Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 419–423 Copyright © 2017 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.4.2.15 Towards a New History of Christians and Jews in Ottoman Society 3–5 July 2017, University of Oxford Summary In recent years, there have been significant developments in Ottoman history, Islamic history, and Eastern Christian and Jewish Studies, all of which promise to radically transform our understanding of the place of dhimmīs in Ottoman society. For example, we now know enough about religious identity to know that the idea of a “mosaic society” seems little more than a caricature of everyday life in the Ottoman world. Where religious communities were once regarded as organic, bounded units—the veritable “building blocks” of the Ottoman Empire—scholars now acknowledge the porousness of these boundaries owing to intermarriage, conversion to Islam, and the incidence of migration. Moreover, access to a wider range of sources has revealed how these communities were riven by deep divisions between clergy and laity, men and women, young and old. Where Christians and Jews were once described as “minorities” in Ottoman society, scholars now doubt the usefulness of a legal category that was developed in the twentieth century as a tool for understanding the pre-modern world. Instead, recent works have explored how networks of patronage, sociability, and trade gave certain individuals status and power, even when they did not constitute part of the “ruling religion.” Where normative rules in early Islam once formed the background to the study of Christians and Jews across a millennium of history, Ottoman historians today ask questions about how geography and locality influenced the everyday life of Ottoman subjects—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike. And although we are now skeptical about the existence of the millet system in the early modern period, further research is still needed in order to understand fully the mechanics of communal religious identity as it played out in Ottoman governance. Is it even possible to speak of a “common” approach to Christians and Jews across the wide geography and diverse contexts of Ottoman society? 420 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4.2 Historians have been exploring such questions for decades, yet the study of dhimmīs in the Ottoman Empire deserves renewed attention in light of several recent developments in historical writing. First, there remains a lingering sense of dhimmī communities as a sort of isolated archipelago surrounded by a sea of Islam. This vision of the past does not sit well with recent attempts, often inspired by early modern global history, to explore issues of circulation, mobility , and connectedness. Such approaches remind us of the modes of interaction that linked dhimmīs not only to their Muslim neighbors, friends, and patrons, but also to individuals and institutions far beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Second, when compared to recent literature on religious diversity in the early modern world, the study of dhimmīs has not benefitted enough from comparison to other contexts (Islamic ones such as the Mughals or the Safavids, but also European contexts such as the vast literature on the Reformation). Nor has the work on dhimmīs engaged enough with a growing and compelling literature on tolerance, coexistence, and how states and empires managed religious diversity in the early modern period. Thirdly, recent attention to the importance of kinship, intermarriage, and family provides another important window into such questions as the relationship between belief and practice, the potential for religious syncretism, and the processes whereby religious identity was constructed, expressed, and policed in the early modern world. Finally, despite a recent surge of interest in the study of dhimmīs from late antiquity to the nineteenth century, too many fences still separate the study of Christians and Jews from the study of Islam. Recent attempts to reinterpret the history of Islam, Christianity, and indeed secularism, in the Middle East, have unexplored consequences for our understanding of the history of dhimmīs. When placed alongside such developments, the literature on dhimmīs risks remaining “frozen in time” and untouched by the impressive work taking place by a new generation of...
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Dec 21, 2022
Asaf Harduf 
Open Access