Instead of Muslim or Christian tolerance & intolerance emerging out of the situation, they become reduced to cultural essences.

You seem to be of a like mind to me.

Have you ever considered becoming a software engineer?

Great post.

Razib said--

Which brings me to my final point: attitudes and sentiments about Muslim Spain are not about history or an analysis of the data, they are about the beliefs we hold about the modern world in regards to the values we deem to be precious. That is, my friend, scholar though he is, was not really interested in the nature of life in medieval Spain, he was making a comment about his adherence to the principle of religious toleration and the separation of church & state. Muslim Spain is simply a notional marker, a signal, the historical details are pretty much irrelevant, it is the legend that matters. I bring my friend's educational qualifications up because this is a person who is intellectual in orientation, but in hindsight I realize that bringing up the minutiae of historical detail is pointless, and fundamentally a distraction for him. The history is grist for the mill of ideology, not a thing in and of itself.

Yes. Most people by large margins care more about defending their moral dogmas, secular and/or religious, than they do about learning the truth in areas that touch upon those dogmas.

I’m not sure the task to changing people’s minds, at least to a degree, is quite so hopeless as you’re suggesting though. It sure isn’t easy though and sure doesn’t happen quickly. A huge and persistent assault with reality is required.

For instance at first most on the left and probably most in the center simply wouldn’t listen to evidence that Muslim intolerance towards unbelievers when they are in any position to reap advantage from acting upon it, is of a wholly different degree than lingering (or since 9/11 heightened) post Enlightenment Christian and post Christian and Jewish intolerance towards Muslims and other outsider confessions. Now that’s substantially changed but there’s still enormous reluctance to go very far in that direction or pursue possible logical conclusions, e.g. about the dangers of continuing mass Muslim immigration into Europe (as opposed to a much smaller slice of high IQ but friendly with Western ideals Muslim immigration).

I.e. not real smart? Don’t need you. We might need some who aren’t but there’s too much history of deep rooted Muslim antagonism towards the West for you to be the safer bet. Don’t buy into pretty much the whole Enlightenment package even though you are bright? Un, you’re not a good fit, and though your children could be there’s a big risk that they won’t given the critical masses of disaffected Muslims we’ve already got, so we think we’ll go with Chinese or Hindu etc. immigration instead.

As well I think a lot of the narrative about relative Muslim tolerance towards Christians and Jews was consciously or semi-consciously designed to shame Christians into taking care to bend over backwards in treating Jews and other minorities with special consideration. The awful tendency towards anti-Semitism within Christian society ESPECIALLY must be beaten back at the first suspicious whiff, it’s so prevalent in some inherently wicked Euro way, usually boiling down to a greater proclivity towards racism but sometimes something religious. (And certainly elements of it are true, if not sufficiently in context as you point out.)

Of course the Holocaust is the biggest club for beating home that message, but the Spanish Inquisition is right up there as well. Many liberal allies want the same message beaten home, and had little ardor for debunking this narrative in any way.

When did this significantly start to reverse? When Muslim terrorism, and rioting and muttering about Sharia areas of Western societies started being perceived as a real threat after 9/11 and various lesser terrorist acts in Europe. That’s at least the first those writing a different story got any significant attention and stopped being ENTIRELY dismissed as hate filled anti-Muslim bigots. Bat Y’Or for example. (She certainly has an agenda but then sometimes that’s necessary for a hugely reviled set of ideas to get any initial airing. That is sometimes it takes that sort of ardor to brave the winds of initial derision and shaming.)

Eastern Europe, backward as it is, has always had a high degree of religious and linguistic pluralism, with weak states and no overwhelming ethno-religious majority. Muslim (Tatar) and even Buddhist (Kalmyk) troops have served in Polish and Russian armies for centuries, and there have been Tatars in the Polish nobility since the battle of Grunewald / Tannenburg.

