Partition of the Holy Land in an alternate XVII Century

What should be included in the Christian area?

  • Parts of Jerusalem

    Votes: 13 52.0%
  • The rest of Jerusalem

    Votes: 5 20.0%
  • Nazareth

    Votes: 12 48.0%
  • Bethlehem

    Votes: 11 44.0%
  • Other religious sites - please post

    Votes: 7 28.0%
  • Access to the Mediterranian Sea

    Votes: 12 48.0%
  • Access to the Jordan River

    Votes: 6 24.0%
  • Additional areas to make it contiguous

    Votes: 5 20.0%
  • Additional areas to make it a viable economical / demographical entity

    Votes: 4 16.0%
  • The rest of Palestine (no partition)

    Votes: 9 36.0%
  • Also include territories outside Palestine - please post

    Votes: 9 36.0%

  • Total voters
    25

Zagan

Donor
Premise (not really for discussion here; you may comment in my TL though):
- The Ottoman Empire is no more.
- The Europeans have conquered most of the Middle East.
- European Jews emigrate to Palestine (expelled by some countries / by their own free will from others).
- The Colonial Power which controls Palestine wants to partition it between a semi-autonomous Jewish area (most of it; to act as a buffer against the Arabs) and a Christian area (containing all / most of the sites of religious significance for Christianity plus the areas already having sizable Christian minorities).

Question: What should be included in the Christian area?

Thank you.
 
Why are they giving the Jews any land, again? Christians of the time were not usually in the business of relying on Jews for military protection.
 

Zagan

Donor
Why are they giving the Jews any land, again? Christians of the time were not usually in the business of relying on Jews for military protection.
Actually, it is not like an independent Israel or something. It would become something like a Protectorate.
Jews were welcomed in the Holy Land in order to erode the existing Muslim majority and because few Christians from Europe wanted to emigrate there.
The local Muslims were restive and the Jewish immigrants were supposedly more loyal.
 

Zagan

Donor
Something strange: option "The rest of Palestine" has more votes than option "The rest of Jerusalem" or "Bethlehem".
So, some voters wanted the rest of Palestine to get included, but not Bethlehem or all of Jerusalem! Hmm...
 
Putting aside plausibility issues, as I haven't yet had time to read your TL, I would say that the Christian area should also include Lebanon, since there is a sizeable Christian (Maronite) population there. I suppose it could be an internationally administered area, where jewish immigration is welcome and they have a degree of communal autonomy, but I don't think it is a good idea to have Christian only cities inside a Jewish Protectorate, especially Jerusalem: it is imho a recipe for ethnical strife.
 
Something strange: option "The rest of Palestine" has more votes than option "The rest of Jerusalem" or "Bethlehem".
So, some voters wanted the rest of Palestine to get included, but not Bethlehem or all of Jerusalem! Hmm...

To be fair, the rest of Palestine has the comment (no partition) which implies that it would still retain all of those cities. It'd be the same as saying that those who didn't vote for access to the Mediterranean mean that this state should not have said access.
 

Zagan

Donor
Putting aside plausibility issues, as I haven't yet had time to read your TL, I would say that the Christian area should also include Lebanon, since there is a sizeable Christian (Maronite) population there. I suppose it could be an internationally administered area, where jewish immigration is welcome and they have a degree of communal autonomy, but I don't think it is a good idea to have Christian only cities inside a Jewish Protectorate, especially Jerusalem: it is imho a recipe for ethnical strife.

In ATL, Lebanon is already a kind of dependency / protectorate (its degree of self-governance may fluctuate in time like that of the proposed Jewish entity).
One problem is that Lebanon is quite far away from Jerusalem / Bethlehem and separated by areas with Muslim / Jewish population.

Ugh... It is so difficult to draw borders in that part of the Earth! Especially when you want both the Colonial Power, the local Christians and the Jews somehow content with the situation.
Support of a part of the population (even if a minority -- Christians + Jews) is absolutely necessary considering the rather small size of the army available to be send from the metropole.
 
I do not understand what you mean. Please reformulate your question.

