Polemicizing with Christians and Jews in Late Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

The late seventeenth-century Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in urban centers, underwent a form of “soft confessionalization” in response to Tridentine Catholic proselytism, Muslim conversion strategies, and the complexities of coexistence within a multi-religious society. In this context, two hitherto unpublished Armenian sources from the period in question, addressing inter-confessional (Miaphysite Armenian–Tridentine Catholic–Greek Orthodox), intra-communal (Miaphysite–Catholic–Reform-minded Armenians), and inter-religious (Miaphysite Armenian–rabbinic Jews–Sabbatean Jews) relations, penned by the wealthy Armenian intellectual Eremia Kʻēōmiwrchean (1637–1695), shed light on the intricate nature of inter-communal interactions structured around religious debate. Introduced into scholarly circulation and taken as case studies for the first time in the present paper, the polemical treatises The Apology of the Armenian Church and Polemics with Jews, both composed in the form of questions and answers, contribute to reconstructing the entangled communal life of a pre-modern multicultural city. These sources further reveal the heuristic dimension of questioning and answering toward understanding the tradition of the “other” (liturgy, pilgrimage, icons, blessing of waters, the Shabbat, circumcision, and others), viewed through the prism of the religious and cultural inquiries raised and contested within Istanbul’s diverse communities

Armenian · Blessing · Christianity · Multiculturalism · Period (music) · Prism · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies