The Muslim nation that saved Jews

[HalloIsBack]

The Muslim nation that saved Jews
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Tuesday 14 April 2015 7:15PM
Lime Basha, whose family hid Jews during WWII IMAGE: LIME BASHA'S FAMILY HID THREE JEWISH BROTHERS IN THEIR HOME DURING WWII (SUPPLIED: NORMAN GERSHMAN)
During the Holocaust, many individuals and small groups risked their lives to save Jewish people. However, it’s only in recent years that the world has begun to hear the story of the Muslim nation that opened its borders and welcomed Jews. Barbara Heggen reports.


At the end of World War Two, only one European nation could boast a larger Jewish population than it had at the start of the war.

It's such an important part of history that the world needs to know.
DASHMIR BALLA
Despite being occupied by Italy and then Germany, Albania not only protected its Jewish population but offered refuge to Jews from elsewhere in the region—and this is a country with a Muslim majority.

The reason for this heroism lies in a concept known as Besa. It's an Albanian word meaning 'to keep a promise'.

Dashmir Balla, former president of the Albanian Australian Islamic Society, says it's a code of respect deeply embedded in Albanian culture.

'To look after your guests, your neighbours, is a matter of national honour.'

As a result, Albania has no concept of 'foreigners' and visitors are regarded as guests. This honour system has remained constant throughout the country's long history of being invaded.

Mr Balla says that the Besa ethos goes hand in hand with the teachings of the Koran.

'It dictates a moral behaviour so absolute that non-adherence brings shame and dishonour to one's self and one's family.'

During communist rule, Albania remained an isolated state and most Albanians were unaware of world events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The country's leaders forbade religion, so no one spoke much of the efforts to save Jews.

After communist rule finally ended in 1992, Jewish survivors began returning to Albania to find, and thank, the Muslims who had saved them.

'Because of the communist regime, the shutters had come down and this information was suppressed. Unfortunately, many Albanians didn't know about it, but when I did find out I was very, very proud,' says Mr Balla.

'It's such an important part of history that the world needs to know.'

Many extraordinary accounts of wartime courage and heroism in Albania have come to international attention thanks to American photographer Norman Gershman.

He spent six years travelling throughout Albania interviewing and photographing the people who risked their lives to save others.

Jayne Josem, the curator and head of collections at the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust centre, says she too was surprised when she first learned of the story.

'The fact that a whole country banded together to save Jews and the fact that they were Muslims, it totally fascinated me. I had to figure out how to bring the exhibition to Melbourne.'

The centre, in partnership with the Albanian Australian Islamic Society, is presenting an exhibition of Gershman's photographs and screening his award-winning documentary Besa: The Promise.

Ms Josem says it is a beautiful story, which is once again bringing together people of different faiths.

'We've come in closer contact with the Albanian community, we had an opening event and many local Albanians turned up, and they really are just wonderful people. It was one of the warmest events we've ever had at the centre.'

Besa: Code of Honour is on at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Centre, until the 26th April

RN Drive takes you behind the day’s headlines, with an engaging mix of current affairs, analysis, arts and culture from across Australia and around the world.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drawingroom/the-muslim-nation-that-saved-jews/6390888

[HalloIsBack]

http://besathepromise.com/

[Toramana]

The Muslim nation that saved Jews
Listen now(Link will open in new window)Download audio
Tuesday 14 April 2015 7:15PM
Lime Basha, whose family hid Jews during WWII IMAGE: LIME BASHA'S FAMILY HID THREE JEWISH BROTHERS IN THEIR HOME DURING WWII (SUPPLIED: NORMAN GERSHMAN)
During the Holocaust, many individuals and small groups risked their lives to save Jewish people. However, it’s only in recent years that the world has begun to hear the story of the Muslim nation that opened its borders and welcomed Jews. Barbara Heggen reports.


At the end of World War Two, only one European nation could boast a larger Jewish population than it had at the start of the war.