An interesting but often overlooked variation of the same theme is the ethnic tension that existed among various groups of same religion in al-Andalus. E.g. Arab Muslims and Berbers were often openly hostile to each other and more than once made alliances across religious lines. Berber - Jewish alliance in particular was much feared by Arabs. In some texts Arab authors even describe Berbers as crypto-Jews. In Granada there was a large scale massacre of Berbers by local Arab taifa-king. white slaves or so-called Slavs (Saqaliba)also had their own ethnic-political agenda and made shifting alliances with different players. Local warlords sometimes even changed religion (even several times)to find suitable new allies.

treating Jews and other minorities with special consideration.

this tendency predates the emancipation and emergence of a jewish intellectual class in the west. please don't be misled by kevin macdonald's overemphasis on the importance of jews in new intellectual movements and implicitly shoehorn everything into this model. the sinophilia (from leibniz to voltaire) in of the late 17th to mid-18th century was in large part motivated by gentile intellectual comparison of a 'secular' and technoratic state with the backward practices of european states with their established religions, and i think it is basically of a piece toward the romanticization of al-andalus.

in any case, i don't think it was semi-conscious for many. i think it is a pretty straightfoward comparison people wanted to make, "see, even muslims aren't bad as christians." but the romanticization of the other is pretty common and a recurrent feature of intellectuals who see problems in their own society (e.g., tacitus contrasting german cultural vitality with roman decadence).

people, please don't post as anonymous, and if you do, please identify yourself later so i can change the name.

tx.

I’m not sure the task to changing people’s minds, at least to a degree, is quite so hopeless as you’re suggesting though. It sure isn’t easy though and sure doesn’t happen quickly. A huge and persistent assault with reality is required.

most people are stupid. and even intelligent people are generally inclined to mine the sample space of historical data to fit their own preconceived biases. it isn't hard, there's a lot of info in there, it takes 10 minutes in google to find 10 talking points. a sincere interest in truth above all is a necessary precondition, and most people in many situations aren't motivated by this. rather, they want to validate their own prior position and win the current argument. i'm not saying everyone wants to lie about historical facts, but at the end of the day the point isn't the history at all, they're just illustrating their own ideological point. there's a place for that, myth making is an essential component of a healthy nationalism, and i think nationalism is often a good thing. but, it does get frustrating when people pretend as if their propoganda is actually reasoned analysis.

Have you ever considered becoming a software engineer?

dude, how do you think i put rice on the table?

I think good reputation of al-Andalus owes a lot to:

1. The idea of the Jewish 'Golden Age', which lasted the first couple of centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, magnified by the prestige Sephardi Jews held in the Jewish world for centuries.
2. the Protestant-inspired 'Black Legend' which presented Catholic Spain of the 16th century (and retroactively, of the late Middle Ages as well) in the worst possible light, which makes Andalus better off in retrospect.
3. In today's modern secular Spain Andalus is held up as an example of tolerant model for Spain to follow, as opposed to the discredited ideology of the Franco regime (which considered himself heir to Ferdinand and Isabella).
4. Andalus is today held up as proof that 'Eurabia' may not be so bad after all... (as in this documentary by former BBC and currently Al-Jazeera reporter Rageh Omaar).

This isn't to say that any of the above is untrue, but given how prominent (respectively) Protestants, Jews, Anticlericalists and Leftists have been to our understanding of the past, it's perfectly understandable that Andalus's good reputation may have been exagerrated.

Razib,
Muslims were a small minority in their domains for the first few centuries of Al-Andalus, so it was simply not practically feasible to engage in excessive religious persecution
So what you are saying is that minority-ruled colonial states tend to be more tolerant than those ruled by the indigenous majority? Sounds about right.

Anonymous,
the ethnic tension that existed among various groups of same religion in al-Andalus
Interesting. Where can I read about that?

to be more tolerant

...of other religious minorities :-)

the ethnic tension that existed among various groups of same religion in al-Andalus
Interesting. Where can I read about that?

this book has some snips.

I have wondered why nobody has romanticized the Turkish occupation of the Balkans. Christians and Jews enjoyed a similar protected-minority status in Ottoman Europe as they did in Andalus. And vassalage relationships crossed religious lines in the Balkans just as often as in the Iberian peninsula. Yet nobody holds up 15th-century Sofia as a model of religious harmony, in the same way that people idealize 10th-century Toledo. Why is Andalus the preferred historical example?

chairmanK: Why is Andalus the preferred historical example?

