Sharing the Same Fate: Muslims and Jews of the Balkans · 53cooperate with the Christians in the empire. From this time the Chris-
tians began to gain power and the Jews began to lose their privileged
positions. Parallel to this development, anti-Semitism began to be seen
in the Christian groups of the Ottoman Empire. It had religious, histori-
cal, economic, and psychological roots. Olga Todorova states, “A specific
continuation of the Gospel motif about the Jewish decadence, the idea
of ritual murder by the Jews, was born in Western Europe in the age of
the Crusades and became accessible to the Orthodox world a couple of
centuries later.”^7
In Ottoman society, the first blood libel accusations were observed in
1530, when Armenian priests and notables of Amasya, a small town in
Central Anatolia, accused the Jews of the city of slaughtering an Arme-
nian boy. They attacked the Jews and plundered their quarter. Sometime
later, the Greeks similarly accused the Jews and ravaged their quarter.
Accusations continued. Western diplomats began to be involved in the
blood libel troubles in the Ottoman society in the nineteenth century.
These kind of accusations and attacks of the Greeks and Armenians were
supported by the local European consuls.^8 The same anti-Semitic climate
also existed in the Balkans. From the Balkan Orthodox angle, the Jews
were killing Christian children for their blood in order to add it to their
bread, and they were treacherous and unclean in the physical and moral
sense. “The Jew in folklore is an acting enemy of Christianity.”^9
The nineteenth century has been defined as the age of nationalism in
European history. The idea of nationalism was born in Western Europe
and transported to the East. In the Balkan conception of nationalism, “the
other” had an important role. In Balkan nationalism, “the other” was the
Ottoman, and the Jews were their partners and historical enemies. Balkan
Christian revolutionaries perceived Muslims and Jews as threats to their
existence. From their point of view, the Muslims represented Ottoman
rule. Since the Jews voluntarily became subjects of the Ottoman Empire
and therefore were protected by the authorities, Christian nations of the
Balkans generally adopted a negative policy toward them. They associ-
ated the Jews with the Ottomans. When the Serbian revolts were destroy-
ing the Ottoman towns in 1804, they did not distinguish Jews from the
Muslims. They labeled the Jews Turkish protectees and spies.^10 During
the Greek Revolution, revolutionaries put the Jews in the same chilling
category as they put the Turks, namely, aliens. Therefore, being a Jew was
even more dangerous than being a Turk.^11