A Slave in My Family

 

Creative commons, author unknown

U tom stubu, kaže se, ima velika soba, mračna dvorana u kojoj živi crni Arapin.

In this pillar, it is said, there is a large room, a dark hall in which lives the black Arab.

from 'The Bridge on the Drina' by Ivo Andrić

Nobel Prize for Literature 1961

Ivo Andrić was a Bosnian Serb who wrote his prize-winning novel about the 16th century Turkish Bridge spanning the River Drina at Višegrad. From the moment I read it I needed to know, who was the mysterious Arab that lurked within a stone bridge and what was he doing in Bosnia? 

Amin al-Husseini, an Arab born in Jerusalem, was indicted for war crimes in Bosnia by the post-war Yugoslav government, but it wasn't him. Modern Arabs travel to Bosnia to reach a Muslim haven in the heart of Europe, but it's not them. Ivo Andrić's Black Arab was not even an Arab, he was African.

The knowledge that Africans may have lived in the Balkans snuck into my life the back way and like many alternative routes began with a subjective decision. 

I had my DNA tested. 

What a wealth of suffering that simple sentence has revealed! 

The genetic testing company 23andMe provided my DNA results in Confidence Levels on its Chromosome Painting page. The 50% Confidence Level is termed Speculative. (This is the one you see when you open the email.) At this level I have 0.3% Congolese and SE African genes. On the chromosomes themselves this is demonstrated by a tiny splodge of pink on chromosomes 2 and 3. At 60% Confidence the same splodges change to 0.3% Broadly Sub Saharan African. At 70, 80 and 90% confidence the splodges are still there but now they fall into a group termed ‘unassigned.’

0.3% is about one part in 250 or a 6X great grandparent. My great great grandfather Martin Mikatović was born in Tar in 1822, a village in the region of Istria in modern Croatia. A 2X great grandfather gives me 1/16 of my genes. A 6X great grandfather gives me 1/256 or 0.39%.

But which year is this?

Allowing 20 – 30 years per generation gives us 80 – 120 years before Martin's birth. My African relative, therefore, was most likely born between 1702 and 1742. That is a little over a century after the Mayflower sailed to America and Oliver Cromwell decapitated Charles 1. 

Not that long ago. 

If you were African in the 18th century and your DNA has turned up in a person whose ancestors came from a country within the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then you were a slave. And not a Pliny-the-Younger-type-well-looked-after-slave either. The Arabs sold black and white slaves but the black ones were on the lower rung and, like their brothers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, frequently died as a result of cruel treatment. 'Some 10,000 slaves, black and white, were brought into the Ottoman Empire every year' and my relative most likely came from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar or Sudan (1). In the mid-18th century, the demand for specifically black African slaves increased. (4)

The famous Turkish cotton industry required African slaves, and their descendants live in Turkey to this day. There they 'are often called “Arabs”... they also refer to themselves as Arabs...[and] this has led to a situation in which “Arab” means “black.” (1) 

It is significant then that a little less than one eighth of my family came from Montenegro, a country that had belonged to the Ottoman Empire for most of the 1500’s and 1600’s and was semi-autonomous until its liberation in 1878. In addition, I have the same amount of Greek Anatolian genes as I do African. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and it is an easy leap to say that in those days a country like Bosnia, that was also incorporated within the Ottoman's vast domain, might have seen African slaves, although it wouldn’t have been the peasants who owned them. The Ottoman Empire collapsed a few years after World War 1, having expanded, declined and fragmented over its 600-year history and made very few friends in Europe during that time.

The history of humanity is the history of slavery, and I use a literary device when I say that ‘for over a millennium’ there was a thriving Arab slave trade in the East that sold men, women and children to the Ottomans and any others with the money to pay, including Europeans. This reign of misery was certainly longer than a thousand years and it is probably not known exactly when the Arab slave trade started although most sources link it with the rapid spread of Islam from the seventh century. In a true human spirit of self-justification, arguments rage on the internet about which slavery was worse, European or Arab. No question here. All slavery is an obscenity or, in the words of the great Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, ‘I don’t buy and sell human beings.’

Novigrad 2018 M Walker

 

‘See that wall? That’s to keep the Turks out.’ 

So said Silvana, my birth mother, pointing at my photograph of the 6m high Venetian wall in the port of Novigrad in Istria. 

