The Outsiders

Refugees in Europe since 1492

Philipp Ther, Jeremiah Riemer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780691207131, 9780691179520
• eBook ISBN: 9780691195346
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The history of Europe as a continent of refugees

European history has been permeated with refugees. The Outsiders chronicles every major refugee movement since 1492, when the Catholic rulers of Spain set in motion the first mass flight and expulsion in modern European history. Philipp Ther provides needed perspective on today's "refugee crisis," demonstrating how Europe has taken in far greater numbers of refugees in earlier periods of its history, in wartime as well as peacetime. His sweeping narrative crosses the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, taking readers from the Middle East to the shores of America.

In this compelling book, Ther examines the major causes of mass flight, from religious intolerance and ethnic cleansing to political persecution and war. He describes the perils and traumas of flight and explains why refugees and asylum seekers have been welcomed in some periods—such as during the Cold War—and why they are rejected in times such as our own. He also examines the afterlives of the refugees in the receiving countries, which almost always benefited from admitting them. Tracing the lengthy routes of the refugees, he reconceptualizes Europe as a unit of geography and historiography. Turning to the history of refugees in the United States, Ther also discusses the anti-refugee politics of the Trump administration, explaining why they are un-American and bad for the country.

By setting mass flight against fifteen biographical case studies, and drawing on his subjects' experiences, itineraries, and personal convictions, Ther puts a human face on a global phenomenon that concerns all of us.

1

THE ROOTS OF INTOLERANCE: RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS AND RELIGIOUS REFUGEES

Narratives of flight and refugees were common as early as the Hebrew Bible. Abraham’s migration out of Canaan, the exodus of the Israelites from out of Egypt, the Babylonian exile, and numerous other episodes center on this theme. The New Testament is not far behind with its story of Mary and Joseph fleeing Herod’s henchmen and able to return to their home in the Galilee only after the king’s death.

The biblical texts already contain all the important motifs of flight and refuge: existential dangers and distress, ethnic conflicts, religious and political persecution. The reception of refugees described in the Bible is, on the one hand, underpinned by an ethical imperative to help the needy stranger. On the other, the Bible describes empty, sparsely inhabited swaths of land as the settlement places available to refugees. These conditions persist into much later history. Owing to the invasion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, epidemics of plague, and the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War, large sections of Europe were repeatedly depopulated. Increasing the number of residents and cultivating the land by settling it were therefore among the key elements of any government’s development policy. Imagining the “New World” as a presumably empty space also played a major role in the legends European settler colonies told about the Americas. As a rule, medieval and early modern Absolutist monarchs saw refugees and other immigrants as an asset. Far from being a burden or a threat, they were a potential source of economic power. Jewish, Protestant, and other refugees were even solicited.

1.1 The Spanish Muslims and Jews

The year 1492 is commonly regarded as the dawn of modern history. It also marks a deep caesura in the history of mass flight, because it began with an unprecedented persecution and cleansing of unwanted minorities. Just as Christopher Columbus was first setting foot on American soil, the Spanish troops of the Reconquista were vanquishing the last Muslim-governed kingdom on the Iberian peninsula. Although the terms of surrender, negotiated in a treaty, guaranteed free exercise of religion to the Muslims in Grenada, the new sovereigns violated these agreements and exerted massive pressure on their conquered subjects to convert. In 1499 the hard-pressed Muslims staged a rebellion that could only be brought under control after two years of ruthless warfare. Resistance, guerilla-like fighting, and retribution proved especially fierce in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Whereupon the government, and especially the Inquisition, cracked down even harder on the Muslim minority, issuing instructions for collective and compulsory baptism. Thousands of Muslims fled to Morocco to avoid conversion or settled in the coastal region around Valencia, where less severe laws were initially in force.¹ Emperor Charles V closed this gap in the laws and, between 1523 and 1526, extended compulsory baptism to every region of Spain. This anti-Islamic policy is attributable above all to the bigotry of the House of Castile and the Habsburgs, as well as to the Inquisition’s self-radicalization. There was, moreover, a foreign policy connection, since during those same years the Ottoman Empire conquered Hungary and expanded into the western Mediterranean as far as Algeria. Hence, throughout the sixteenth century, fear of a fifth column and an Ottoman intervention in Spain was not entirely unfounded.

