THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN THE WEST

The yellow cloth patch with the inscription ‘Jude’ (meaning ‘Jew’ in German), was introduced by the Nazi regime in 1939. It is believed that the first order to wear such a badge was issued in Poland by the Schutzstaffel (SS) Oberführer Kremer after the capture of Włocławek. All Jews, regardless of age or gender, were required to wear a yellow triangle no less than 15 centimeters in size on their backs. Soon, similar regulations were introduced in other territories in Poland and eastern Europe with official approval from the central authorities. However, in the Third Reich itself, an order regarding the distinctive badge was issued only in September 1941 and covered Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia.1¹It is worth noting that the reaction to such regulations was not uniform in Western European society. People, including within Germany itself, did not react in a clear and unanimous way to these rules. As a result, the authorities introduced the law in different lands at different times. In the Netherlands, this law came into effect in May 1942, and many Dutch people, trying to express their solidarity with their fellow Jewish citizens, also started sewing these badges onto their clothes. It is known that 300,000 yellow badges were made and distributed here with the inscription: ‘Jews and non-Jews are united in their struggle!’ The law was introduced in Belgium and France in July 1942, in Bulgaria in September 1942, in Greece in February 1943, in Hungary in April 1944. In Denmark, the Nazis did not succeed at all in introducing a law on the wearing of badges by Jews, largely thanks to the position taken and publicly expressed by the king of Denmark, Christian X.

In practice, Jews were ordered to wear the badge so that they could stand out. Most often, the badge carried the six-pointed Star of David, a very ancient symbol in the shape of a hexagram. In the nineteenth century, this symbol gained specific Jewish significance when it was adopted by the national Jewish movement.

Under the Nazi regime, the Star of David was made of yellow fabric with the word Jude or simply J. inscribed inside. Occasionally, Jews were required to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David or a round or triangular yellow metal badge with the letter J. In general, the color of the star could be different, and the shape of the patch could vary—from a circle, stripe, triangle, or inscription—and it could even contain the person’s address in the ghetto. The essence of the law remained the same in all these cases—the authorities sought to mark the Jewish population to make it identifiable in order to exterminate it.

The introduction of the badge was driven by the idea of ​​racial discrimination. Eventually, a piece of yellow fabric became a symbol of inhumanity in world culture. The ‘badge of shame’, as the Nazis called it, came to symbolize a collective disgrace for European civilization as World War II experiences were reconsidered.

The Holocaust, in which millions of innocent people died, is without a doubt one of the most horrific and bloodiest chapters in history. Paradoxically, while the Jews bore the brunt of this catastrophe, Europeans also interpreted it as a catastrophe of their own culture, the collapse of civilizational principles.

This interpretation arose from the realization that the events leading to such a terrifying and barbaric collapse were rooted, in some way or another, in societal norms and values shared across Europe.

The best minds of Europe, thinkers and philosophers, artists and scientists, have made great efforts to understand why and how the path led from an idea to the yellow mark and finally to the gas chamber. They recognized that history had been irrevocably split into the era before these events and the era after. One such person was the famous French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who wrote a brilliant postmodern study, titled Heidegger and “the Jews”. This book revealed the deep layers of their own thinking to European readers and explained the cause of the catastrophe of the initial memory, inherent in Jews, but different in its nature in comparison with the European one.

Lyotard noted that

Lyotard saw in Auschwitz a monstrous crime that was indirectly sanctioned by European thought itself, which seemed only concerned about its own safety and the comfort of its functioning, which could not fully understand and accept the inexpressible, even unimaginable, that organizes Jewish culture. Consequently, European thought latently sought to supplant and forget this something ‘other’ and, as a result, lost the most important of its foundations. After the introduction of the laws on wearing a yellow badge, any rational reasoning became suspicious.

Today, it may seem that the task of enlightened humanity is to overcome this long-standing trauma that goes back to a seemingly distant past. However, a quick look around is enough to understand that discrimination against people using scraps of coloured fabric can still occur today. For instance, as reported by CNN on 22 May 2001, the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan mandated the Hindus to wear a yellow badge in public places.

It is clear that the idea of ​​forcing people to wear a distinctive sign or mark on their clothing is a violation of human rights. It is a violation of the rights enshrined in the United Nations Charter on Human Rights and other international agreements on the protection of religious minorities. Why, then, is there a return today to these seemingly long-condemned practices?

Is it possible that these practices are much broader and older than Nazi Germany? What if humanity has already tried more than a few times to label those who were not understandable to the majority, those who remained different, thought differently, believed differently, lived their lives differently?