She was born in nearby Tar in 1920, two years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, near enough historically to grow up with stories of marauding Turkish pirates. ‘Slaves [were] brought by pirates’ (3). Silvana called them Turks but history calls them the Barbary Pirates and they worked for the Ottomans around the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. 

Silvana's family name, Mikatović, means the son of Saint Michael and is derived from the Greek for the Archangel Michael, Michali Taxiarhis, or Michael the Brigadier. The earliest reference to the name Mikatović I have been able to find was about 1720 in the Poreč area near Tar but there may easily be earlier ones. The church books from the seventeenth century that are displayed on FamilySearch.com are written with thick quills and ink in abbreviated Latin and, if I am in the wrong mood, scrolling through a hundred pages defeats me. 

I ought to try harder.

Politicians like Mussolini who tried to divide these old regions into modern political entities and to impose a single national language on them forgot that the residents had long memories. Greek, Turkish, Slavic, Austrian and Italian eras intermingle and are remembered in place names, family names and local dialects. As Silvana said to me, 'you only speak the same because you have television and radio. We didn't have any of that.' 

A case could easily be mounted that my African relative was a woman. More women were deprived of their freedom in the East than men whereas the reverse was true in the West (2). Perhaps she was a beautiful black concubine in an Istanbul harem or a nursemaid to a wealthy Turk. Perhaps she was a spinster, endlessly spinning cotton thread to weave the sails of the Ottoman fleet.

Although I am adopted, I have a lot of information about my birth family which helps makes sense of my genes but, having said that, a chronological issue remains. The academic papers relating to the settlement of Tar, my family’s village, state that the area was settled from Venice’s possessions in the south in the late 1500’s and 1600's, not the early 1700's when my African relative was born. These emigrants were mostly Slavs but not always. A whole range of ethnic groups from the south needed to escape from the marauding Turks at this time and Venice wanted to repopulate Istria which had been ravaged by the plague. 

How do I feel about all this?

I am inspired to compose the Romantic Version. That's how I feel.  

Around the year 1700 a baby girl called Mercy was born to a couple in Kenya. The baby was black and very beautiful and, as she grew towards young womanhood, she attracted attention wherever she went.

Mercy's village was close to the Indian Ocean and one tragic day when she was only twelve she was playing on the beach with other children when she caught the attention of a pirate ship. They captured Mercy, placed her aboard their reeking vessel and sailed her first to an Arab slave market in Aden, Yemen. From here she was transported to Cairo in Egypt in the belief that as a concubine she would fetch a high price. 

However, the ill treatment and privations of the voyage took a heavy toll on her beauty, and she was purchased instead by a Turkish cotton grower. He set her to work in his fields near the Anatolian coast irrigating the cotton in the hot summer months and harvesting the fluffy pods as they matured in the late autumn.

Separated from everything she loved, Mercy began to die of grief.

One day, the cotton grower looked at the beautiful girl properly for the first time and, moved by a strange compassion, asked her why she looked so sad. Mercy could not speak his language and was unable to reply but, seeing that she had dexterous hands and fine fingers, the cotton grower removed her from the harsh fields and brought her into the long rooms where dozens of women sat all day spinning thread on drop spindles.

Their kindness and affection nursed Mercy's wounded spirit and she did not die, yet death remained present in her eyes for she could see no other way to be restored to her family and her culture. She often dreamed that she would die, in the same way that other people look forward to a joyful event.

After several years, the owner's son chanced to visit the spinning rooms bringing with him his Greek friend Dimitri. At this time Turkey was a multi-ethnic country and many Greeks lived there. Dimitri saw the beautiful girl spinning her everlasting cotton thread. Mercy lifted her head and their eyes met.

Dimitri was smitten and that night he could not sleep. His heart pleaded for the opportunity to look upon Mercy a second time. His soul begged him to free her. 

But haggling over a price with the cotton grower was no easy matter and Dimitri, being a Christian in a Muslim state, did not have much money. However, that night the cotton grower had a dream in which he saw Dimitri and Mercy standing together with an angel by their side. He placed great store by dreams and was persuaded to agree on a lower price that was within Dimitri's limited means.