I haven't read your TL and I don't know how your world is, but, XVIIIth century absolustic rulers tendend to maintain an autocratic, chauvinistic and patrimonialistic rule over foreign land - just look at Spanish America. This worry about giving minorities powers -within the state's structure- only started with 19th century imperialism. Most indirect rule by then was made by paying off the local elite with trinkets.

Also, a true Christian ruler would never agree to divide his rule of the holy land. It's part of his legitimacy and strength.

As I see, you're working with a late 19th century/early 20th century mentality. But, again, I haven't read the TL.
 

Zagan

Donor
I haven't read your TL and I don't know how your world is, but, XVIIIth century absolustic rulers tendend to maintain an autocratic, chauvinistic and patrimonialistic rule over foreign land - just look at Spanish America. This worry about giving minorities powers -within the state's structure- only started with 19th century imperialism. Most indirect rule by then was made by paying off the local elite with trinkets.

Also, a true Christian ruler would never agree to divide his rule of the holy land. It's part of his legitimacy and strength.

As I see, you're working with a late 19th century/early 20th century mentality. But, again, I haven't read the TL.

You are right, with some observations:
- The people from the Middle East were not considered "savages" like those "pagans" from America or some remote islands.
- Some form of autonomy / self-rule for minorities existed even earlier in OTL, for example:
--- the Saxon and Szekler Seats in Hungarian-ruled Transylvania;
--- the Autonomous Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, under Ottoman suzerainty, but not really Ottoman territory;
--- the rights of the religious minorities in the HRE;
--- etc.
- Strength? Not exactly. The colonial rule in the Middle East was very fragile, because the Muslims were very numerous and still quite powerful.
- Not exactly absolutistic autocratic rulers... Something more like OTL Poland-Lithuania than OTL France or Spain.
- The mentality is indeed somehow more advanced than in OTL, but not quite so advanced!

In conclusion, I suppose that it too early for ethnic / religious cantons. This will have probably to wait at least another century.

The question that remains, though is: "What areas from Palestine are so important from a Christian point of view that they should never get ceded to a Jewish entity by a Christian Colonial Empire?"

Thanks to all, anyway.
 
You're right, but, you need to remember that all the Balkanic examples are from preexisting medieval institutions - rulers simply took it as fait accompli. I just can't see the creation of this kind of autonomy in an early modern state. Also, why give something to the Jews? What kind of leverage they have? As I see, a situation similar to the Russian Pale of Settlement is perfectly fine in the given period.
 
The question that remains, though is: "What areas from Palestine are so important from a Christian point of view that they should never get ceded to a Jewish entity by a Christian Colonial Empire?"

Ok then: Jerusalem (with the Mount Calvarium), Nazareth, Bethlem, Tiberias and the Jordan river should be the most significant areas from a religious pov.
 
So, it's difficult to back-project demographics to find which regions were Christian majority because of the notoriously bad Ottoman censuses in the area, plus the fact that the region itself is split into multiple administrative subunits, but Christians probably have a significant population in much or most of the Galilee region, as well as the coastal city of Haifa, as well as Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and probably Nablus (which was a minor urban center), as well as being present in large amounts near Mt Lebanon and really throughout Lebanon and Syria. Depending on your definition of the word "sizeable", a hypothetical Christian state could well be made in the entire Levant (basically, the further back you go, the more Christian the whole region is). Christians weren't super concentrated, aside from the infamous community at Mt Lebanon and communities at holy sites like Nazareth and Bethlehem. Jerusalem would have had a significant Christian presence, but also Muslims.

As others have mentioned, I'm not even sure why someone would set up a Jewish region. I'd expect them to just set up a unitary Christian state that allowed Jews (and maybe Muslims) to be minimally harassed. The state should, at the least, include the northern half of what is now Israel, and could possible extend over the entire Levant, maybe even reaching down the Tigris and Euphrates into Mesopotamia.
 
I don't think they would partition the areas by religion. They would declare the whole area a Christian-ruled region, while allowing Jews and Muslims to live there.
 
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