THE PERSECUTIONS OF THE JEWS AND MUSLIMS IN THE WEST

In reality, for a long time, the very concept of a ‘ghetto’ in European languages ​​meant an isolated part of the city specially allocated for Hebrews and later Jews. It dates back to the Venetian ghetto, which was established in 1516 in the Cannaregio area, located between canals, when the Council of Ten, one of the major governing bodies of the Republic of Venice, demanded that all the Jews of the city move to a place specially designated for them. The ghetto was closed off and had its own gates manned by Christian guards. Jews were not supposed to leave the ghetto at night and on Christian holidays. However, within their quarter, the Jews had autonomy.

The etymology of the word ‘ghetto’ does not have a single accepted explanation. Perhaps it comes from an old foundry, known as ghetto or getto, located in the area before the establishment of the Hebrew quarter in Venice. However, contemporary historians have discovered that the name of the settlement aligns with the Hebrew name of the document of divorce or separation, known as a get or ghet. Two other connections are also curious and noteworthy: in Yiddish, gehektes means ‘closed’, and in Italian, borghetto means ‘little town’ or ‘a small part of a city’. In a broader sense, the term began to be used in the twentieth century to designate a residential area where people of an ethnic, racial, or religious minority live in isolation.

Clearly, ghettos arose as another way of segregating people of other faiths, this time by physically isolating them from the main population of the city. In the Modern Era, in Central and Eastern Europe, these were special neighborhoods that were usually overcrowded since the authorities did not allow them to expand despite their population growing. Therefore, they were characterized by unusually tall buildings, high population density, poverty, and unsanitary conditions. One might even say that over time, it was the poverty of the ghettos that was perceived as their main distinguishing feature.

However, as you might have already guessed, as we now know about segregation regulations based on appearance, separate living areas for representatives of a religious minority was not invented by the Venetians in the sixteenth century but existed in social practice long before that. Thus, the very first evidence of the establishment of a special region called Delta, where Jews were forcibly resettled to, most likely dates back to 38 AD, during the anti-Jewish pogrom in Alexandria. However, this policy did not become a widespread practice there.

In pre-Islamic times in the Middle East and after the formation of the Arab caliphate, there were so many religious ‘minorities’, as we tried to show in the previous lecture, that the very idea of ​​isolating them spatially could not be considered a good one. In addition, people of other faiths, Christians for example, traditionally occupied prominent positions among the officials of the caliphate, which periodically caused discontent among the common people, and one way or another, they defended the interests of their fellow believers.

Of course, the Middle Ages are famous for their specific social structure that was expressed in communalism. It can be said that the communal way of life is one of the characteristic features of the Middle Ages. Both in the East, and even more so in the West, people lived in communities.

In medieval times, they could be built on different principles. There were territorial communities that united residents of the same area, professional corporations—for example, shoemakers or carpenters, carpet merchants, or doctors—as well as knight orders and spiritual associations. There were also religious communities like the Alhamas of the Jews and Saracens in Spain or the Miletes of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.

Medieval artisans preferred to settle close to each other, often on the same street or on several adjacent streets, which formed a special quarter within the city. To this day, on maps of old cities you can find a Silver Street, where jewelers like silversmiths lived, or a Baker Street, a Potter Lane, a butchers' quarter. For example, in Bukhara today, there are neighborhoods—mahallas—called Weavers, Nailers, or the butchers’ quarters called Gaukushon and Murgkush (cow and poultry slaughterers respectively).

Similarly, separately, trading colonies of foreigners could settle in a city; for example, there were communities of Genoese or Pisans in Spain, Catalans in Alexandria, Arabs in Bukhara (the Arabon Quarter). And in pre-Muslim Yathrib (Medina), the city was divided into tribal quarters. Religious communities also appeared next to them. Again, in Bukhara, Mahalla Kukhna (the Old Quarter) is one of the most famous Jewish quarters of the Islamic Middle Ages and Modern Era. Of course, such neighborhoods that allowed fellow believers to maintain their usual way of life, follow their daily religious rules and norms of communication, and practice their worship were the most natural and familiar form of settlement.