KingM: Have you ever seen The Alhambra?

Why is Andalus the preferred historical example?

some of the reasons have been enumerated (see what danny said). here are some reasons though:

1) we are heirs to western european civilization. so, we focus on western european states and their histories, and spain is a major one. also, as westerners we tend to focus on the spanish transmission of classical thought to the west during the medieval period, but the byzantine influence on the proto-renaissance in italy was significant, and yet relatively neglected.

2) the ottomans are closer in time than the muslims of spain. that is, the apogee of muslim power and inflence was between 700 and 1200. the apogee of ottoman power was in the 1500s, when the ottomans threatened central europe. in contrast, arab raids into central france were a facet of 8th century history. so that was water under the bridge.

3) the monarchy of isabella and ferdinand is a pretty good "evil" foil compared to the successor states of the ottoman empire in the balkans. do we want to lionize the serbs? part of it is the issue that danny alluded to earlier, our western history in the anglo-saxon world has a strong anti-catholic backstory, and most definitely anti-spanish. the spain which sent the armada was also the spain which was heir to the reconquista and was in the process of expelling the muslims and had expelled the jews.

I had been under the impression that eastern europe had less pluralism and tolerance than the west. Perhaps it was primarily jews (which westerners then heard stories from) who were kicked around, and we never heard about the treatment of Tatars and Kalmyks. It also seems to me that people more familiar with history think of empires as tolerant/cosmopolitan out of necessity compared to nation states (discussed here), while to the average person an empire is a big bad thing stomping on its subjected peoples (as this jokingly points out in cliche #133, the empire are always the bad guys, the kingdom good guys).

Different ethnicities are often lumped together as just Muslims, but we should expect variability in their behavior. Gary Brecher describes Berbers as being much more tolerant/easy-going than Arabs. People seem divided on Shia vs Sunni. Sometimes the Shia/Persians are known as extra-crazy suicidal "We love Pepsi-Cola and you love death" or "There is no fun in Islam" types, at other times they are remembered as once being rather secular, highly educated/intelligence and behaving cautiously (they didn't fight the Taliban despite some of their officials being killed, and while they fought Iraq they were clearly responding to an attack) while the Sunnis are the ones behind al Qaeda/Wahabbi islam that we need to look out for. Is there a major difference in what one Muslim statesmen referred to as the "indigestibility" of Muslims among different ethnic groups? The immigrant Turks in Germany don't seem as problematic as the South Asians of Britain (I think Razib has highlighted a poll showing how out-of-it some of them are) or the Africans of France (though some claim that the Algerians/Berbers were less involved in the recent riots than others from the Maghreb that identified more as black/poor than muslim) or the Lebanese of Australia. I've got a pretty fuzzy grasp of this, but it seems at least as important as whether or not Syria has a Sunni regime.

erhaps it was primarily jews (which westerners then heard stories from) who were kicked around,

where do you think they were kicked out of? most of the western nations kicked jews out in the middle ages. poland-lithuania was one of the few places where they could resettle and were welcomed.

Gary Brecher describes Berbers as being much more tolerant/easy-going than Arabs.

google "almohads."

Shia/Persians are known as extra-crazy suicidal

persians weren't shia until the 17th century. they were forced to convert by a turkic dynasty.

i'm a little confused about the rest of your comment. i'm fuzzy about your point.

The Eastern European example supports Razib's argument. The various minorities (Kalmyks, Tatars, Mennonites, Jews, etc.) were normally there because they were needed or useful. Those areas were often underpopulated or lacking in skilled personnel.

Rosy retrospection. It's even worse with contemporary events because you'd figure the person would know better either from personal memory or the fact that recent history tends to be overemphasized in popular culture, so that they'd pick it up just by being born during the same rough time-period.

Extreme case-in-point, complete with hagiography: JFK ("if only he were President again...")

readers interested the pluralism common in east central europe should read the reformation.

Hungary still has significant Protestant populations -- Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian. The world's oldest Unitarian churches are in a Hungarian-speaking area of Rumania.

