Sites of Pluralism: Community Politics in the Middle East by Firat Oruc

Author:Firat Oruc [Oruc, Firat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, political science, World, Middle Eastern
ISBN: 9780190052713
Google: kCieDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-05-15T00:31:22.876551+00:00

The Jewish quarter as a case of inclusive/exclusive space/place

Judaism developed and spread in a unique urban context. This has allowed some to argue that a historic Jewish tradition of self-segregation was always driven by urban necessity. The community clustered around the synagogue because it was an essential structure for their worship. It was also the most convenient way to observe the Sabbath, at which a certain concentration of Jews was necessary to meet the requirement of minion (ten men for regular prayers, three times a day, every day). Because of dietary laws, Jews also needed access to a kosher butcher.

In Europe, the Jewish quarter was typically an enforced ghetto. For example, Jews in Venice during the early fifteenth century were confined to it to protect gentiles from them. The ghetto can thus be interpreted as a punitive space. But its existence also resulted in the evolution of a rich, uniquely Jewish cultural life out of a need to forge a world apart. One reflection of these conditions is that Yiddish came to be spoken prominently in European cities where Jews were excluded.

The experience of Islamic cities with minority Jewish populations was more diverse and multicultural. There was, for example, no strategy of theological Puritanism toward Jews. In Islam, Jews are accepted as a “people of the book,” rather than being seen as fundamentally other. Thus, one of the major differences between European and Islamic urban experience for Jews was that the gates of the European ghetto were locked from the outside at the discretion of the gentiles. By contrast, the mellah was locked from the inside at night—as were the gates of the other quarters of a typical Islamic city. These gates might also be locked during the Sabbath and on religious holidays at the discretion of its inhabitants.

Despite the apparent isolation or exclusion of Jews into walled quarters in the Islamic world, these spaces were thus very porous, and strong social and economic ties existed between Muslims and Jews within the larger urban community. What architecturally looks like exclusion therefore was far more complicated in social terms. Indeed, one has to look at the history of who was being “excluded” and why to truly understand the difference in social reality between the Jewish quarters of Europe and the Middle East. It is thus interesting that many a Muslim ruler greatly valued Jews because they were useful for furthering his own prosperity. In fact, an Ottoman sultan once commented that Ferdinand and Isabel’s expulsion of the Jews from Spain had delivered guaranteed wealth into the hands of their enemies.32 For this reason, some Muslim rulers sought to protect Jews from urban unrest and theft by outside tribes—Jews were often victims of such attacks because they traditionally dealt in portable capital and goods rather than investments in agriculture and land. Hence, they sometimes relocated the Jewish community so that it was next to the Kasbah.33

In hindsight, the concentration of the Jewish population into the mellah may have benefited both Jews and Muslims in various ways.

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