Muslims built mosques and madrassas in their neighborhoods, Christians built churches, Jews built synagogues. There were shops selling halal meat in Muslim quarters, and shops selling kosher meat in Jewish quarters, and they had their own slaughterers. Each religious community had its own spiritual leaders and officials and managed internal affairs independently, which was also set by the confession. In the event of a quarrel, the division of inheritance, or the violation of a contract, every member of the community had the right to go to ‘their’ court, and their case would be dealt with by ‘their’ judge, who would sort it out based on ‘their’ law. Of course, if a serious criminal offense was committed, the matter might not be limited to its own court within the community. But in ordinary day-to-day life, it was the community that was the environment where everyday life took place and holidays of fellow believers were celebrated.

The religious community, therefore, in the Middle Ages was both a human collective and a social space with its own norms of behavior, opportunities, and a system for protecting interests. It was a physical space tied to a certain territory with buildings: houses, streets, places of worship, schools, workshops, shops, markets, common bakeries, guest houses, et cetera.

Medieval languages showed this difference well and had two words, one denoting a group of people and the other meaning a physical space on the map. In the Iberian Peninsula, for example, there were communities of Muslims and Jews, Aljama de Moros/Judios, Aljama Sarraacenorum/Judeorum, and there were also quarters, moreria and juderia. We can be a part of this bit of history today by going on a virtual or live journey, and historical quarters are today protected cultural monuments—Judiaria in Lisbon, Judería in Toledo, Judería in Girona. Similarly, Jewish quarters are known in many cities of medieval Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East: Paris, Istanbul, Bukhara, Samarkand, et cetera. Muslim quarters in Europe and Christian quarters in Eastern and Central Asia experienced a more complex fate between the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, and have often already lost their pristine medieval integrity.

The infrastructure of a religious quarter in the Middle Ages was determined, among other things, by religious rules and the needs of its inhabitants. The service sector also took into account religious needs. Travelers, for example, preferred to stay in the hotels of their fellow believers, not because they considered people of other religions unholy, dirty, or inferior, but because they were confident that they would be served keeping all the rules and details of their religious requirements in mind.

We dwell on this in such detail to give the listener the opportunity to feel that the communal way of life came from the very essence of religiousness, which set the rhythm of social life and individual destiny from birth to death, with its sacred rites, annual holidays, daily rules in food, and household rituals. It was exactly why many Muslim and Jewish communities in the West themselves preferred to settle in separate quarters of Christian cities.

In this sense, it is very significant how Muslim leaders behaved during the Reconquista, when an Islamic city was conquered by a Christian king. Besides signing a bilateral treaty with him and becoming his vassals, maintaining their faith, laws and autonomy, they also often expressed a desire to be allocated a special quarter in the city. Sometimes, Christian authorities themselves evicted Muslims and Jews from the main city, and thus, new neighborhoods arose. In these cases, the leaders of the communities, whose petitions are known to historians, indicate that they did not consider resettlement itself offensive or dangerous; they only sought to protect their property and maintain a convenient route to their pastures. It was a conflict between the winner and the vanquished, and not a confessional conflict, since the Muslims themselves were not averse to isolating themselves from the Christian conquerors of their lands. There were cases when Muslims surrounded their neighborhoods with walls, locked the gates at night, and posted their own guards. This was the case, for example, in the city of Xàtiva, where the Muslim community was traditionally large and wealthy.

Thus, one charter of the Aragonese king Jaime II dated 1310 tells a story truly comparable to the biblical parable of Joseph the Beautiful. It talks about the fate of a boy from the moreria of Xàtiva. One night, at the behest of his elder sister, who had married a Christian and had been baptized herself, and who had exhorted her brother to do the same, he went into the Muslim quarter for something she had left there. He was seized by the guards as he was crawling through a hole in the gate of the moreria. The little criminal was brought to trial by the Saracens, and they knew that he wanted to become a Christian, and when they could not convince him to change his mind, they tried him unfairly. As the letter stated, he was stripped of his status as a free man and turned into a royal slave. Despite having become a slave, the boy was actually baptized, which, according to the laws of that time, should have restored his freedom, but a royal Christian official sold him to some private person. Having learned about this, the king wanted the boy to gain his freedom, and ordered this official to find him and buy him from his owner for the same price.

