The Shaping of the Modern Middle East Read Online Free PDF Page A

they were now socially isolated from the Muslims and virtually excluded from the active cultural and political role they had played in the past. The first phases of Westernization and national revival gave the Christian minority, for a while, a new and important function in Middle Eastern life and affairs. The shift from liberal patriotism to communal nationalism and the growth of hostility to the Christian West have again reduced it.
    Only in one place did Christians as such continue to play a vital and decisive role. The republic of Lebanon, as formed under the French mandate, was a new creation with new frontiers, but it expressed an old reality. The mountain that formed the core of the socalled Greater Lebanon has since medieval times been a refuge and a citadel of religious and political nonconformity; its people have an old tradition of initiative and independence. In an age of submission, the Lebanese amirs succeeded, under both Mamluks and Ottomans, in preserving a considerable measure of autonomy. The Christian people of Lebanon, possessing both the Arabic language and a link with the West dating back to the Crusades, were able to make an immense contribution to both the spread of Western culture in the Middle East and the emergence of a new Arab consciousness in response to it. The civil war, which flared up briefly in Lebanon in 1958 and raged from 1975 to 1991, has greatly reduced the role of the Lebanese in Arab affairs and, more important, of the Christians inside Lebanon. Even the city of Beirut, once one of the major commercial, financial, and intellectual centers of the Arab world, has lost its primacy.

    The experience of the Jews in the Middle Ages was in general similar to that of the Christians, but diverged sharply in modern times. The Persian Empire had treated them well; the Romans less well, especially in their Judaean homeland, where their repeated attempts to recover their lost independence gave endless trouble to their imperial masters. After the suppression of the last major Jewish revolt against Roman rule in A.D. 135, the Romans made a determined effort to obliterate even the name and memory of Jewish independence. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia, and a temple to Jupiter was erected on the site of the destroyed Jewish Temple. Even the name Judaea was abolished and replaced by Palestina, from the name of the long-vanished Philistines who had once invaded and for a while inhabited the southern coastal strip. After the conversion of Rome to Christianity, the position of the Jews became significantly worse, and in Byzantine times, they became an oppressed minority. The Arab conquest, which found important Jewish communities all over the Middle East, brought a general improvement in their status and security. The main centers of Judaic scholarship and culture had been in Persian Iraq and Byzantine Palestine. Under Muslim rule the Iraqi community flourished, while that of Palestine, now a minor and disturbed border province, fell into a decline. The Jews of Palestine had a particularly difficult time during the Crusades. They were massacred with the Muslims when the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 and massacred again with the Christians when the Muslims finally reconquered Acre in 1291. Between these two extremes, however, they did manage to maintain some form of Jewish life in Palestine, and in the thirteenth century there were even waves of Jewish immigration from both Muslim North Africa and Christian Europe, including a party of three hundred French and English rabbis who arrived in Jerusalem in 1211. It was not, however, until after the Ottoman conquest at the beginning of the sixteenth century that fresh immigration from other Mediterranean lands led to the establishment of new and vigorous centers of Jewish intellectual activity in Jerusalem and Safed, with far-reaching influence among Jews in other countries, even in Christian Europe.
    Like the Christians, the Jews also made an important,