Indeed, the very idea of ​​wearing a distinctive badge first appeared quite a long time ago and was directly related to the living proximity of the Abrahamic religions. It was the presence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the same urban space back in the ninth century that gave birth to the idea of trying to distinguish them from each other. More precisely, the aim was to distinguish Jews and Christians from Muslims clearly and unambiguously. This idea first arose in the Middle East, in the capital of the Arab Caliphate, Baghdad, and it was first recorded under Caliph Omar II.

However, the Baghdad caliphs never ordered the people of the Bookithe Dhimmis, or Jews and Christians who believed in one God, had protected status in the lands of Islam unlike pagans to sew marks onto their clothes; they used other visual methods, which we will discuss in the next lecture. Perhaps the only exceptions were slaves whose owners were Jews or Christians. In this case, the slaves had to wear a piece of honey- or brown-colored fabric on their clothes four fingers across. But one Sicilian ruler, wanting to identify those of other faiths, approached this issue very straightforwardly. At the end of the ninth century, he ordered Christians to sew a piece of fabric in the shape of a pig onto their clothes and the Jews to sew on a piece of fabric in the shape of a donkey. This order should be considered more of a historical absurdity than a rule, especially since we know little about the application of these norms in practice. In Baghdad, in any case, decrees of this kind were updated and rewritten from time to time, which indicates that the local population showed absolute indifference to them and was in no hurry to implement them.

The Lateran Council of 1215, closely tied to the European region, should be considered a turning point in the history of discriminatory distinctive badges. As it often happens in history, the resolution adopted by the council and sanctioned by the Pope, therefore making it valid through the entire Latin Christian world, did not say a word about marks, patches, or any other badges on the clothes of people of other faiths. Nevertheless, it has become the reason why the kingdoms of Western Europe began to adopt decrees ordering the wearing of badges by Jews and Muslims.

The Fourth Lateran Council was convened by Pope Innocent III at the height of the Crusades and amid the Catholic Church’s struggle against the heresies of the Cathars and Waldensians in southern France. The Pope saw the Western Church as the highest authority for the entire Christian world, and the council was meant to further strengthen this position. One of the notable decrees of the council, attributed according to historians to the involvement of the Pope himself, is the canon of transubstantiation. This canon explains the transformation of wine and bread into the actual blood and flesh of Christ during the sacrament of the Eucharist. Another significant decree was the call to the Greeks, who had recently endured the sacking of Constantinople by the crusaders, urging them to reunite with the Catholics. This aimed to address the great schism of 1054, which led to the split of the united Christian church into the Orthodox and Catholic branches. With equal certainty, the council suppressed heresies, including the teachings of Joachim of Flora and Amalric of Bena, which were condemned as heretical, and endorsed the Fifth Crusade to the East against the infidels.

At the end of a long list of about seventy decrees, there were three that touched on the topic of people of other faiths—the Jews and Muslims. Here, in particular, the idea was set out that in those Christian lands where people of other faiths lived in large numbers, they were often no different from Christians in appearance. This could lead to confusion, as a result of which men and women of different faiths may enter a sinful relationship due to ignorance. This practice was declared by the council to be dangerous for Christians and had to be cut short.

This resolution of the Lateran Council remained unheeded for quite a long time, but from the second half of the thirteenth century, in different parts of Western Christendom, royal decrees requiring Jews to wear a special badge on their outer clothing began to appear.

Towards the end of King Henry III's reign (1216–72), a decree mandating the wearing of a mark on clothing was implemented in England. He ordered a ‘tabula’ to be worn in a prominent place, and his son King Edward I (1272–1307) ordered a piece of yellow taffeta six fingers long and three fingers wide to be sewed onto a Jewish person’s clothing. All Jews over seven years of age were required to wear this badge.

In France, all the decisions of papal legates or local church councils were most likely unsuccessful. Only under Louis IX (1226–70), several decades after the Lateran Council, was a royal decree ordering Jews to wear a round sign, a rota (wheel), on their outer clothing issued. This decree was then reiterated under Philip the Bold, Philip the Fair, Louis X, and Philip V. The fact that it was enforced reluctantly is noteworthy, especially considering that, according to the sovereign's orders, the attire of a Jew accused of not wearing the mandated mark would be confiscated in favor of the informant. This round mark was supposed to be yellow or red and white (the round field is divided vertically in half), placed on the chest, hood, or belt, sometimes on the back. It was required to ‘decorate’ the clothes of every male or female Jew after the age of seven or, according to another version, thirteen. If the decree was violated a second time, the offender was obliged to pay a fine. The pragmatic King Philip the Fair, who knew how to get money even from bishops (as illustrated by a famous incident involving annates and silver), saw an opportunity to bolster his treasury through the Jewish issue. Now, the Jews could purchase their distinctive marks only from the royal tax collectors and at a fixed price.

