The Ottoman Empire was the most religiously diverse empire in Europe and Asia. Macedonia, the southernmost Balkan regions and Asia Minor, which formed historically and in the minds of late Ottoman elites the territorial core of the empire, housed large groups of Christians and a significant number of Jews. Religious diversity characterized the core regions of the Islamic empire. Struck by an existential crisis beginning in the late 18th century, the Ottoman state undertook reforms, declared the equality of its subjects, willingly maintained its diversity and even institutionalised the cultural and religious autonomies which it had given its Christian and Jewish communities. When the Ottoman state failed to defend its territory and sovereignty, the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the revolutionary rulers who gained power in a coup, finally decided on a program of national homogenization in Asia Minor which it carried out in 1914-1918. The CUP classified the Ottoman populations and dealt with them through resettlement, dispersion, expulsion and destruction – depending on the populations' assimilability into a Turko-Muslim nation in the Anatolian core. It judged the Muslims, in particular the Kurds, assimilable, but the Christian groups non-assimilable.
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