You take into account, that a person like Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, was not possible to think of (was not possible to exist as he did) in a pure christian cultural environment?

And concerning Eastern Europe: You take into account, what is said for example by Heinrich Heine about the backwardness of catholic Poland of his times?

You take into account that counter-reformation in catholic Poland for MOST people (for example in the city of Thorn) had not so much to do with religious freedom?

I think it is not so important to say, that differences were quantitative or qualitative, if you only really be AWARE of the differences.

Suppression of freedom has to be at least as strong as the longing for freedom is. (Suppression of freedom is a mirror of the longing for freedom). May be in Muslim countries the longing for freedom wasn't and isn't as strong as it was in central and northern Europe.

May be, for example, ADHS-genes- and IQ-genes-frequencies were and are different.

So, we have examples, that muslim cultural influences, attitudes gave more freedom to central and northern Europe (Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and more of that).

Do we have examples, that christian influences in muslim countries of that time gave more freedom to the muslim culture?

razib

this tendency predates the emancipation and emergence of a jewish intellectual class in the west. please don't be misled by kevin macdonald's overemphasis on the importance of jews in new intellectual movements and implicitly shoehorn everything into this model.

The al-andalus-myth is an unhelpful example to argue against Macdonald.
Of course it originated with enlightenment thinkers. But according to Bernard Lewis and Priceton University Professor Mark Cohen it was given a scientific gloss by Jewish historians in the nineteenth century.

Danny wrote:
So what you are saying is that minority-ruled colonial states tend to be more tolerant than those ruled by the indigenous majority? Sounds about right.

South Africa? Guatamala? Aurangzeb? Bloody Mary (or Elizabeth I)? And if the rules only includes colonial states run by religious minorities -- its a pretty small population. I'm not convinced.

Eastern European states were pretty tolerant of the Jewish minority (as compared to England, etc). But extremely intolerant of Muslim minorities. Belgrade was once 10% Muslim. Budapest was a city of minarets. Difference: Ottomans.

Two comments on how tolerant Berbers are? Unlike those nasty Arabs? Is this part of a new set of Marty Peretz talking points? I Echo Razib: Google Almohad. Then Almoravid.

A couple of points:

In the 19th century, when European Jews came out of the ghetto and acquired wealth and education, the synagogues they built were usually in the 'Moorish' style of Andalus [e.g. Berlin, Budapest]. For the newly-modern Jews of that era it was important to have a 'Classical Civilization' in which it was possible to be 100% modern and participate in the general culture, and still remain 100% Jewish. Come to think of it, they rejected their Ashkenazi heritage in much the same way as Renaissance humanists rejected the Medieval heritage.

Ikram, all I was trying to say was that small group shouldn't try to impose their alien religion on everyone else (they can oppress them in other ways). Not a terribly interesting point to make.

Berber tolerance: Yeah, an argument that a given ethnic group is consistently more tolerant for hundred years is pretty feeble. Greater Berber openness is a modern phenomenon. Berbers resemble Kurds in being a Muslim people that did not have a literary language, and have thus been marginalized. With the rise of language-based nationalism, it's natural for Kurds and Berbers to reject not only Arab Nationalism, but also Islamic fundamentalism (given how Islam gives primacy to Arabic) - Saladin, a Kurd, must be spinning in his grave seeing his co-nationals are cooperating with the 'Crusaders' rather than fighting them (though he probably viewed the Crusades with less ideological lenses than we do).

In Portland, OR, the two synagogues I know of are both in a kind of Moorish style, with a dome instead of a steeple. They are two of the finest buildings in an architecturally pretty bland town.

Steeples are, and historically in changing cities there were bell-vs.-muezzin wars for control of the aural space of the city. With religious domination one sound would often (usually?) be suppressed.

Both Arab nationalism and Berber nationalism are mostly new (after 1800 for sure). Muslim identifications tended to be with Islam, with a sect of Islam, with a city, or with a clan. "Classical Arabic" had religious and cultural defined the educated class, but it was a language of Koranic experts and didn't define an ethnicity. "Arabic" was split up into dozens of local dialects.