By now Mercy was sixteen, the age at which most girls married. When Dimitri explained that he wished to marry a black girl who had been a slave on a cotton farm, Dimitri's father was too shocked to reply. Dimitri remained defiant and, as he was over twenty-one, little could be done to stop the marriage. Nor would Dimitri lose his inheritance because Greeks who had not 'turned Turk', as converting to Islam was then called, were very poor.

In desperation, Dimitri's father paid a visit to the Turkish cotton grower who, realizing that he'd been manipulated out of a valuable slave by his own wayward emotions, was furious. He chased Dimitri and Mercy across the sea to the powerful city-state of Dubrovnik. He should have known better because not only were the magistrates of Dubrovnik rich they were also men-of-the-world and had managed alone out of all the countries in the Balkans to successfully bargain with the Ottomans to retain their independence. They simply stone-walled the unfortunate cotton-grower who left for his farm in a high temper vowing never to pay attention to his dreams again.

However, the Great Earthquake of 1667 had flattened the noble streets of Dubrovnik taking much of its fine architecture with it and, in the year of Mercy's birth, the city's magistrates had granted to the Ottomans a piece of coastal land only twenty kilometres to the north. By this means the Empire of Venice, that had for a long time looked on Dubrovnik with greedy eyes, would be forced to defeat the Ottomans before attempting to take it over in its weakened state. This was a very astute move by the magistrates, effectively guarding their city as it was being rebuilt, while simultaneously placating the Turks and frustrating the Venetians. Today the land still belongs to Bosnia. 

And so, amidst the scaffolding, Dimitri and Mercy were married, but they did not feel safe in Dubrovnik with the Ottomans a mere twenty kilometres away. They decided to migrate further north to the Istrian peninsula. This was an area of great ethnic diversity and considerable Greek influence. Here Dimitri met the influential Mikatović family who over a century before had travelled north from Montenegro, another country with a strong Greek background. He noticed immediately that they had a Greek/Slavic name. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and intermarriage between two families.

Sources and extra resources 

(1)    Turks with African ancestors want their existence to be felt (archive.org)

(2)   The Arab slave trade (ourhistory.org.uk)

(3)    Memory of Vanished African Community Lingers in Montenegrin Town | Balkan Insight

(4)    Only Memories and Emptiness Remain: The History of Ulcinj’s Afro-Albanian Community in Montenegro - Lefteast

(5)    The story of the black African families who lived in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Face2Face Africa

(6)   39321 LES CIUTATS MEDITERRANIES.indb (iec.cat)

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization

 

Link to my prehistory blog.

VINČA, Serbia - Europe's First Civilization (myprehistory.blogspot.com)

The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

23 CENTURIES OF ANTISEMITISM

If I said that this work was a resource to every expression of antisemitism in history, I would not be far from the truth. Its research is exhaustive and gives some understanding of why antisemitism seems to be the default setting of every age. I have added it to my blog War in the Balkans because of the Holocaust of the Jews in Croatia and Serbia during World War 2, and I will ask the question: to what extent can antisemitism be held accountable for the world’s response to the present Israeli Hamas conflict?

Edward Flannery was an American Catholic priest who published the work in 1965. On the subject of antisemitism, he doesn’t mince words. ‘The vast majority of Christians…are all but totally ignorant of…the immense suffering of Jews throughout the Christian era... because the antisemitic record does not appear in history books.’

I am a Christian and it grieves me to read that antisemitism, although present in ancient Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt (Maccabees 1 and 2), was cemented throughout the fourth century of the Christian era and into the early fifth century. It stemmed from ‘the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment to Christ’s crucifixion’. Neglecting St Paul’s exposition on God’s election and salvation of Israel in Romans 9 -11, the church fathers ‘turned upon the synagogue with the greatest vigour’. Indeed, the language of St John Chrysostom against the Jews reminds one of Hitler. Only St Augustine was faithful to St Paul. ‘Christians,’ he wrote, ‘have a duty to love Jews and to lead them to Christ,’ but ‘he is at the same time at a loss to understand their unbelief, this animosity towards Christians, and their unending misfortunes.’

During this same century, the centre of the Talmud was established in Babylonia and ‘It was forgotten or ignored that the Jewish dispersion began many centuries before Christ and that Palestine was never completely emptied of Jews.’

