The tolerance which the Jews have always enjoyed in Turkey is well known. At the time when they were being burnt at the stake in the public square in the town of Valladolid in Spain, Jewish overseers were deputed by the Jewish community in Constantinople to sit in the public bakehouses and see that the bread which was baked for Jewish consumption was prepared according to Jewish rites. Individual Jews were even permitted by the authorities to exercise a kind of police supervision over the Turks themselves at a time when their co-religionists were being exterminated like vermin in some Christian countries. Under Sultan Suleyman, one of the most influential of Turkish Ministers of Foreign Affairs was a Christian, Ludovico Gritti, a son of Andrea Gritti, the Doge of Venice. Sultan Suleyman even went so far as to have his portrait painted by a Christian, Melchior Lorenz, an inhabitant of Flensburg. One of the men most honoured by Sultan Mohammed Fatè, the conqueror of Constantinople, was again a Christian, an Italian of the name of Gentil Gellini, who was treated by the Turkish monarch with the greatest distinction. When subsequently war broke out between Venice and Turkey, the Sultan commissioned Gellini to take back to Venice the body of Enrico Dandolo, a former Doge, the first conqueror of Constantinople, during the Fourth Crusade, whose sarcophagus was found in the Church of Saint Sophia. Even the outbreak of war and all the supposed fanaticism of the Turks did not prevent a Turkish Sultan from pursuing a course of conduct which, even after five centuries, would be looked upon as an exceptionally chivalrous action among Christians.
When I was in Salonica there was no virulent Turkish Press to hound on the Turks against the Greeks, although a large proportion of the inhabitants in Salonica, albeit Turkish subjects, were Greeks in open sympathy with the Greek cause, even joining Greek committees, an act of high treason—in every country but Turkey. Nor did the Greeks take any trouble to hide this feeling, poring over the Greek newspapers in public as they arrived day by day. Yet no signs of popular resentment were visible during my stay on the part either of the populace or of the soldiery. The same passive toleration was to be observed in Constantinople, where the narrow streets leading to the French Consulate in Pera were crowded with Greeks seeking to obtain the protection of the French Embassy. They were not molested in any way. This might, perhaps, seem to be a matter of course, if we were not reminded of what happened to the Germans in Paris at the outbreak of the war in 1870.
How little is known of the record of the Turks in offering shelter to the oppressed of other races! Who was it that sheltered the Hungarian revolutionists who, when captured, were hanged or imprisoned? Is it not an historical fact established beyond question that a Sultan of Turkey risked war with Austria and Russia combined rather than break the sacred laws of hospitality of Mohammed, and surrender the Hungarian leaders Kossuth, Görgey, and many others? How do these facts, I ask, tally with the slander heaped upon the Turkish people and their rulers?
In no country in Europe are there so many foreigners, both as regards nationality and religion, as in Turkey, and nowhere else would aliens have a chance of such careers as some of them have made there. And yet I never came across any signs of Turkish jealousy. I have heard Turks speak with the highest respect of individual foreigners whom the Sultan had loaded with favours, but who at least had shown gratitude and attachment to the interests of their adopted country. We have only to think of the Dutch crew of adventurers who came over with William III from Holland to find an analogy, and compare the sentiments of the English towards them with those of the Turks towards foreigners in high place and pay in Turkey to illustrate even more closely the generosity of the Turks, and how far they can go in their tolerance of an alien element. Such favouring of the foreigner, even if it could exist in other countries, would inevitably evoke intense jealousy and intrigue on the part of the natives.
Speaking of a foreign pasha noted for his bumptious arrogance, and referring to some of his countrymen, a high-placed Turk said to me: “Que voulez-vous, mon cher? On les tolère.” But whatever the Turks may feel, they have never shown it by malevolence towards foreigners who were in the employ of their Government.
Many Turkish Ambassadors abroad have at different times been Christians. The Turkish Ambassador in Berlin some years ago was a Greek, who, mainly through his position as Ambassador, was enabled to make a rich marriage. Far from feeling any gratitude to the Turkish Government for his career, he left his private fortune to some Greek institution at Athens, although at that particular moment Greece was meditating war against Turkey.
We have had of late years only too many instances of Christian ministers lending themselves to denunciation and depreciation of the Moslem. I have gleaned from the lips of missionaries, and their wives more rabid than themselves, both in Macedonia and in Asia, how ignorant prejudice can blind the understanding. A pathetic instance of this, verging on imbecility, is to be found in a book written by an Englishwoman which circulates in the Tauchnitz Collection of British authors, entitled “Diary of an Idle Woman in Constantinople.”[[27]] In relating that she had seen a eunuch at the Selamlik with the Sultan’s ladies, she exclaims: “He was a fat giant, a wretch.” Why a poor devil who has been deprived of manhood should be a “wretch” the ingenuous authoress does not explain. Yet, so far as my experience goes, a good deal of what has been written in disparagement of the Turks has no better logical foundation than this exclamation. For all that, there can be no doubt that this eunuch abomination is a feature of Turkish life which has always created a strong prejudice in the Christian world against the Mohammedans. Hence it is not without interest to emphasize once for all that this unnatural institution is not of Mohammedan origin at all, but, as well as every other kind of human mutilation, is strictly forbidden by the Koran. Eunuchs were a common feature in antiquity, and in spite of the efforts of both Constantine the Great and the Emperor Justinian to do away with them they were quite common among the “good” Christians of the Byzantine Empire. Even at the present day the eunuchs in Constantinople—who, by the way, are only to be found in the household of the Sultan and of a few wealthy pashas—are supplied from the Christian monasteries of the East, notably those of Abyssinia.
[27]. Vol. 2921, p. 320.
Is it to be wondered at that people nurtured on misleading data can scarcely be brought to believe that there is less crime in Turkey than in almost any other country; that the punishment for crime is far more lenient than in most countries; that the deposed Sultan was never known to sign a death-warrant; and that the Mohammedan Turks, as distinct from the Christian inhabitants of the Levant, are so kind to animals of every variety, beast or bird, that a Society for the Protection of Animals, however vigilant, would find its occupation gone in Turkey?
The Turk’s kindness to the dogs of the capital, since exterminated, is well known, as is also his kind treatment of horses. The beneficent results of this can be witnessed by the visitor to Constantinople when he sees saddled horses standing, free and unfettered, for hours by the kerbstone waiting to be hired, as docile as dogs, without anybody looking after or controlling them.