The Jews of Istanbul are proof that Jews and Muslims can coexist in harmony. After Saturday we are mourning the loss of people whohave learned to span an unbridgeable gulf, writes Fiachra Gibbons
There is, we are often told, no hierarchy in death. But in the grim arithmetic of history there is no contest between the deaths of two helicopters full of American soldiers in Iraq and a few Turkish Muslims and Jews.
The front pages this morning won't be much help. The media and history often serve different masters. I mean no insult to the dead or their families - far from it - but on the cruel scales of time an Istanbul Jew is worth a regiment of GIs.
The Jews of Turkey, and the survival of their precious and unique culture, are one of the few enduring examples of tolerance through the ages that humanity has left to cling to.
So when six die, as they did on Saturday morning when their blood mingled with that of their Muslim neighbours blown to bits by a suicide bomber outside the Neve Shalom synagogue, the heart should miss a beat and the world weep. For we are mourning the loss of souls who had learned to span a supposedly unbridgeable gulf that is being daily widened by George Bush and Britain's deluded leader.
The 17,000 or so remaining Jews of Istanbul are living proof that Jews and Muslims can coexist in harmony. It is a bond that has endured more than 1,300 years of trials and tribulations and held fast every time. Theirs is one of the great anomalies of Jewish history - a happy story. The work of more than a millennium of patience and restraint, this truer picture of what Jewish-Muslim relations can be has been obscured and all but erased in the handful of decades since the creation of Israel.
Yet the very existence of Jews in the streets around the Galata tower, in the boutiques of Tesvikiye or in middle-class Sisli where the second bomb exploded, gives hope elsewhere. Which is maybe why they became targets for angry and desperate men determined to prove otherwise.
It matters little who did the deeds - even if, as the Turks dread, it turns out to be one of their own tiny fundamentalist groups. Such headbangers are as peculiar in the great swell of Turkish tolerance as Ian Paisley would be at a Church of England tombola. My fear is that the finger will point at the poor, hunted and brutalised Chechens you sometimes see in Istanbul. It is not hard to see how, in the absence of any kind of hope of returning to their homeland, they might give their souls to global jihad.
Istanbul's Sephardic Jews were refugees too, refugees from the religious fundamentalism of the west. They are the last survivors of the great Islamic-Judeo civilisation of al-Andalus, and they carried its language and cultural achievements with them to Turkey when Sultan Beyazit II sent "mercy ships" to rescue them from the Spanish inquisition in 1492.
A third still speak Ladino, the beautiful mediaeval Spanish of Cervantes, and you can still hear echoes of the music and poetry they brought from Cordoba and Granada in the old Ottoman lands from the Balkans to the Caucasus and beyond. Four decades before their expulsion from Spain, within weeks of the fall of Constantinople and the ending of the old Byzantine empire, Beyazit's father Mehmet II ordered that Jews from all over his empire be brought to his new capital. A city without Jews, the sultan reasoned, was no city all.
Under the pluralist Ottoman empire he forged, which stretched at its height from the Atlantic to the Gulf, Jewish communities prospered and effectively ruled themselves. The empire's second city, Thessalonica, became "a new Jerusalem", the biggest Jewish metropolis in Europe.
Happiness isn't supposed to last, but in Istanbul it has lasted more for more than five centuries. Even as the empire shrank in the late 19th century, Jews continued to pour into Constantinople fleeing persecution by Cossacks, Persians and the new, Christian Balkan nations, just as they had earlier fled from the Teutonic knights and that insidious Venetian invention, the ghetto. The Jews of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus never had to live behind walls - either of their own or their rulers' making. They were closer to their Muslim overlords than any of the Christian populations of the empire. Any Christian who raised the spectre of the old blood libel on the Jews, of the supposed ritual killings of Christian youths at Easter, had to answer to the sultan himself.
He was tended by Jewish doctors, and Jews were also often dominant in trade, banking and the customs service. One Jewish pasha almost had himself made king of Cyprus. Jewish women, too, were key players in the harem, from which the sultan sired his heirs; Jewish hawkers were Istanbul's bush telegraph. Even now, close to the grand bazaar in Istanbul, a mosque and a synagogue share the same building.
Strangest of all these cultural collisions was a group called the Donme - so-called Muslim Jews who followed the "false Messiah" Sabbatai Sevi, whose heresy divided the Jewish world in 1666 until the sultan put a stop to it by forcing him to become a Muslim. Turkey's last foreign minister, Ismail Cem, is a descendant of one of Sevi's followers.
The ancient bond was further strengthened four years ago when an earthquake shook Istanbul and killed 18,000 people in a swathe of cities to its south. While the Turkish government's chaotic response drew derision from its people, Israeli rescue crews became the heroes of the hour. This year's intake of Turkish schoolchildren contains a rather high number of four-year-olds bearing the very un-Islamic name of Shalom.
Turkey is also, of course, Israel's almost lone ally in the Muslim world. Both countries have disputed borders with Arab neighbours, both rely heavily on US aid, both have poor human rights records, and both have powerful generals pulling strings or setting agendas behind the scenes.
Despite all this, Israeli Foreign Minister Mr Silvan Shalom's immediate identification of Jews with Israel when he visited the bombed synagogues yesterday is not something most Istanbul Jews will be thankful for. They walk a very treacherous line in a country where Ataturk's secular religion of Turkishness is still gospel. Of all the trials that have befallen them over the last 500 years, none has brought more threat than the existence of Israel. It has drained away more than half of their numbers, and brought Palestinian gunmen to the door of the Neve Shalom synagogue 17 years ago at the cost of 22 lives.
Yesterday Israel blamed hatred whipped up in Turkey against it for the attacks and pressed for stronger security measures. It is from such mixed blessings as protectors who may unwittingly provoke attack that the famously acid Ladino wits of Istanbul have coined their epigrams. One pungent favourite of the tea houses seems particularly apt now: "Aharva kulo ke no pedo" - It's the backside that didn't make the stink that always gets hit.
Fiachra Gibbons is writing a book on minorities in the lands of the Ottoman empire - (Guardian Service)