Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide

By Marc David Baer

An examination of why Jews promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while denying 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 myths. He aims to foster reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront, accept, and deal with them. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer aims to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.

“[Baer] demonstrates not only his erudition and knowledge of the sources but his courage on confronting a major myth of Ottoman history and current Turkish politics: the tolerance and defense of Jews by the Ottoman and Turkish state.” —Ronald Grigor Suny, editor of A Question of Genocide

“A very significant study regarding the origins of violence and its denial in Turkey through the empirical study of not only antisemitism, but also its connection to genocide denial.” —Fatma Müge Göçek, author of The Transformation of Turkey

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780253045430

Book preview

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

1 2 3 4 5    25 24 23 22 21 20

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Friend and Enemy

1Sultans as Saviors

2The Empire of Tolerant Turks

3Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks

4Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists

5Five Hundred Years of Friendship

6Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism

7The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices

8Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear?

Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

DECADES AGO, IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, AN ARMENIAN 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 Müge Göçek, 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 genocide was recognized and commemorated—given a capital letter and its own special word, Holocaust—while theirs was denied and dismissed. They were well aware that American, Israeli, and Turkish Jews frequently, publicly denied the Armenian genocide. At the annual Ann Arbor Armenian dance that year, held per usual in the old blue-domed Greek Orthodox church on Main Street, an argument between me and some of the more hotheaded among them nearly turned into a fistfight when they referred to me with a derogatory term for Jews.

I also socialized with Turks. At the Del Rio Bar, I downed pints of beer with well-dressed, well-coifed secular Turkish medical and engineering students and professionals who insisted all Armenians were liars, and that their ancestors were the true victims of genocide at the hands of Armenian terrorists. Was I unaware of the fact that dozens of Turkish ambassadors had been assassinated by Armenians over the past two decades? And I had thought that studying Ottoman history would be less contentious than the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, for which I had initially pursued graduate education.

Fortunately, a year after my arrival, a group of open and critical Armenian American, but especially Turkish graduate students in history, anthropology, and sociology began to gather around Professor Göçek. And elsewhere in Ann Arbor, other descendants of victims were encountering descendants of perpetrators. Around that time, I started dating fellow graduate student Esra Özyürek, who, hailing from a family of secular Turkish elites, had received the best education available in her country. Yet she had never been taught about the genocide. Her roommate was fellow graduate student Lucine Taminian. As soon as they met, Lucine made Esra a pot of tea in their kitchen and explained what had happened to her ancestors in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. I wondered how it felt for this descendant of survivors of genocide to face a descendant of the perpetrators who had not even heard of the tragedy. When Professor Suny invited us over for dinner, his wife, Armine, took Esra aside the moment we entered their house and asked her whether she had accepted the fact that the Armenian genocide had happened. As Jew and Turk, we faced the wrath and hurt of those who experience genocide twice over: the physical annihilation of their forbears, followed by the denial of their annihilation. Rather than promote the myth of Turkish-Jewish coexistence, as might be expected, we were compelled to reappraise the ethnonational myths we had both been reared on.

When deciding to pursue Ottoman history exclusively, I was recruited and received a generous fellowship offer from Princeton University but declined it. Admittedly, I had to choose between an ethical rock and a fairly hard place. One choice was to study at Princeton, whose Atatürk Chair in Turkish History had been endowed by the Turkish government. The chair was held by a professor who had worked hand in hand with the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the coordinator of Armenian genocide denial in North America. My other choice was to study at the University of Chicago, whose Kanuni Suleyman Professorship of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies had also been endowed by a gift from the Turkish government, and whose holder would receive the Order of Merit of the Republic of Turkey, Turkey’s highest honor given to foreigners. Along with most US-based professors of Ottoman history at the time, the professor in question had signed a notorious anti-Armenian genocide petition in the 1980s, part of Turkey’s public campaign against genocide recognition. For reasons that should at this point be obvious, there were in the early 1990s very few historians of the Ottoman Empire who both conducted research in Turkey and recognized the Armenian genocide.