In Western Europe, Muslim and Jewish settlements, of course, looked different. These could be individual streets, or entire neighborhoods, or whole cities within cities—this depended primarily on the size of the community.

In such cases, of course, there was no need for a separate quarter. It is noteworthy that there could well be settlements nearby, including large trading cities, in which Muslims and Christians did not ‘separate’ after the Reconquista, but continued to live together, having houses on the same streets. Moreover, Muslims and Jews could have houses in their own quarters and in the Christian part of the city at the same time. Further, Christians easily bought houses in neighborhoods of other faiths. For example, by the end of the fourteenth century, in the moreria in Valencia, eighty houses belonged to Christians and about fifteen to seventeen to Saracens. Christian authorities tried to fight this practice, and there were two reasons for this. The first one we already know from the decrees concerning the appearance of people of other faiths. The Christians’ proximity to Jews and Muslims in a common physical space seemed dangerous to the church authorities. The ban on Christians living together with people of other faiths is often attributed to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), but this is not entirely true. The first attempts to suppress this practice were made in 1179 at the Third Lateran Council, which prohibited Saracens and Jews from having Christian servants, referring to household servants who helped with raising children and chores.

Attempts to introduce such a norm in the lands of the Spanish kingdoms brought resistance from both the infidels and the Christians, which, more clearly than anything else, indicates that such a practice was widespread. In the twelfth century, Christians could not only be neighbors on the same street, but they could also live under the same roof with Muslims or Jews and share meals with them. In the eyes of the popes and bishops, this was too close and therefore engendered dangerous physical contact. Just as with the regulations regarding appearance, the Spanish kings were in no hurry to implement the council's decrees and only did this as a formality under pressure from local bishops, without much concern for the local implementation of these decrees.

Their attitude towards living together inside the city was different 150 years later. Through the fourteenth century, Spanish Christians were forbidden to buy houses in morerias, to build their houses on lands adjacent to the Saracen quarters, former Muslim converts were ordered to sell their houses in morerias so that they would not communicate with the Moors. Occasionally, the authorities would order Saracens to buy back the houses of Christians located in morerias, and to lock up their houses opposite churches and sell their homes next to it.

These decrees, which often did not have national significance but applied to one specific settlement or city, were nevertheless motivated by the same desire to isolate ourselves from people of different faiths, to exclude the very possibility of physical proximity.

There was a second reason too. The kings were interested in preserving the heterodox population because it was subject to higher taxes and often paid extraordinary levies. For example, if Christians, attracted by the wealth of the morerias, began to displace Muslims from their quarters, the latter would go to the lands of the nobles, preferring the power of the sovereign lords to that of the king. This was, of course, extremely unprofitable for the treasury. That is why the kings’ decrees did not prohibit Muslims from having houses in the Christian part of the city but Christians from buying houses in morerias. For example, Jaime II did not allow Christians to buy property in Crivillén until they accepted the obligation to ‘pay the king everything that the Saracens pay’.

It is obvious that here too the ideological orientation of the church hierarchs and the fiscal interests of the secular authorities conflicted with each other. Medieval society, the ‘third player’ in this complex historical game, represented by the townspeople, nobles, local officials, and royal officials, as a rule, took quite a pragmatic approach to these issues.

In the eyes of a minor official, a letter from a bishop or a royal decree was an excellent way to demand additional taxes from the non-Christian community. The kings, too, willingly accepted compensations and gifts from delegations of Jews or Saracens who would ‘redeem’, in such a simple manner, their ancient privileges—not to wear strange hairstyles, or specially tailored clothes, or a distinctive sign, or to keep their houses in whichever part of town those were located. The Christian society showed deep indifference to issues of faith and to the heterodoxy of its neighbors, the Jews and Muslims, until it started to think that they affected its economic interests—or, until an ardent preacher appeared in the city, whose words fell on fertile soil simply because those people suffered from the hardships of famine, war, or epidemics.

