This is the third episode of The Same Small Land, a grounded, from-the-beginning look at the Israel-Palestine conflict.
When the last episode ended, in fifteen seventeen, the Jews had become a diaspora culture only, with almost no presence left in their homeland itself. The Ottoman Turks, an Islamic empire, had destroyed the Mamluks, another Islamic empire, to take it: Their sultan, Selim the First, broke the Mamluk army in the field in fifteen sixteen and finished off the Mamluk state in Egypt the year after. Palestine -- the land that had been Judaea -- and Jerusalem above all had by now become the Holy Land of three major religions, with smaller offshoots still to come. The Ottomans would hold this region for the next four hundred years, while the Jews built their communities elsewhere.
They had scattered, in the main, into what had become a divided world. One was the world of Islam -- the faith whose armies had taken the land in the seventh century, now stretched from Spain across North Africa to Persia. The other was Christian Europe. For roughly a thousand years, from the rise of Islam to the doorstep of the modern age, most of the Jews alive on earth lived inside one or the other of these two powers.
I’m Allen Schyf, and this is Polite Disputes.
Music: Truth Be Told by Maarten Schellekens
