Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey

I have a secret, but don’t let it leave this room. When I started to sing these songs I assumed that they were part of the Sephardic tradition, carried on the lips of singers expelled from Spain 500 years ago. But then I noticed something strange: many of the songs had a musical structure that didn’t exist in Spain. So, I did some research and found that the songs aren’t that old. We found a copy of a Salonikan newspaper whose writers popularized these songs by writing Judeo-Spanish poems and instructing their readership to sing along to the tune of a Greek or Turkish song which was in fashion at the time. So, as you can imagine, the song isn’t really a traditional Jewish song, but it is beautiful nonetheless.
By calling the song “non-traditional,” Shira professed an ideology of linguistic and musical purism. But why is syncretism a dirty little secret? If a Spanish song can be Jewish, why can’t a Turkish one?

an interview, a community official once offered me a history of the community’s security apparatus. An engineer, he had developed the system of double doors, alarms, and wires himself, believing that the community shouldn’t entrust its security to non-Jews who ran the alarm companies in Turkey. The security system became so successful that it was eventually marketed for sale outside the community. Soon, the highest-level Turkish jail adopted it for an island prison holding political detainees such as (Kurdish leader) Abdullah Öcalan.

The author of this piece, a non-Jewish human rights activist and writer for the news journal Turkish Daily News, refers to the anti-Israeli demonstrations that take place each week in Beyazit Square, home to one of the oldest mosques in Istanbul and named for Sultan Beyazit II, who is credited with welcoming the Jewish community into the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain (an irony likely lost on demonstrators). Turkish (and other) anti-Zionists often imagine that all Jews are Zionists (or vice versa).