However, we emphasize that in these two situations, the ideas were exactly opposite, and the goals pursued by different parts of society also turned out to be different. A pragmatic streak made the Christians see the non-Christians as a source of income and labor. In order to keep this in order, both the royal authorities and social communities tried to prevent Jews and Muslims from leaving.

Moreover, they periodically tried to limit their right to leave the country, change their residences within the country, and go on trips abroad whether to visit relatives, for study, trade, or pilgrimage. Restrictions of this kind went against the agreements that these communities had signed with the Christian authorities. Of course, the communities resisted, and they did not accept these innovations. They wrote petitions, received confirmation of their rights, or left illegally. In the fourteenth century, the illegal emigration of Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula without paying duties or having an official license to exit became a noticeable phenomenon. The reason for it was precisely the advent of discriminatory regulations. Kings were losing subjects, and the Muslims who decided to take such a step risked falling into the hands of ill-meaning people and pirates.

On the contrary, the religious feeling, often coupled with superstition, aroused the fear of people of other faiths in Christian society, especially among ordinary townspeople. They started to see the cause of their own misfortunes in them, to suddenly attribute terrible sins and crimes to them, and to strive to alienate them in various ways. To this end, Christians could evict these communities, expel them from a city or settlement, commit a pogrom, wanting to physically destroy their homes or even themselves, and finally convert them to the true faith.

The secular authorities tried to control this instinct as best they could since its impulses posed a threat to their pragmatic interests. However, there are known cases of pogroms in Jewish quarters in Germany during the First Crusade, in France in the middle of the fourteenth century, and in Muslim and Jewish quarters in Spain at the end of the fourteenth century.

In fairness, it should be noted that the East had its share of oppression too. For example, in fourteenth-century Khwarazm, Jews and Christians were mandated to have no more than 100 houses. There were occasional attacks on their neighborhoods and even street battles between different communities—this was how ordinary townspeople’s social tensions spilled out. Their consciousness, as we have already noted on several occasions, was religious, which means that they were inclined to look for the causes and consequences of all phenomena in the realm of the sacred.

There were periods in the history of Western Europe when populations of other faiths were rejected at the level of political power, and this exclusion was usually irreversible. Thus, in 1290, the Jews were expelled from England by King Edward I; in 1394 they were expelled from France by King Charles VI; and at the very end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic kings expelled them from Spain and Louis XII from Provence. In 1501, Muslims were expelled from Spain. As an alternative, though, they were all offered the choice to convert to Christianity.

To summarize, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the requirement for separate settlements certainly contained a segregationist and discriminatory connotation. However, in the very form of organization of life in physical spaces—quarters, ravals, slobodas, mahallas—known since ancient times, there was no idea of ​​isolation and only the idea of ​​autonomy. Human passions and fears, passing through the funnel of political power, were cast into discriminatory decrees.

Thus, special neighborhoods in history should be divided into at least three types, which are completely different in their purpose and social functions. The first includes neighborhoods that arise from the initiative of the community itself with the goal of independently organizing its internal life. However, it is worth noting that under unfavorable conditions, the right to own one’s own quarter turned into an obligation if there was a tendency towards the formation of the second type. This includes settlements that exist in order to isolate a different population from the majority.

The second type of settlement is always introduced forcibly, for example, through the decisions of political authorities. Such settlements include the Venetian ghetto of 1516, manned with guards and sanctioned by the decree of the Council of Ten. In much more recent times, in the case of the Chicago ghetto of the mid-twentieth century, immortalized in song by Elvis Presley, the isolation of the minority is achieved instead with the use of social tools such as poverty, lack of education, lack of employment opportunities, income, et cetera.

Finally, the third type of neighborhood, Nazi ghettos, were created not for isolation but for the annihilation of the population forcibly gathered in them. An example here would be the ghettos in Warsaw or Bialystok.

Such a detailed analysis of the history of ghettos makes it possible to understand how important it is not to succumb to the charm of external forms. Instead, we should strive to distinguish the internal content behind the apparent homogeneity of facts and phenomena: namely, the social function and idea that can arbitrarily transform a traditional form, distorting it beyond recognition.