Even conversion was not enough to guarantee peace for the descendants of the Spanish Moors, the so-called Moriscos. After another uprising in 1568–70 they were forced to leave the former Kingdom of Granada—all of them, without exception.² Once again, the uprising was suppressed with extreme brutality; after the siege and surrender of the Andalusian city of Galera, Don Juan de Austria (soon to be the victor in the 1571 naval battle of Lepanto, the decisive victory of the Christian Holy League over the Ottoman fleet), had around four hundred women and children killed. King Philip II did not even allow economic considerations to get in the way of persecuting Muslims. Although their massive flight led to the collapse of an irrigation system that had been built up over centuries and to a weakening of trade and commerce, the king nonetheless proceeded with the persecution of Muslims and Moriscos. In 1609/10, his successor Philip III issued deportation decrees against all Moriscos still in Spain. We cannot know with any precision how many fled between 1492 and 1614, because their departure took place largely in stages and over several generations.³ Leonard Harvey has put the number of those driven out of the Kingdom of Granada and the numerous Muslim communities on the Valencian coast at 300,000.

As so often happens in the history of flight and expulsion, the state cracked down not just on one minority but on several of them simultaneously. Spanish Jews had no ties to any great power threatening Christian Europe, and they had never been military adversaries, but the Church viewed them as a domestic threat. Shortly before the conquest of Granada, the Inquisition staged a ritual murder trial in Andalusia in which the chief defendant, a converted Jewish merchant, confessed under torture to desecrating the host and murdering Christian children. He was burned at the stake, and the aroused masses committed pogroms in several cities. The Spanish state and clergy thereupon gave the Jews a choice between forced baptism or exile. In 1492, and then after a second great wave of persecution in 1513, around 200,000 Jews fled Spain for North Africa, Italy, the Netherlands, and especially the Ottoman Empire.⁴ The fate of the Portuguese Jews ran a similar course; they had to leave their homeland in 1497, because the Spanish royal house had agreed to a dynastic tie with Portugal but insisted that the marriage, between Princess Isabella and King Manuel, could take place only under the condition that all Jews were thrown out of the country.

Like the Muslims, Iberian Jews found that not even conversion to Catholicism offered them durable protection, because, according to the principle of “limpieza di sangre” (purity of blood), the religious affiliation of the converted Marranos (the name is etymologically derived from the Spanish word for “pigs” and was meant to be an insult) was often traced back several generations, much as it had been with the Moriscos. Here, in principle, the Inquisition was obeying a logic similar to that followed by radical nationalists in the late nineteenth century, who introduced ethnically and racially defined criteria of ancestry to determine membership in a nation.

Little is known of the fate of the Muslim refugees (most of whom settled in what is today Morocco and Algeria), but we know a great deal about what happened to the Sephardic Jews. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced out of Iberia scattered all over Europe and adjoining regions along the Mediterranean (see Map 1). Some of them, as merchants, already had ties to Genoa, Pisa, Livorno, Venice, and Amsterdam, but most accepted an invitation from the Ottoman sultan and settled in Istanbul, Salonika, Sarajevo, Izmir, and other cities of the Ottoman Empire. As in early modern Poland and Prussia, the interest of the Ottomans lay in increasing the number of their subjects after population losses incurred in the costly conquest of Constantinople and the Balkans.⁵ Compared with this grave concern, the new subjects’ religion was of only secondary significance, which explains why Istanbul remained a majority Christian city even after 1453.

In the Ottoman Empire, the Sephardim were allowed to continue practicing their faith and operating their own schools and courts. This was the core principle of the so-called millet.⁶ This system of far-reaching autonomy for groups (rather than territories) was possible because the government did not intervene as closely in the lives of its citizens as a modern state does. The Ottomans demanded only that the Sephardim—and, analogously, their Christian subjects—pay their taxes and behave loyally. The system functioned well from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, but in the long run this rather radical grant of group autonomy weakened the state, because it could not be run as effectively as the Absolutist monarchies in Western and Central Europe. Russia, France, England, and the Habsburg Empire used the presence of Christian minorities (which in some regions were a majority) to claim authority as their protectors and intervene in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire.

MAP 1. Flight routes of Sephardic Jews leaving Spain and Portugal after 1492

Moreover, the Ottoman Empire was increasingly subjected to economic and great-power competition. Owing to Europe’s overseas expansion, the center of world economy had shifted to the West and the Atlantic world, while nineteenth-century colonialism had England and France impinging on the Ottoman Empire in Egypt and Algeria, much as the Russian Empire was doing from the north. Western Europe also gained the upper hand because of administrative reforms that centralized public administration, enabled each emerging nation-state to collect taxes throughout its territory, and strengthened the economy through mercantilism. Owing not least to the devastating defeats it suffered at the hand of Russia, the Ottoman Empire tried to join in this development. But the modernization of its administration, in the Tanzimat reforms in the middle third of the nineteenth century, was only partly successful because the highest offices of state continued to be sold, and the governors of individual provinces (vilâyets) then attempted to extract as much as they could out of their subjects. The social feudal order in the countryside was no less oppressive; a small stratum of large landowners and notables confronted a mass of poor peasants.