It's such an important part of history that the world needs to know.
DASHMIR BALLA
Despite being occupied by Italy and then Germany, Albania not only protected its Jewish population but offered refuge to Jews from elsewhere in the region—and this is a country with a Muslim majority.

The reason for this heroism lies in a concept known as Besa. It's an Albanian word meaning 'to keep a promise'.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/...d-jews/6390888

Hallo, the region from North Africa to South Asia is an ancient region where the first civilizations were created which included such facets as the invention of agriculture, writing(alphabet), and wheel, establishing city states, birth of monotheistic religions (Judiasm, Christianity, Islam, etc.), etc.

This region has seen a lot of mixing of different races, religions, cultures, etc. Probably, it has been the most culturally, racially, and religiously diverse region in history. Therefore, it has got a tolerant attitude towards the question of diversity.

The diversity in other regions example south Afica, Americas, western Europe, Far East is only recent one and the result of globalization.

[HalloIsBack]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8szhccfZM

[HalloIsBack]

Hallo, the region from North Africa to South Asia is an ancient region where the first civilizations were created which included such facets as the invention of agriculture, writing(alphabet), and wheel, establishing city states, birth of monotheistic religions (Judiasm, Christianity, Islam, etc.), etc.

This region has seen a lot of mixing of different races, religions, cultures, etc. Probably, it has been the most culturally, racially, and religiously diverse region in history. Therefore, it has got a tolerant attitude towards the question of diversity.

The diversity in other regions example south Afica, Americas, western Europe, Far East is only recent one and the result of globalization.

i cannot say anything about it but also turkey and people in caucasia especially muslems welcoemd jews with open arms, lots of jews were teaching in turkey university durign the 2ww and after it

the antisemitism in caucasia and in other muslem countries was imported

[Black Pakistani]

The main reason for anti-Semitism among Muslim groups is the Arab-Israel conflict.
Unfortunately many people do not differentiate between Jews and Israel.
I respect Jews but I hate Israel.

[Toramana]

The main reason for anti-Semitism among Muslim groups is the Arab-Israel conflict.
Unfortunately many people do not differentiate between Jews and Israel.
I respect Jews but I hate Israel.

Even that problem is not a problem caused by Muslims in the first place. It is purely a European creation.

[Black Pakistani]

Even that problem is not a problem caused by Muslims in the first place. It is purely a European creation.

German Nazis were the ones who oppressed the European Jews so Israel should have been created inside Germany or at least in Europe rather than in the Arab lands of Palestine.
The root cause of all evil in this world is the European white man.

[Toramana]

German Nazis were the ones who oppressed the European Jews so Israel should have been created inside Germany or at least in Europe rather than in the Arab lands of Palestine.
The root cause of all evil in this world is the European white man.

Many people (but not all as Red Indians and Aboriginals of Australia are an exception for how they welcomed Europeans) that have been living in inaccessible and remote regions isolated from the rest of humanity have a degree of Xenophobia and insular attitude towards others. Examples are south Africa, Far East (China, Japan, Koreas), and Central and north-Western Europe.

But unfortunately, such Xenophobia peaks in Central and Western Europe. Only recently have they opened up to the rest of the world.

As for religious harmony, people of different creed have been living together in the birth places of classical civilizations (North Africa, ME, Mediterranean, South Asia, Central Asia, and to a degree South-East Asia) for millennia without any big conflict and in relative peace. There are some examples here and there (e.g., Armenian Genocide) but not any systematic persistent Xenophobic tendency or attitude in these regions.

About Jews, there were significant number of Jews living in Muslim countries for centuries. I watched a video about Jews living in Central Asia. Unfortunately, the Israeli Palestinian issue may have caused problems for Jews in Muslim countries. At one time (in the medieval times) Jews were banished from Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, etc. and ultimately ended up in the ME.

