Giovanni Bellini. Venetian embassy to the Mamluks in Damascus in 1511 / Musée du Louvre, Paris
In the final lecture of her series on the persecution of Jews and Muslims in the West, medieval historian Irina Varyash examines the typical driving forces behind discrimination against people of different faiths as well as the dangers posed by a lack of tolerance.
This series of lectures is devoted to the topic of segregation laws and is intended to demonstrate the means humanity has resorted to in the course of its history to designate otherness. The very need to label someone else who lives nearby but is different is connected, as we found out, to a deep-seated need to identify oneself and protect one’s identity. The fact that we become aware of ourselves through a complex thought process, which consists of separating what is ours from what pertains to others, ourselves from others, and finding the ‘self’ only in opposition to something outside us, manifests itself at different levels of existence. For instance, it manifests in an individual’s life as they are born and growing up. They first perceive themselves as one with their parents and as they mature, they learn to say ‘I’, eventually leaving their parents’ home. In global history, which mixes peoples, languages, and cultures, it manifests when, faced with a different way of life, foreign customs, and beliefs, people learn to understand themselves better, to distinguish their own characteristics, to protect themselves from confusion and dispersion. But they also learn to find common interests and, in general, to somehow regulate their relations while taking into account any differences they discover between each other.
However, being aware of oneself and protecting one’s own identity is not at all the same as forcing others to follow your rules. This is, in fact, the main characteristic of the segregation and discrimination strategies invented by humanity over several millennia of its existence—the compulsory nature of the rules. Even well-known practices of, say, arranging life inside a fenced-off settlement or quarter ordered by political power turned into an obligation, which very quickly came to be associated in the public consciousness not only with a group’s peculiarity but also with its strange, alien uniqueness. The differences turned into an insurmountable abyss. Alienation turned into enmity. Social tension turned into aggression.
Antisemitic riots in Paris / Collection KHARBINE-TAPABOR/Legion Media
The coercive nature of segregation regulations, as we sought to show, deprived society of internal flexibility and prevented self-organization. Where once, before the introduction of mandatory rules, people had followed economic and social needs, they now blindly obeyed the norm, which, perhaps not immediately but inevitably with the development of society—in fifty or a hundred years—came into conflict with economic and social interests.
Submitting to the idée fixe of achieving a certain true integrity through social unification, European civilization has systematically inflicted the most severe blows on itself. At the very end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic kings expelled the Jews from Spain. They were all given the choice of either selling all their property and leaving or converting to Christianity. A hundred years later, the descendants of Muslims, the Moriscos, were expelled from Spain. Hundreds of thousands of people ceased their economic activities, ceased to participate in the organization of life and even in its reproduction, and left the territory of Spain. Their knowledge, professional experience, and connections were in demand in other parts of the world and brought them tremendous income there.
Edwin Long. The Moorish Proselytes of Archbishop Ximenes at Granada in 1500. 1873. The conversion was forced / Getty Images
Jews were specially invited to take up residence in Italian cities interested in the development of international trade and finance. Both Jews and Moriscos moved to the Ottoman Empire in large numbers. Spain survived the first wave of emigration only thanks to the colossal resources that started flowing in from its colonies in the New World. The irony of history was that the ‘their own’ Jews and Muslims had been replaced by ‘alien’ Indians—pagans, and savages in the eyes of the conquistadors—whose place among the human race was seriously discussed in the Spanish scientific literature of the time. However, they had to learn to manage this human resource as well, which took time and effort. The second wave of emigration inflicted the most severe blow on the Spanish economy, and these consequences could not be compensated for by any profits from the colonies.
Piero della Francesca. Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. 1452-1466 / Wikimedia commons
In the 1930–40s, the doctrine of extermination of the Jewish people was formulated in Germany, six million people were killed, and a huge number of people fled from Germany and other European countries. It is well known that in the second half of the twentieth century, German leadership made a significant effort to restore the Jewish diaspora, which, as it turned out, had constituted an important part of the intellectual, economic, and cultural shape of the country.
History teaches us that segregation and discriminatory measures always result in irreparable losses. And this pattern works not only in cases like the ones we have just discussed, brought to their extreme expression.
NSDAP members and a motley dissolute group of German men reading antisemitic newspaper. 1930s / Alamy
Today, we live in a global world full of diversity and connections. In general, how we live depends on our ability to accept others as they are while preserving ourselves at the same time. Will we move forward and grow as thinking and creative beings? Will we make a difference for the better in the lives of the people around us? Will we ensure that our children never attach any markings onto their clothes, or are not afraid to go outside specific areas, or to fall in love with whomever they like?
To achieve this, it is useful to learn to understand the hidden internal forces that drive the mechanisms of segregation. Behind any discriminatory norm or segregationist rule, there are always at least two forces, and their directions of action may coincide or oppose.
The first force is pragmatism. The intention of extracting benefits from a politically suppressed alien population, of exploiting it and forcing it to participate in economic life on one’s own terms, is often the true basis for the introduction of certain restrictive measures. For example, the eviction of people of other faiths into special, often newly created, quarters during the capture of a city was undertaken so that the conquerors could settle in the old and comfortable parts of that city. And restricting the right to leave the country helped preserve the working and tax-paying population.
Jewish family of Salonika (Thessaloniki) in 1917. it was the only Jewish-majority city in Europe / Alamy
The second force, as we have tried to show, is fear—ordinary human fear born from a sense of one’s own weaknesses. It was precisely this, one might even say civilizational, fear that Western culture experienced in the East during the crusades. On the one hand, the West tried, with all its might, to integrate into the highly profitable Mediterranean trade, which was then dominated by the Muslim civilization and Byzantium. However, it did not have much success until the thirteenth century, only making it more aggressive. On the other hand, the West felt awed by the powerful and luxurious civilization of the East, rich in fabulous treasures and great wisdom.
Fear often turns out to be a much stronger driving force than we credit it for, and an idea born of it can overcome common sense and turn into an obsessive phobia. And then the Romans destroy the Temple, the Bolsheviks demolish churches, the Chinese build the Great Wall, and white people introduce public places of recreation for themselves—this series of historical examples can continue ad infinitum.
Poster for the 1912 film «The Life of Buffalo Bill» /Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Film Company, New York City
However, at the same time, it is very important to remember that no idea or intention of political power can be successful without the active support of society. It is the local officials, the authorities represented by city councils, class assemblies, professional communities, et cetera, that actually implement any decrees and orders. They often turn out to be even more rigid and cruel in their individual choices, which tend to fuse together their urge for profit and their metaphysical fear. This is exactly how the Spanish officials appear to us, seizing Muslims and accusing them of having sexual relations with Christian women. Ordinary townspeople listening to their preacher, citizens listening to the Fuhrer—they all participated in turning an idea into a social discriminatory practice.
So the Pope, a caliph, and a party leader can all come up with a discriminatory rule, but only the willingness of the people to support such an idea, or to show indifference to it, determines history. This is probably the difference between the Western European and the Middle Eastern experiences in the Middle Ages and early modern era. In the Arab caliphate, in Fatimid Egypt and in the Ottoman Empire, the pragmatism and common sense of the population overcame the discriminatory ideas put forward by the authorities from time to time. We did indeed see that the idea of distinct clothing for non-believers was written down for the first time by Caliph Omar II. Yes, Caliph al-Hakim in the eleventh century forced Christians to wear huge wooden crosses, and the Ottoman Sultan Murad III banned Jewish women from wearing silk clothes. But these were isolated episodes that characterize these rulers—they do not characterize those state’s policies nor the mentality of their people. In pre-modern times, there was no anti-Semitism or persecution of Christians in the Middle East or in Central Asia. Religious tolerance and patronage of the arts, sciences, medicine, and various trades were the real treasure trove that this civilization possessed.
To summarize, we would like to note that discriminatory laws have never existed naturally or to begin with in any society or state; they arose in certain conditions and always violated social peace and ultimately cost humanity dearly.
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