland, if you will, Ukraine, Lithuania, these regions. Because of the steady mass murder, looting, expulsion, you know, accusations of well poisoning, spreading place. Yeah. And yeah, the blood libel.

Host desecration, blood libel. Yeah. And that happens in Poland too. But the vast majority are projected by the decentralized Polish state. And it's many lords who have these large areas of Latifundia and require a sort of more urbanized presence. presence that they find utility in these smaller Jewish communities that work within this the second feudalism, but in this region. I mean, the Spinozas are a minority of a minority. Right, right. Well, and they are actually some of those, that's just because of the unique nature of the low countries,

Dutch republics, and many of these are of course people, communities, communities, who are Sephardic, who actually fled. And they didn't end up going to the Ottoman Empire, as the vast majority of them did. They, in small, scattered communities, found some refuge in a few enclaves within Western Europe that had very unique or different kinds of conditions. So that's, I think, the point. I mean, what I'm gaining from this, I think the conclusion, you know, for this part of our discussion and the end of this episode is really to pay attention to the fact that there's a long duet history here of persecution of Jews and Muslims who are being excluded, marginalized, forcibly converted, then still cannot be incorporated and are expelled even post-conversion. And that

most of the Jews from kind of Western Europe where they've not been forcibly converted or slaughtered have basically moved and migrated to areas and territories in central and eastern part of Europe where Eastern Europe, let's say Eastern Europe, where there is more of a dynamic of toleration or at least the persistence of these. communities they manage to survive because there is very close a model that is rather different in terms of how religious minorities are incorporated into society in the Ottoman Empire as the example that puts kind of a political pressure to accommodate because otherwise these valuable populations might just welcome Ottoman rule and actually

collaborate with them or migrate to the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, I have found evidence in the Ottoman archives of Jews actually either provisioning or even as spies for the Ottoman in the 17th and 18th centuries. There's a great deal of sympathy for Ottoman rulers. Well, Eliahu Kapsali, chief head rabbi of the Romaniot community in Crete is, you know, busy dreaming of the Messiah and he thinks that might be the Ottoman Empire who's going to come and save them from this Latin Catholic oppression that they're living under. And what you might say is that the long period of history of persecution begins with the false charge of Jews being

allies of the Muslims and ends up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy because of persistent hundreds of years of persecution that there are some cases of Jewish communities in Eastern Europe that see the Ottomans or Eastern part of the Mediterranean who see the Ottomans as a hopeful possibility for a more liberated condition for themselves after suffering a millennia or more of harsh, anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish suppression. So I think we're going to have to move and talk in a moment in our next episode about what is the prospects for liberation and emancipation. of the Jews in the modern period, how did that go?

I think that's an important part of the story that you have something to say about. Okay, thank you.