On the Iberian Peninsula, where many Jews and Muslims had lived since the early Middle Ages, the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council was essentially introduced twice. In the thirteenth century, all attempts to establish such a practice were unsuccessful since it caused serious resistance from people of other faiths. Muslims and Jews in the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, Portugal, and the lands of the Aragonese Crown saw the promulgation of such regulations as an attack on their rights and a gross violation of the privileges granted to them by the royal authorities. In response to orders from bishops or decrees from kings, they wrote petitions to the sovereign's offices, in which they made it clear that they intended to leave the kingdom if their opinion was not heard and move to Muslim countries. This backlash was so powerful, and the heterodox population in these kingdoms was so significant, that even the Pope had to make concessions and suspend the effect of this decree across the Iberian Peninsula.

As for the kings, they were in no hurry to introduce such measures, realizing that they would lead to a disruption of social peace and the loss of subjects who regularly and significantly replenished the treasury. The only force that showed interest in introducing the mark in the thirteenth century were the bishops, both in England and in France, as well as in many other European regions.

The second wave of interest in this issue in the Iberian Peninsula occurred at the end of the fourteenth and the early fifteenth century. It was not associated with papal orders, but with the local Cortes, that is, the class-representative institutions that had existed under the kings in all the kingdoms of the peninsula. This is where the initiative to introduce distinctive marks for people of other faiths came from. Citizens and nobles in Spain, as well as in some cities in Italy, considered such norms useful. As a result, for example, in Castile, after a request from the Cortes and the famous sermons of the Dominican Vicente Ferrer, the wearing of red marks was introduced for Jews in 1412.

In the 1390s, the Catalan, Aragonese, and Valencian Cortes adopted rulings with approximately the same wording on several occasions: Muslims had to wear a strip or bandage made of yellow woolen fabric on the right sleeve near the shoulder so that it was visible. If the clothes themselves were yellow, then it would be a strip of red fabric. The Jews had to wear a red one made of fabric half a palm wide. Sometimes, the bandage took the form of two stripes. Those who violated this norm would be punished with 300 lashes or a fine. In fairness, it should be noted that historians do not have any documents confirming any instances of accusation and particularly punishment of Saracens or Jews for disregarding these decrees.

The appearance of regulations on wearing a distinctive badge in Sicily and Italy dates back to the mid-late thirteenth century, to a church council in Budapest (then Ofen). In Germany, the compulsory wearing of a mark was first introduced in 1434 in Augsburg. It was extended to the entire empire in 1530 and to the Austrian lands in 1551. While in Hungary and Germany, it was also a yellow circle and, as a rule, required to be worn only by men, in the kingdom of Sicily, it was a light blue stripe in the shape of the Greek letter ‘τ’. Curiously, the advocates for the introduction of segregation marks were the enlightened monarch Frederick II and the humanist cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.

And this is just a short list in which the decisions of local church councils and most of the local secular statutes of the late Middle Ages have not been taken into account. Let’s overlook those since it is already clear how viable the very idea of ​​segregation on religious grounds was in the medieval consciousness and how rooted in legislative tradition was the norm on wearing a mark on outer clothing.

Finally, even if the inhabitants of a certain city or land were affected by a norm they were unaccustomed to and which they considered unacceptable, they could avoid complying with it in various ways. For example, representatives of the Muslim communities of Lleida, Tortosa, and many other Catalan and Aragonese communities, both royal and seigneurial, together with their masters—the Count of Prades, the Count of Montcada, the ruler of Amposta, of Asca, and the Master of the Hospitallers—signed an agreement with the royal treasurer to pay a certain amount in exchange for not wearing a distinctive badge. Similarly, a decree updated by the Cortes was canceled by King Martin at the beginning of the fifteenth century after a Muslim delegation arrived at the court, which most likely presented the king not only with a petition, but also with gifts. There are known cases when kings issued permission for specific groups not to comply with the norm of wearing a mark as a courtesy to their Granadian neighbor, the emir, who was pleading for the protection of his fellow believers.

Interestingly enough, the requirement to wear a distinctive badge on clothing did not apply to courtiers and visitors, foreigners of a different faith in Germany, France, or Spain. Likewise, in the sixteenth century, when Spanish Jews had left the Iberian Peninsula in large numbers and moved to Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries, the old laws in force there did not apply to them. The new communities that appeared there, who were sometimes very wealthy and noble, were not subject to the previous regulations, which applied to the Jews who lived there in the fourteenth century and their descendants.