In Ibn Battuta, the word "Arab" usually means "bedouin nomad and possible bandit". Batutta was a Berber but gained high status through a mastery of classical Arabic which only elite Arabs would have.

Regarding E. Europe, the point is really that the situation was fluid, not that there was consistent tolerance. Russia had pograms **because** they tolerated Jews, though -- they had a large jewish population. Austria-Hungary had a pluralistic, almost philo-Semitic policy with weak German / Hungarian domination.

After WWI many Czech and Hungarian Jews (even German Jews) were willing to be Czech or Hungarian patriots, but the dynamic of nationalism forbid that. Ernest Gellner has written a lot of interesting stuff about that.

CORRECTION: Steeples are belltowers, and historically in changing cities there were bell-vs.-muezzin wars for control of the aural space of the city. With religious domination one sound would often (usually?) be suppressed.

TGGP—

I had been under the impression that eastern europe had less pluralism and tolerance than the west. Perhaps it was primarily jews (which westerners then heard stories from) who were kicked around, and we never heard about the treatment of Tatars and Kalmyks.

We hear a lot about the instances of being kicked around (often to put it mildly) and out of various countries (unless they converted) and there was indeed a recurring great deal of that, but the fuller actual story is more complicate. Sort of a boom and bust cycle on steroids in various cascading regions of Europe for Jews in their niches.

For a number of reasons Jews frequently occupied advantageous middleman and upper middleman / high bourgeois positions in various European countries in the dark and middle ages. What they were virtually never allowed to do was own land (or certainly any grand amount of it farmed by subordinate Christians which was of course the ruling classes stock in trade in feudal times) or become members of the ruling classes (aristocracy). They couldn’t enter the militaries in any commanding position which of course were positions held by the aristocracy of various levels, and a major means of moving up in that sphere.

As is widely appreciated, the Catholic Church for a long time outlawed money lending (“usury”) and related financial profit making for Christians as immoral exploitation. But there was a need for such financial services that those profits induce, from factoring or financing the sale of agricultural or crafted goods as they are being created by buying them in process or before reaching their destination and then selling for what markets (and local mores) will allow, to local and high level money lending, including to kings raising armies. Jews often filled that niche, though by the time of the Hanseatic league in the Baltic and then the Renaissance in Italy there were certainly many gentile Christians as well or in grander positions filling the international finance niche, such as the Medici’s. Jews filled as well many profit oriented extra-feudal middle man activities including tax farming (sort of factoring tax collection) goldsmithing, and long distance trade, where cosmopolitan connections to other Jewish communities in different regions of Europe often by extended family relatedness was a great asset. The unassimilated nature of Jewish communities had it’s advantages in connections within and between a far flung network of Jewish communities, very widespread literacy among males, communities that nearly all lived in urban areas from Roman times and continued to thereafter or at least in towns, and high and / or growing intelligence. (See Cochran/Harpendig theory backed by some genetic evidence of rapidly increased Jewish IQ in around 800 years centered in the Middle Ages.) Though the “cosmopolitan Jew” with connections and loyalties far beyond the realm a particular Jewish community existed was often resented and thought suspicious, this niche and characteristic also facilitated pan European trade and finance.

A typical pattern was for rulers and sea merchants and sub-rulers (aristocrats) and so on to find Jews very useful initially especially when their realms or quasi independent trading cities were lagging and in need of a faster increase in commerce and revenues for rulers, especially to raise militaries. Rulers often appreciated that having or attracting in from other realms Jewish communities or ghettos was helpful towards those ends. Jews were not only often required to live separately sometimes even being able to apply their own community laws up to a point (a good way of attracting them in), but usually wanted to until more modern times.

After awhile these Christian rulers or influential other upper classes often found themselves too deeply in hock, and/or their peasantry and middle classes too resentful of their own deeply indebted status or how much of the value of their crops or crafts were extracted or seen to be extracted by the middlemen (blame the tax farmer, not your king or lord, particularly when he’s scapegoating the Jews to take the heat off himself). Some “outrage” against Christian sensibilities by Jews or a series of them are uncovered and made much noise about, or greatly exaggerated, or wholly invented, people riot, rulers and upper classes want to wipe out debts as do others, or be in a better bargaining position, so the Jews get kicked out of a realm, or suffer looting and murderous pogroms, or some of both depending on whether they’ll convert (perhaps first shorn of some assets) and so on. Or rules are shifted to the gentiles’ favor. This often didn’t happen until the Christian rulers felt that their own non-Jewish members could effectively fill the niches Jews in that realm had opened up or come to dominate. (Not that they were always completely right about that.) Sort of like in the modern world inviting in foreign companies to build factories or find and develop oil, and then after a while expropriating the success the expertise has produced by taking over and kicking out the alien group, or greatly changing the rules. Neither probably work as well after the less skilled locals have taken over but it’s at least initially better for wealth grabbing and certainly better for in group pride.

Of course that Jews did largely keep to themselves and look out for themselves in the dark and middle ages (who else would in any way they could trust in a durable way), practiced a notably different religion that had never accepted Jesus and “his ultimate messages of brotherly love for all”, etc, and at the same time were often earning what seemed like fat and unfair returns in activities the Church condemned as too immoral for Christians to engage in (or at least had long condemned) – well it was a combustible mixture. Which periodically did combust.

Rulers in many areas of central (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and then Eastern Europe (Poland, etc.) sought with success to induce Jewish communities to move there in the Middle Ages, so as to help fill these same niches (finance, tax farming, facilitating long distance trade) in their still lagging and backward realms, that was necessary to start to modernize and increase the overall prosperity or the rulers prosperity. Often in these areas Jews remained on relatively good terms with royalty and the upper nobility, and while considered socially “inferior” certainly to the nobility, to also be necessary and useful. Often enough the peasantry, craftsmen and sometimes competing gentile middlemen soon widely or at least frequently despised them as exploiting “capitalists” essentially (long before that term was invented).

The al-andalus-myth is an unhelpful example to argue against Macdonald.

i wasn't arguing against that specific example per se. just saying macdonald tends to shoehorn every example of and ideology he doesn't like as jewish derived. you don't need to go to him for most of the facts that he brings up, and drawing from him most definitely is one of sample biasing (conscious or unconscious).

Belgrade was once 10% Muslim. Budapest was a city of minarets.

but note that the south slav eastern euro states and romania still have significant muslim minorities.

South Africa? Guatamala? Aurangzeb? Bloody Mary (or Elizabeth I)? And if the rules only includes colonial states run by religious minorities -- its a pretty small population. I'm not convinced.


see my qualification: tolerance for other minorities, not necessarily the majority. this could be entirely self-interested, the trend toward religious toleration which james II pursued was simply because he was catholic and of course his sect would have benefited from a broader toleration of dissent. in the end he probably wanted to curb the toleration through re-catholicization, but in the short term a dampening down of the protestant orthodoxy (by which i mean anglicanism, not necessarily all protestants) was the best could probably achieve. in south africa i think groups like jews might very well be better served by minority rule, ceteris paribus, than majority rule, since minorities have an interest in not making being a minority a liability.

A minority not mentioned often enough is the Mennonites, German minority believers driven from W. Europe into Russia. They were a significant minority in parts of Russia, though they've mostly moved to North Dakota and Canada by now, I think.

John Emerson said—

Regarding E. Europe, the point is really that the situation was fluid, not that there was consistent tolerance. Russia had pograms **because** they tolerated Jews, though -- they had a large jewish population.

Well sort of. It’s true that in the late Middle Ages Jews were tolerated in separated community in various Russian towns outside of Muscovy, and perhaps sometimes encourage to settle by some local and national rulers. Ivan the Terrible did some clamping down and killing for those not willing to covert, but then he did lots of those things to lots of groups.

Most Jews came to be part of the Russian Empire because they had settled (often with invitation) in parts of the Polish-Lithuanian “Commonwealth” in the Middle Ages and in Ukraine, and Russia conquered most of both in the 18th century. Jews were already seen to have achieved often dominant positions in their traditional European niches and in other middleman roles in those locales, and Russia came to view this ambivalently due to it’s modernizing advantages but also with increasing alarm as crowding out the prospects of a Orthodox Christian Russian middle class, particularly as Jews began migrating in larger numbers to other areas of opportunity within European Russia.

Catherine the Great was first to declare by edict in 1791 that all Jews in Russia must move “back to” or to the Pale of Settlement, whose outline in far western Russian constituted much of the Poland-Lithuanian and Crimean lands which Russia had conquered. Jews periodically seeped out and took up middle man and other capitalist opportunities outside but it was always insecure, and was subject to periodic pogroms – which were a form of ethnic cleansing – though out the 19th century right up to the Bolshevik Revolution. Sometimes these occurred with the Pale of Settlement as well, or in areas that had been within it.

So in other words this further restricting of Jewish rights and officially sanctioned opportunities in Russia was occurring just as the Jewish Emancipation inspired by the Enlightenment and then especially brought in to practice by Napoleon during the French Revolutionary period, was transforming Jewish life elsewhere in Europe. It’s from this community of Jews, may of who emigrated to the US in the 1880 to WWI period but whose population size in Russia did not decrease due to large family sized, that the good majority of US Jews trace their roots. It’s also the from the community in or formerly from the Pale that the Bolsehviks recruited so early supporters of the Revolutionaries and middle and upper level government apparatchiks, including in the various secret police and gulag guards and enforcers.

John Emerson--

Mennonites seem a bit interesting to me in a quirky sect kind of way with a long history, but they don't seem to me to have AFFECTED very much or anyone. So far as I know.

So in other words this further restricting of Jewish rights and officially sanctioned opportunities in Russia was occurring just as the Jewish Emancipation inspired by the Enlightenment

...and by a german princess who was initially a patron of the enlightenment (though frederick the great was also simultaneously such, a freethinker and an anti-semite).

I think that in general efficiency, rationality, and centralization worked against the Jews until about 1800, and in favor of the Jews only after the centralized states liberalized.

Austria-Hungary was a unique case because it was technologically and economically pretty modern, but politically archaic, and as an empire it had a tolerance policy which effectively favored the Jews in intellectual and economic life while freezing them (and almost everybody else) out of political participation.

had a tolerance policy

...the royal family were an ethnic minority (germans).* and jews were german speaking generally in the empire.

* yes, i know that term 'ethnic minority' is a bit anachronistic before 1800 when germany identity was hegemonic.

The dual monarchy had two dominant peoples with their own spheres of influence. The same man was King of Hungary and King of Austria, but the zones were separate. The Empire was meaningfully aristocratic (much more so than England) with a very limited franchise and limited participation.

I'm finishing up some other stuff I'm doing and moving to an Austria-Hungarian emphasis. The intellectual power of that decadent fossil state has been enormous.

One other point, the barrios in Sevilla, Cordoba etc. where HIGHLY segregated, with physical walls separating each neighborhood and heavy pressure against intermarriage.

There was the Jewish quarter, the Muslim quarter and so forth. I am sure this went a long way to keeping the peace.

Any image of the different cultures "intermingling" a la the modern west is not accurate.

Well, I am not westerner :)) but I read GNXP almost everyday and recommend it to many friends of mine, so I am not the only easterner here. It will be good if some of you know more about Bulgaria. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the Nazi death camps during the Second World War. With exception of ten casualties of a fire, no one was killed. When Bulgarian Jews were forced to wear the Star of David, many of them attached to it the portraits of the King and the Royal Family. It is known that on request of the Bulgarian Queen Giovanna (a daughter of the Italian King Victor-Emmanuel) the Italian ambassador in Sofia, Count Magistrati, issued Italian passports and transit visas to Jews of foreign nationalities who lived in Bulgaria. It is a less known fact, however, that King Boris quietly helped thousands of Jews from Slovakia, first been sent to Hungary and then to Bulgaria, to receive transit visas to Palestine. Adult men were banned from normal military service and drafted to build roads instead. Over 11,000 Jews who lived in the occupied territories of Macedonia and Thrace could not be rescued. The claim of the Bulgarian Kingdom over Macedonia and Thrace was never recognized by the Third Reich and Bulgaria had no sovereignty over this region and its civilian population. This book is interesting and it is describing the facts in a pretty good way.
I can ensure you that I live in a peaceful Balkan country where many minorities live well and we celebrate all holidays with my neighbours /muslims, jews, christians, armenians/, so many holidays could be fun, I am telling you :)) please excuse my english I try my best.

Dess

Thanks. Interesting.

Roughly what percentage of Bulgarians are Muslims, Christians or Jews, or with that background if secular?

Dougjnn,
Thanks for the interest!
The country has an area of 42,855 square miles, and its population was approximately 7.76 million at the end of 2004, according to the National Statistical Institute. The majority of citizens, estimated at approximately 85 percent, identified themselves as Orthodox Christians. Muslims comprised the largest minority, estimated at approximately 13 percent; other minorities included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Gregorian-Armenian Christians, and others. Among the ethnic-Turkish minority, Islam was the predominant religion. While not officially enumerated, academic research estimated up to 40 percent of the population was atheist or agnostic. Official registration of religious organizations was handled by the Sofia City Court; it reported that twelve new denominations were registered between February 2005 and February 2006, bringing the total number of registered religious groups to seventy-three denominations in addition to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC), a nearly 20 percent increase.

Some religious minorities were concentrated geographically. The Rhodope Mountains (along the country's southern border with Greece) were home to many Muslims, including ethnic Turks, Roma, and "Pomaks" (descendents of Slavic Bulgarians who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule). Ethnic-Turkish and Roma Muslims also lived in large numbers in the northeast of the country, primarily in and around the cities of Shumen and Razgrad, as well as along the Black Sea coast. More than half of the country's Roman Catholics were located in the region around Plovdiv. Many members of the country's small Jewish community lived in Sofia, Rousse, and along the Black Sea coast. Protestants were dispersed more widely throughout the country. While clear statistics were not available, evangelical Protestant groups had particular success in attracting converts from among the Roma minority, and areas with large Roma populations tended also to have some of the highest percentages of Protestants.

According to a 2005 report of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, only 50 percent of the 6 million Bulgarians who identified themselves as Orthodox Christians participated in formal religious services. The same survey found that 90 percent of the country's estimated 70,000 Catholics regularly engaged in public worship. Approximately 30 percent of Catholics belonged to the Eastern Rite Uniate Church. The majority of Muslims, who were estimated at 750,000, were Sunni; 50,000 were classified as Shi'a. The Jewish community was estimated at 3,500, and approximately 50,000 were said to be evangelical Protestants. The report also noted that more than 100,000 Bulgarians practice "nontraditional" beliefs. (Orthodox Christianity, Hanafi Sunni Islam, Judaism, and Catholicism were generally understood to be "traditional" faiths.) Forty percent of these "nontraditional" practitioners were estimated to be Roma.

Statistics reported by the Council of Ministers Religious' Confessions Directorate reported slightly different figures, listing nearly 1 million Muslims and 150,000 evangelical Protestants, as well as 20,000 to 30,000 Armenian Christians and approximately 3,000 Jews.

Foreign missionaries from numerous denominations, including several Protestant churches, the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), and Jehovah's Witnesses, were active in the country.

Dess-

Well, thanks, kind of.

This kind of response makes me think you're working for the Bulgarian government. Why it would want to score points on this site in an effort to change opinion in the broader West (EU membership and NATO defense being the primary Bulgarian objectives re: Western opinion so far as I can tell) is a little beyond me at the moment. However, people interpret mandates broadly, often enough, and have imperfect judgment.

Dougjnn,

I am sorry for giving you the wrong impression that I work for the Government. I am far from the thought to change somebody's western opinion. May be it will be better for me if I keep reading this site without any comments /I do this already 3 years/ as I don't want to be misunderstood or to be accepted as somebody who makes "effort to change opinion in the broader West". It reminds me the saying: Seeing is believing!
Don't misunderstand me, please. I really like GNXP and I am scientist as well.