At this time, violence was perpetrated by both sides and some countries showed less tolerance than others. In Rome Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) respected the legal rights of Jews and ‘the Pauline teaching of special affection for Israel’. Under the Emperor Justinian (483-565), however, who reigned from Constantinople, rules restricting Jewish life were passed with liberality: what Jews could own, where they could be seen, the professions from which they were barred, where synagogues could be open or closed and where Judaism was outlawed.

From 1096, matters deteriorated in Germany, France, Austria and England, as the first Crusaders, eager to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, turned first upon European Jews. In what the author refers to as the ‘the superstitious zealotry of the mob’, Jews were offered baptism or death, and thus many were slaughtered. ‘From January to July of 1096 it is estimated that up to 10,000 died, probably one fourth to one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.’ Once the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, the slaughter continued. ‘In 1099 at journey’s end in Jerusalem the soldiers of Godfrey de Bouillon found the Jews assembled in a synagogue and set it ablaze.’

With the onslaught of the Second Crusade in 1147, St Bernard was forced to condemn further antisemitism in Europe by again recalling St Paul. “Who is this man that he should make out [St Paul] to be a liar and render void the treasure of Christ’s love and pity?” In 1272 following incidences in the Rhineland and Bavaria, Pope Gregory X forbade forced baptisms and violence. Many Jews migrated to Palestine and, of those who remained, 100,000 throughout Germany and Austria were killed by mobs stirred up by noblemen.

The development of the Jews as usurers and money lenders was an outcome of the laws restricting their lives, and brought its own resentment from Christians. ‘By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were expelled from France, England and most of Germany. In almost all cases, the expulsions found the origin in the business of usury.’ Yet the list of things they were accused of is a tribute to the Mediaeval imagination and the zealous peasant jumped at any excuse for murder and for the widespread burning of the Talmud. Jews were even blamed for the Black Death (1347-50). ‘Apparently, no enormity was too great to lay at the door of the Jews.’ In a chilling foretaste of the twentieth century, ‘the massacres were greatest in Germany’ and ‘by the end of the fifteenth century no more than three or four German cities still harboured a Jewish population… Most left Germany for Poland or Lithuania.’ Upon their failure to accept his teaching, Martin Luther also turned his fury against the Jews the following century.

Popes and Christian leaders condemned the atrocities. In 1418 Martin V ‘issued a decree which guaranteed protection [for the Jews] of their lives, rites, privileges and festivals [and] forbade forced baptism.’ St Bernadinus of Sienna (1380-1444) wrote, “As to the Jews, I say here what I say elsewhere: no one who has concern for his soul can injure the Jews, whether it be their persons or their faculties, or in any other way, for even to Jews, Christian piety and love must be shown since they possess a human nature.”

Only in Rome were the Jews never persecuted from the fall of the Western Empire until the close of the sixteenth century. ‘Jewish-Christian relations were intimate’ even to permitting intermarriage. Northern Italy had ample wealth and plenty of Christian usurers without them and they mostly benefitted from the friendliness of the Popes.

Until the end of the fourteenth century Jews also flourished in Spain, when the power and wealth attained by a few and their relationships with the royal family eventually provoked a downward spiral of resentment and persecution. 50,000 perished in a single massacre and worse was to come. In the wake of the Reconquista came an intense desire to strengthen the Christian state, and a conversion campaign was aimed at the Jews. Antisemitism against both Jews and converted Jews increased over the course of the fifteenth century and contained a strong racist element. However, the biggest problem was the ‘compromisers’, those Jews who by nominally accepting Christianity grew to power and wealth by having, as it is said, a foot in both camps.

Enter the Spanish Inquisition.

‘In 1479…Ferdinand and Isabella untied the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon’ and in 1483 the ‘fanatical Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor General.’ He was the most brutal and the most feared inquisitor and his job was to ‘ferret out’ Jews. Beginning with the dodgy converts, he continued to all the other Jews in Spain. ‘In 1492 the monarchs issued the fatal decree. All Jews must leave the realm by July 30th under penalty of death’. 300,00 departed.

Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard nevertheless sums up the entire Middle Ages. ‘To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God.’

The Age of the Jewish Ghetto in Europe commenced in the seventeenth century and many Jews moved east to Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey or Poland where life was safer. However, a series of attacks upon Polish Jews by Russians, Cossaks and Swedes during one decade in the second half of the seventeenth century killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Jews and destroyed 700 Jewish communities. ‘With the exception of the Nazi period…the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted the [lowest point] of post-Biblical Jewish history.’

In France, the Enlightenment and the change in ideas swept in by the French Revolution brought some measure of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century, but the racist antisemitism present in Prussia is considered to be the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. (Note the difference between religious antisemitism and racist antisemitism.) ‘From this point Germany became the undisputed cultural centre of antisemitism and the source of an endless stream of antisemitic books and pamphlets.’ The German-born Karl Marx is an example of a Jewish antisemite.

As religious faith [in Europe] declined… and the spirit of rationalism and scepticism rose, the need to justify the segregation [of the Jews] in purely secular terms grew…If the plight of the Jews did not stem from the crucifixion, it came from themselves, their ethnic make up; Jews, in a word, were innately perverse.’

Here begins a section marked ‘rationalistic antisemitism’ in which the French writer Voltaire stresses the rationalist grounds of his ‘utter contempt’ for the Jews and Judaism. ‘Jews are… “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, a people most obtuse, cruel and absurd, whose history is disgusting and abominable.”’ His ideas were echoed by the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher and Harnack, and studied later by Hitler.

Under the final two Czars, government-approved pogroms against Russian Jews shocked the world and led to the immigration of over a million. Not content with this, Russia published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of badly-written nonsense blaming the Jews for every crime in the universe. Nevertheless, it was well-received and translated into the major European languages and Arabic. ‘When otherwise brilliant minds are so deceived and…even after irrefragable disproof, persist in believing, we are at grips with a collective psychosis, with a will to hate and destroy well beyond the pale of human rationality…a secularized diabolism.’

Thus ended the nineteenth century and we all know what happened in the twentieth.

 

A REFLECTION ON THE OCTOBER 7th ATTACKS ON ISRAEL AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT IN GAZA

In the middle of January 2024, I witnessed Marxist groups outside Newtown railway station in Sydney ardently collecting pro-Palestinian signatures. As there has always a Jewish presence in Palestine, why not collect pro-Israeli signatures, I wondered. It is antisemitism that governs the choice. Why do the Federal Greens refuse to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7th? Why is the NSW Teachers Federation openly pro-Palestinian? Why does Sydney’s art and literary scene consider it appropriate to simplify the present complex situation in Palestine to Israeli attacks on Gazan children? Why are the two sides unequally reported in the media?

Because ‘hatred of Jews [is] a serious social and ethical problem,’ concludes Edward Flannery, and the Australians referred to above are following the tradition of mob mentality outlined in his book. History has established a culture in which it is acceptable to disbelieve Jews.

As an example, regarding the brutal Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7th 2023, ‘bone-chilling horrors – such as repeated gang rapes that were so brutal they left women and girls with broken pelvises and mutilated genitals’, I quote from Human rights groups’ hypocrisy on Hamas rape - opinion - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 25th December 2023.

‘Amnesty International so far has issued 29 press releases entirely or mostly about Gaza since October 7. They, too, have been filled with baseless allegations about Israeli murders, “apartheid,” and the like. To this day, Amnesty still has not issued any statement about the Hamas rapes.’

And another article from Microsoft Why are feminists silent on Hamas's use of rape as a weapon of war? (msn.com) 20th January 2024.

‘The denial of widespread, preplanned mass rape and sexual violence on October 7 must therefore be treated with the same revulsion as Holocaust denial. Hamas has denied that the rapes occurred, despite overwhelming evidence. Speak up, an Egypt-based feminist initiative, inconceivably has launched a campaign to discredit Israeli victims, with coalition groups joining across the Middle East and a letter condemning The New York Times investigation into sexual violence by Hamas. Speak up boasts over 68,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and 250,000 Facebook members. Turkish public broadcasting has published an article claiming to debunk “outlandish Israeli claims of rape.” Unbelievably, their efforts have found sympathetic ears in Western academia…Ingrained antisemitism on the extreme Left leads to this moral failure.’

How else can we explain it?

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. ‘He and the Israeli leaders Peres and Rabin received the Peace Prize for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington. The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ Yasser Arafat – Facts - NobelPrize.org

How quickly we forget.