In truth, historians have very little visual material—paintings, church drawings or book miniatures—where Jews and Christians are depicted with a distinctive badge on their clothing. Perhaps the exception here is the Crusades’ chronicles, which, of course, are a very specific and biased genre. Neither in the Spanish retablos or in the ceremonial royal manuscripts (like the Cantigas de Santa Maria dedicated to Alfonso X), nor in French or English illustrated manuscripts were Jews and Muslims visually distinguished—by a mark, bandage on the sleeve, or some letter sewn on clothes—despite their frequent appearances in biblical stories, hagiographic images, and parables. This is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the view that the practice differed from the legal norm.

In those places where the mark was actually sewn on, this practice became especially noticeable in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries among the Jews as by that time Europe had practically no Muslim population of its own. From the end of the sixteenth century, the practice of Jews wearing a distinctive badge on their clothing ceased to be imposed, and in the eighteenth century, it gradually faded away. Where the wearing of badges did not occur organically in Europe, it was abolished by the French Revolution and the revolutionary troops during the Napoleonic Wars.

Thus, when thinking about discriminatory badges, we should remember that what we’re dealing with is not a history of Nazi anti-Jewish policies that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. This is a conflict as old as the world and humanity itself between ‘us’ and ‘the other’, which inevitably poses the question to each of us: ‘Who am I, and can I consider myself a full-fledged person if I refuse this to another only on the grounds that they wear strange clothes, speak an unknown language or pray to another god?’

Of course, the idea of ​​segregation of the different has always had deep social and economic foundations, which we will talk about later. Now, it seems important to pay attention to the fact that the idea of ​​marking people of other faiths, which was born in the Middle Ages and was characteristic primarily of civilizations with a high proportion of urban populations (the Middle East, European cities of the developed Middle Ages, and the Modern Age), was concentrated on the confessional identity of a Jew, Muslim, or Christian. Baghdad caliphs, Popes and European monarchs used the mark not only to protect their coreligionists but also to encourage adherents of other religions to convert to the true faith.

Jews who converted to Christianity, influenced by the sermons of Vicente Ferrer, were considered by the preacher—who had an excellent command of both the Hebrew language and Jewish texts—as born anew in Christ, with the path to salvation now open to them, according to his teachings. The Muslim system for governing Dhimmi communities primarily aimed at their conversion to Islam, driven initially by economic incentives, with the ultimate goal of achieving full understanding of God and genuine salvation.

In any case, neither Christians nor Muslims ever had physical violence against their subjects of other faiths in mind. The Latins sought to use the infidels in their own way. The Arab Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and notably Mughal India have historically been highly appealing destinations for Jewish emigrants from Europe, as well as accommodating to their sizable Christian and Jewish communities. The concept of segregation in these regions was intertwined with traditional social structures and a strong emphasis on education.

Only the Nazi ideology combined the idea of ​​segregation of the other with the idea of ​​racial inferiority. Religion entered the blood, ethnicity replaced religious affiliation. But it was precisely this seemingly small change in thought that became fatal because it is impossible to rewrite DNA or be born again not in the spirit but in the body. Flesh that did not meet the standard or ideal was subject to extermination, and this idea, which for some time remained just a verbal construction, materialized suddenly, horribly, and irreparably at one point in history.

Jewish leaders called on their fellow Jews to ‘wear that yellow mark with pride!’, and many at first did not understand the danger that lay behind the ‘idea’, woven and sewn on one’s sleeve, precisely because they saw in it something that had already happened before.

Studying this issue today, we have no right to make such a mistake for the sake of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. In the twenty-first century, it should be remembered that an idea can turn into a yellow badge, that under certain circumstances people can easily move from the desire to distinguish themselves from others to the desire to exterminate people that are different.

Anticipating the questions of an enlightened listener, let's say that humanity, over the long history of its existence, has invented many more ways to mark otherness than just a badge on outer clothing. As a rule, segregation measures were not limited to appearance and easily degenerated into discriminatory ones. This, of course, has a scientific explanation.

In the next lecture, we will talk about hats, ribbons on women's bedspreads, haircuts, and beards. A special subject of conversation will be the practice of creating special neighborhoods, ‘ghettos’, and regulating the sexual life of people of various faiths. As a result of such a comprehensive study of the issue, we will be able to understand the difference between the Western European and Middle Eastern approaches to distinct populations.