Bostom's articles are useless as historical analysis. They cover long periods with no historical contextualization or judgment on the trustworthiness of the sources.

Bostom does not seem to have any ability to evaluate the Ottoman Turkish, Arabic language and Hebrew/Leshon Qodesh sources directly himself.

I have looked over the 19th century Rabbinical court records and tshuvot from Saloniki while Hebrew University's Haim Gerber has evaluated 17th-19th century sharia court records from Bursa and Jerusalem.

Gerber's "State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective" concludes that the Ottoman Empire was a Rechtstaat in the 19th century and that it probably was a good deal fairer towards the poor and minorities than the UK or Germany was at the same time period.

My evaluation of Jewish court records from the same time period brought me to the same conclusion, but I have to add that the Sharia courts seem to have been a good deal more just than Jewish battei din, for there are a tremendous number of cases where both parties in a dispute are Jewish, and they resort to the sharia courts in preference to the battei din.

Concepts of universal citizenship took hold in the Ottoman Empire earlier than they did in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Jizya in the 2nd half the 19th century was applied to all groups Muslim and non-Muslim that were exempted from military service.

20th century Turkish nationalist concepts have generally followed Boeckhian linguistic principles. Boeckh is the 19th century Swiss linguist, who argued (incorrectly) that Yiddish was a Germanic dialect and that the German Empire should be expanded into areas where there were large number of Yiddish speakers.

Understanding of modern Turkish policy towards Turkish Jews must taken into account Turkish awareness of the role of Soviet Ashkenazim/Jews in Soviet mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Turkic and Muslim populations.

Nevertheless Turkish Jewish populations (whether ethnically Ibero-Berber or Greek) never represented a serious threat to Turkey either in reality or in mental perception, and on the whole Turkish Jews have had higher incomes and higher education levels than other Turkish citizens.

Until the successes of the AK party not many Turks from families not associated with the former Ottoman elite have held high political office. With the sea-change in Turkish political culture that the AK has brought, there is still a good chance for complete integration of non-Turkic non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. Certainly Turkey does much better in this regard than most Eastern European states or the criminal genocidal racist State of Israel.

During the 30s and 40s Turkey was in many regards a natural ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, which was a murderous genocidal extremist state correctly perceived both in Germany and in Turkey as dominated or highly influenced by a fanatic genocidal Russian Ashkenazi/Jewish revolutionary elite.

Credit must be given to the Turkish elite for realizing that the Nazi Germans were only slightly less unsavory than the Soviets and for never actually joining in a formal alliance with Nazi Germany.

Turkish foreign policy has been for the most part pragmatic, and Turkey has been willing to work with the criminal State of Israel when Turkey and Israel had common anti-Syrian interests.

As relations between Turkey and Syria and warmed and as more of the Turkish political elite have become aware of the danger of the fanatic criminal transnational Jabotinskian Zionist elite that runs the Zionist state and that has tremendous influence over the US government, progressives and decent people in general can hope for increasing Turkish hostility towards the Zionist state, and there is a good chance that Turkey will eventually play a positive role in eradicating the Zionist state and in bringing the murderous genocidal Zionist elite to Nuremberg justice.

While racist ethnic Ashkenazim have waged a campaign of fairly intense fantasy-based Arabophobic and Islamophobic incitement (Moshe Maoz and Giselle Littman [Bat Yeor] are good example of typical racist Zionist hack Islamophobes) for over a half century, comparable incitement either propagandistic or fact-based is not found in Turkish literature or political culture.

I have to note that there are far superior and more sophisticated anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim sources in German than the ones Bostom used. (Binschwanger is a good example.) I have to assume that Bostom did not use them because he also lacks German.

Joachim Martillo,

What is useless is your self-importance; your ascription of others' work as being "useless;" your imbalance and self-assigned pride of place together with your quasi- and pseudo-erudition; also the way you leverage some better founded content as if it is everything, as if it's the sine qua non and authoritative word on every subject you pontificate upon.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, you're a farce wrapped in a bad joke packaged in self-promotion and sneering dismissiveness.

That you take yourself seriously and even impress yourself to the degree you obviously do reflects but one small aspect of your farcical content. You're the Leonardo DeCaprio of your own imaginings, ultimately nothing more than a boor who reflects hyper-leveraged and distorted content and which content is forwarded with snide, presumption, mendacities and other malignancies still.

Lee Harris reviewing The Legacy of Jihad, a volume edited by Bostom.