I open this thread to shed light on yet another dark chapter of Balkan
history, which biased Christian westerners have never bothered to
uncover.
Little is known of the faith of the Balkan Jews during the turbulent
times of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. An uniniterested Europe, never
bothered to uncover or record the the deaths of Balkan Jews and Turks
during the Greek war of independence. Sympathetic to chrisian Greeks,
Europeans chose to portray that war as a liberations. But as a result
of that struggle for liberation, in the spring of 1820 Turkish and
Jewish communities in Greece disapereared suddenly and finally,
without leaving any traces. For them that was no war of indepence or
liberation, but a war of total extermination. While I knew about the
faith of the Turkish population killed during that war, I knew little
about the faith of the Jews, until I came upon this article written by
Shira Shoenberg:
By supporting the Ottoman Empire, the Jews curried
disfavor with the Christian Orthodox Greeks. In 1821-1829, during the
Greek War of Independence, thousands of Jews were massacred alongside
the Ottoman Turks. The Jewish communities of Mistras, Tripolis, Kalamata
and Patras were completely destroyed. A few survivors moved north to
areas still under Ottoman rule.
In the late 19th century, Greece attempted
to regain the southern Balkan territories historically associated with
Greek history and language. Jews and other ethnic groups were subject
to "Hellenization," a movement to force them into accepting
Greek custom and language. The Romaniot Jews of southern and northwestern
Greece were already Hellenized to a large extent. The Hellinization
was mostly problematic for the Sepharadim who only came under Greek
rule after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.
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To me Jews seem to be yet another ethnicity in the long list of victims of Hellenic chauvinism.
Source:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Greece.html#Ottoman%20RuleWhat do you know about the Jews of Greece during the Greek war of independence?
Edited by bg_turk - 25-Nov-2006 at 14:12