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).

In 1942, finding work (in Turkey) was impossible. I would arrive at an interview and find the post filled. My name sounded foreign and people were very nationalistic at the time.

The name “Salomon” iconically represents Jewishness in the community’s imagination and in Turkish society more generally. The anti-Semitic Salomon F?kralar? (Salomon’s Tales), a popular cartoon series in the 1930s Turkish press, portrayed a Jewish man named Salomon as foolish, money hungry, and unattractive (Bali 1999; Bayraktar 2006).

Historians invoke the term “a usable past” (Roskies 1999) to describe how individuals, communities, and nations seek to interpret the past in light of current concerns and future desires.

Turkey has garnered special attention as a test case for the public/private divide around which the new force of political Islam has increasingly mobilized since the 1990s (White 2002), challenging the secular nature of public life and driving secular idols (for example, the Turkish Republic’s founder, Atatürk) from the public sphere into the home (Özyürek 2004; Navaro-Yashin 2002). This has engendered an exciting new critical literature about Turkish nationalism and the Turkish state, but one that largely takes up these questions from the perspective of the majority and its central institutions (Özyürek 2007). This book contributes to this literature by looking at Turkish nationalism and the Turkish state from the perspective of a quantitatively small but symbolically important group, showing how republican ideology has been embraced and rejected by different groups in the country.

This law was unevenly implemented over the centuries of Ottoman rule but it uniformly recognized Jews as different, not equal: “Nothing in the political system of the Ottoman Empire called for different groups to merge into one. The difference was a given and accepted as such” (Rodrigue and Reynolds 1995). As a reader of Ottoman Jewish history and an observer of the lives of Jews in the Turkish Republic, I was confronted with the question of how tolerance of difference has been enacted, interpreted, and taken up in recent Turkish discussions; the question became one of the puzzles that this book attempts to solve.