The conservative sultan Abdülhamid II, who began his reign in 1876, reacted to this external threat and to the domestic weakness of the Ottoman Empire (a few years before it had to declare a state bankruptcy) by calling off the Western-style reforms, suspending the imperial constitution that had just been drafted, and stressing the role of Islam as a state religion. After the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 and alongside similar developments in the Russian and German empires, a phase of nationalization or Turkification paved the way for the formation of an ethnically defined nation-state. Up to this point, the Sephardim had lived largely undisturbed and free to preserve not only their religion, but also Ladino, their language based on medieval Spanish. Yiddish, which migrating Jews brought to Poland from the Holy Roman Empire, also survived as a widely spoken language until the Holocaust.

Multilingualism and the coexistence of multiple religions are frequently touted as admirable features of Ottoman and Eastern European history, but the special status accorded different minorities also made them easy to identify and attack. This kind of vulnerability should be kept in mind when cultural diversity is celebrated (or its loss mourned) in postmodern models of society. The multicultural character of some early modern societies was premised on different groups having their social and economic niches assigned to them, on their fulfilling these prescribed roles successfully, and on the groups not mixing with each other. Religion played an essential role in isolating different faith communities and ethnic groups, since marriages between the adherents of the three great monotheistic world religions were impossible unless one of the marriage partners agreed to convert. Hence Jews remained Jews; and, analogously, Christians and Muslims kept to themselves. Only the advent of secularization and civil marriage could break the hold of these rigid differences. Moreover, the societies of the early modern states were built upon social inequality. Perhaps the current trend in today’s global metropolises is heading in this direction; it would not be the first time that history proceeds in cycles and not in the progressive manner that has shaped Western thinking since the Enlightenment.

At the same time, the case of the Sephardim helps illustrate the difference between integration and assimilation. The Jews who came from Spain were undoubtedly well integrated into the Ottoman Empire, although this was an integration that rested on the primacy of the state, its dynasty, and the ruling religion. There was a hierarchical relationship that one should not idealize, ex post facto, any more than one should romanticize the way cultures actually coexisted. Jews and Christians were exempt from military service, but also did not have the same rights as Muslims and had to pay higher taxes. If they fell too much out of favor with any sultan or governor, heads quickly rolled, and not just metaphorically. Yet the Sephardim did not have to assimilate; as late as the twentieth century, they were still clearly identifiable as a social group, especially in their stronghold of Salonika.⁷

This made them into obvious targets for modern nationalism and antisemitism, which existed in what became an independent Greece just as they did in other European countries. During the Second World War, the history of the northern Greek and Macedonian Jews came to an end in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In 1943, the National Socialists deported the descendants of these Jewish refugees from Spain; some survived in hiding or in the Italian-occupied parts of Greece and Yugoslavia, and larger groups in Bulgaria and Turkey.

Early modern Poland’s stance toward Jewish refugees may be compared to that of the Ottoman Empire. When Casimir the Great (1310–70) took in the Jews who had been expelled from German cities, he had in mind enhancing his country’s economic power. He promised the Jews group autonomy, which was expanded further under the Jagiellonian dynasty in the sixteenth century. Polish Jews did not participate in political decision-making processes, such as electing the king, and they were not represented in the bodies representing the feudal estates, the pan-Polish Sejm and the regional Sejmiki. Accordingly, one may (as in the cases discussed earlier) speak of a specific kind of integration, or more precisely of an incorporation that did not include legal and political equality. Professionally, too, integration was limited, since the Jewish immigrants were only allowed to occupy or work in specific niches; and their living environments were also largely separated from those of Christian inhabitants. In the cities and especially on the land, where many Jews were employed as estate managers, major social conflicts arose. This was the source of the antisemitic stereotype of the Jews as exploiters, which was then spread to the masses by a variety of national movements.

In the nineteenth century, this early modern group autonomy proved barely sustainable as the modern state began to make new demands on its citizens, from compulsory school education through military service, all the way to an expectation of und...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction: Flight and Refugees in Historical Perspective
• 1. The Roots of Intolerance: Religious Conflicts and Religious Refugees
• 2. The Two Faces of Nationalism: Ethnic Cleansing and National Solidarity
• 3. Political Refugees and the Emergence of an International Refugee Policy
• 4. Refugee Politics after the Cold War
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Archival Resources
• Bibliography
• Index