[Toramana]

Bukharan Jews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBAW7DxtmwE

[Toramana]

Invention of Agriculture

"Scholars have developed a number of hypotheses to explain the historical origins of agriculture. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, based on evidence from south west Asia and China, indicates an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism known as the Natufian in south West Asia and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China. Current models indicate that a range of food resources was being used more intensively. Wild stands that had been harvested previously started to be planted. Evidence is also now emerging that the crops grown initially were wild and not domesticated.[4] Crops such as emmer and einkorn wheat do not appear to have become domesticated until well into the Neolithic and 'ancient cultivated rice' (Oryza sativa) took 3000 years to become domesticated."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture

Nutufians

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture

[Toramana]

Neolithic Revolution

"Once agriculture started gaining momentum, human activity resulted in the selective breeding of cereal grasses (beginning with emmer, einkorn and barley), and not simply of those that would favour greater caloric returns through larger seeds. Plants that possessed traits such as small seeds or bitter taste would have been seen as undesirable. Plants that rapidly shed their seeds on maturity tended not to be gathered at harvest, therefore not stored and not seeded the following season; years of harvesting selected for strains that retained their edible seeds longer.

Several plant species, the "pioneer crops" or Neolithic founder crops were named by Daniel Zohary, who highlighted importance of the three cereals, and suggesting domestication of flax, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and lentil came a little later. Based on analysis of the genes of domesticated plants, he preferred theories of a single, or at most a very small number of domestication events for each taxa that spread in an arc from the Levantine corridor around the fertile crescent and later into Europe.[23][24] Gordon Hillman and Stuart Davies carried out experiments with wild wheat varieties to show that the process of domestication would have happened over a relatively short period of between twenty and two hundred years.[25] Some of these pioneering attempts failed at first and crops were abandoned, sometimes to be taken up again and successfully domesticated thousands of years later: rye, tried and abandoned in Neolithic Anatolia, made its way to Europe as weed seeds and was successfully domesticated in Europe, thousands of years after the earliest agriculture.[26] Wild lentils present a different challenge that needed to be overcome: most of the wild seeds do not germinate in the first year; the first evidence of lentil domestication, breaking dormancy in their first year, was found in the early Neolithic at Jerf el Ahmar (in modern Syria), and quickly spread south to the Netiv HaGdud site in the Jordan Valley.[26] This process of domestication allowed the founder crops to adapt and eventually become larger, more easily harvested, more dependable in storage and more useful to the human population"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

[Toramana]

Plant Domestication

The wild progenitors of crops including wheat, barley, and peas are traced to the Near East region. Cereals were grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago, while figs were cultivated even earlier; prehistoric seedless fruits discovered in the Jordan Valley suggest fig trees were being planted some 11,300 years ago. Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain.

The origins of rice and millet farming date to the same Neolithic period in China. The world’s oldest known rice paddy fields, discovered in eastern China in 2007, reveal evidence of ancient cultivation techniques such as flood and fire control.

In Mexico, squash cultivation began around 10,000 years ago, but corn (maize) had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, teosinte. While maize-like plants derived from teosinte appear to have been cultivated at least 9,000 years ago, the first directly dated corn cob dates only to around 5,500 years ago.

Farmed Animals

Cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs all have their origins as farmed animals in the so-called Fertile Crescent, a region covering eastern Turkey, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. This region kick-started the Neolithic Revolution. Dates for the domestication of these animals range from between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/development-of-agriculture/

[Toramana]

Bronze Age

"The Bronze Age in the ancient Near East began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Cultures in the ancient Near East (often called, "the cradle of civilization") practiced intensive year-round agriculture, developed a writing system, invented the potter's wheel, created a centralized government, law codes, and empires, and introduced social stratification, slavery, and organized warfare. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy and mathematics."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/8aad2bed7b2805ef16e0242b47ffe144.png

Iron age

Lack of archaeological evidence of iron production made it seem unlikely that it had begun earlier elsewhere, and the Iron Age was seen as a case of simple diffusion of a new and superior technology from an invention point in the Near East to other regions. It is now known that meteoric iron, or iron-nickel alloy, was used by various ancient peoples thousands of years before the Iron Age. Such iron, being in its native metallic state, required no smelting of ores.[7][8] By the Middle Bronze Age, increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appeared in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age

[Toramana]

History of writing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing