Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks

Marc D. Baer

Description

What compels Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey? Based on historical narrative, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire and then, later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then how can we believe that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians? Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to find the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront it and come to terms. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.

<FMO>Contents<\>

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Friend and Enemy

1. Sultans as Saviors

2. The Empire of Tolerant Turks

3. Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks

4. Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists

5. "Five Hundred Years of Friendship"

6. Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism

7. The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices

8. Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear?

Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies

Epilogue

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Conversos
• Turquía
• Jews
• Byzantine Empire
• The Holocaust
• Israel?Turkey relations
• Turkey ? United States relations
• Indiana University Press
• History of the Jews in Turkey
• Jewish studies
• IUP
• History of the Middle East
• Armenians
• Converso
• Sephardi Jews
• Genocide denial
• Greeks
• Zionism
• Ottoman Empire
• Middle East
• Antisemitism
• Armenian Genocide
• Turkey
• Nouveau chrétien
• Institut universitaire professionnalisé
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 10 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253045430
• Langue: English

Extrait

SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS
INDIANA SERIES IN SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES
Harvey E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS
Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide
Marc David Baer
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Marc David Baer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baer, Marc David, [date]- author.
Title: Sultanic saviors and tolerant Turks : writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide / Marc Baer.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2020. | Series: Indiana series in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021136 (print) | LCCN 2019980961 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253045416 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253045447 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253045423 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews-Turkey-History. | Antisemitism-Turkey. | Armenian massacres, 1915-1923. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) | Turkey-Ethnic relations.
Classification: LCC DS135.T8 B333 2020 (print) | LCC DS135.T8 (ebook) | DDC 956/.004924-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021136
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980961
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CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Friend and Enemy
1 Sultans as Saviors
2 The Empire of Tolerant Turks
3 Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks
4 Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists
5 Five Hundred Years of Friendship
6 Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism
7 The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices
8 Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear?
Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
D ECADES AGO, IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, AN A RMENIAN FRIEND once asked me, Why is it that you Jews deny our genocide? I remember answering meekly, Not all of us do. In reflecting on my own emotional introduction to these issues, I realize that I have written this book as a more detailed answer to the question, a kind of exegesis on the feelings, convictions, and material circumstances that have compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote the tenacious image of sultanic saviors and tolerant Turks.
Here is the path I took. I am a Jewish American raised in the Reform tradition, which emphasizes social action and social justice. Compassion is a central focus of belief and practice. Growing up in Indianapolis in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, I was fully exposed to the Holocaust from a young age. I remember watching the Holocaust miniseries on television at the tender age of eight. Each year at religious school, I studied the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. A number of survivors with the telltale numbers tattooed on their left forearms inhabited my world. They included a best friend s father and an Auschwitz survivor, the stern referee at our Jewish Community Center soccer league. When we visited my mother s relatives in Chicago, I listened engrossed as elderly women with thick accents talked about Hitler s Germany, they sipping tea with lemon, I eating jelly fruit slices. In 1978, neo-Nazis even dared plan a march on Skokie, Illinois-a Chicago suburb where relatives lived-one of the highest-density areas for survivors in all the United States. Two years later we cheered when Jake Elwood declared I hate Illinois Nazis and drove them off a bridge in a scene in the Blues Brothers film.
My family moved to Kaiserslautern, West Germany, where our rabbi was a fiery US Air Force chaplain. Under his tutelage, I celebrated my bar mitzvah there in 1983, the first that town had witnessed in many years. A year later, I was astonished to learn that anyone who completed Kaiserslautern s hiking club trek was given a medallion featuring the city s magnificent gold-domed synagogue, destroyed during the November 9-10 pogrom of 1938, the Kristallnacht. I never visited a concentration or death camp, but I did not need to understand what the absence of Jews meant. The medallion said it all for me.
Grandpa Harvey, my father s father, a first-generation Russian Jewish American, refused to visit us in Germany. He had served in the US Air Corps, making bombing runs over southern Germany during World War II. When his plane was shot down over Nazi-occupied Slovakia, he used his Russian skills to link up with Soviet guerrillas fighting against the Nazis. He would never go back to Germany.
When I began to travel to Turkey during graduate school in the early 1990s, Grandpa Harvey told me bluntly he would not visit me there either, on account of what the Turks had done. What had the Turks done? I had not heard about the Armenian genocide until I was in my early twenties, when an elderly aunt told me about donating money for the starving Armenians. I began to explore the topic on my own and learned about how the Jewish American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, had stood up to the Ottoman architect of the genocide, Talat Pasha, as it was happening. I read a 1930s historical novel by German Jew Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh , set in the Ottoman Empire of 1915, which uses Armenians as a stand-in for German Jews under Hitler. Jews read the novel in the besieged ghettos of Poland, identifying with the Armenians and their similar plight. I learned that it was the Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin, a man who had witnessed the trial of Talat Pasha s assassin in Berlin two decades earlier, who, reflecting on the common fate of the Armenians and Jews and watching it happening again, coined the term genocide during World War II. His own family was murdered in the Holocaust. I read Holocaust survivor Robert Melson s comparative history, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust . All these readings and experiences led me to believe that Ashkenazi Jews were constitutionally sympathetic to the Armenian plight, likening theirs with our own.
I was to be disabused of this notion in 1992, however, when I began to pursue a PhD in history at the University of Michigan. Advanced graduate students made it clear to me that not only did the most prominent Jewish historians of the Ottoman Empire lack sympathy for Armenian suffering, but, worse, they publicly denied that the Armenian people had been subjected to genocide. I could not comprehend why Ashkenazi Jewish historians, not subject to the same pressures as their Sephardic Jewish counterparts in Turkey, would deny the Armenian genocide. Why could they not empathize with Armenians? Where were the Morgenthaus, Werfels, Lemkins, Melsons, and Grandpa Harveys among them? It brought to mind how I had felt when I first came face to face with a notorious Holocaust denier at my undergraduate college. I was in the microfilm room at Northwestern University Library when I caught a glimpse of him-sporting a Hitler-style haircut and mustache, no less-the electrical engineering professor who had written a book in the 1970s denying that Jews had been murdered in gas chambers at Auschwitz. Seeing him made me angry and hurt. In the face of overwhelming evidence-including the testimony of both perpetrators and survivors, testimony I had heard firsthand-what could motivate him to deny the murder of Jews? My outrage, the normal reaction to someone promulgating malicious lies that fly in the face of all evidence, could not have been sincerer.
In graduate school I quickly discovered that, whether through silence or open denial of the Armenian genocide, Turkish Jews and their historians proffered a utopian perspective on Turks as having been sent by God, time and again, to save His persecuted people from European barbarity. What were the origins of this claim, where was the evidence to support it, and why was it still being repeated? Such a view could not be reconciled with the nightmare that the Armenians experienced in 1915, a set of events that in the early 1990s only a handful of professional historians of the Ottoman Empire referred to as a genocide.
To learn more about the Armenian genocide, I took an undergraduate course in Armenian history at the University of Michigan taught by professor Ronald Grigor Suny. The other students, two dozen Armenian Americans, were hostile to him. They resisted his efforts to rid them of their notions of primordial national identities and to show them instead how identities are socially constructed. All hell broke loose in the classroom when Professor Suny dared to invite professor Fatma M ge G ek, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, to discuss the fate of the Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire. The very idea of even a liberal Turk explaining the event to such an audience was viewed as an outrage. What could a descendant of the perpetrators possibly have to say to descendants of the victims, and why should anyone listen?
My fellow students were equally antagonistic to my presence in the classroom. They were full of rage and jealousy that my ge