I first lived in Istanbul in the summer of 1994, continuing my study of Turkish at Boğaziçi University. Two sets of generally negative experiences from that summer left a lasting impression. My interactions with Turkish Jews were mixed. When I inquired at the offices of the Jewish weekly Şalom about Ladino lessons, I was asked what (Jewish) language my grandfather spoke. I responded, Yiddish, as my grandparents originated in either Austria-Hungary, Poland, or Russia and are named Wolf, Braun, and Baer. Then you can never learn Judeo-Spanish, I was told. It is not on your tongue. I was also not allowed to conduct research at the library of the chief rabbinate. I did meet with the official historian of the community, Naim Güleryüz (b. 1933), in his book-lined office at his home in seaside Moda, but he only repeated the mantra that Jews and Turks had lived together in peace and brotherhood for five hundred years. He would not discuss the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi and his followers, about whom I planned to write a dissertation. In fact, I would find it easier to enter the secret community of the Dönme—the descendants of Sabbatai Zevi’s followers who had abandoned Judaism for Islam in the seventeenth century—than the community of Turkish Jews. I also became good friends with Turkish Jewish researcher Rıfat Bali, who dared like no other to publicly criticize the myth that there was no anti-Semitism in Turkey. Only after several attempts was I allowed to pray at Sephardic synagogues in Ortaköy, Kuzguncuk, and Büyük Ada, but I found it difficult to follow the unfamiliar liturgy and melodies, prayer books sometimes written in the Rashi script, and sermons delivered in Turkish and Ladino. I did appreciate the tables laden with cucumbers, feta cheese, spinach börek, tea, and rakı, and the warm welcome I received after the services, however. At one of these synagogues I met an Ashkenazi family whose narrative of a life of discrimination and violence in Turkey contradicted the story promoted by the chief rabbinate and its spokesmen. More off-putting were the many levels of security enveloping these houses of prayer forever flying the Turkish flag at their gates. Despite several attempts, I never was allowed in to Neve Şalom synagogue in Beyoğlu, showing my US passport and speaking Hebrew or English (rather than Turkish). In the middle of the street outside one of these synagogues, I was stopped and questioned by an Israeli security guard. If Turkish Jewry felt so safe, secure, and welcomed by brotherly love in Turkey, I thought, then why did they feel the need to hire Israelis to protect them? I realized that, despite their public face, perhaps this was a sign that these communities did not trust their own government and police to defend them.

Connected to this first set of experiences was a second: coming face to face with pervasive anti-Jewish sentiment expressed by young and old, secular and religious, right-wing and left-wing, Kurd and Turk. I did not grow up in a naïve Jewish bubble. I had had anti-Jewish epithets shouted at me by children my age, Grandpa Harvey received anti-Semitic tracts in his mailbox, I read ads placed by the Ku Klux Klan in the Indianapolis Star, and I witnessed a Klan gathering in southern Indiana. At Kaiserslautern American High School in Germany, my elder brother Steve was viciously and repeatedly targeted by an underground student group calling itself USA, which circulated its own samizdat gossip newspaper. Members of the appropriately named student group Kaiserslautern Kar Klub (KKK) tried to run him over in the school parking lot. Despite such experiences, I had never seen, heard, or read the likes of what I found in Istanbul, whether it was in conversation with academics, taxi drivers, or imams or encountered in the daily newspapers, on television, or in the bookstores of Taksim. Along with Turkish translations of anti-Semitic classics such as Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the International Jew, there were vicious Turkish-authored pieces. These included Soykırım yalanı (The Holocaust lie), which claims there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that six million Jews were not murdered in the Holocaust; Yahudiler dünyayı nasıl istilâ ediyorlar? (How do the Jews take over the world?), whose cover depicts a globe entrapped within a Star of David; and Nasıl bir dünyada yaşıyoruz? (What kind of a world do we live in?), illustrated with a globe surrounded by a question mark made up of Stars of David. Worse was a Turkish translation of an Arabic work, Yahudilerin kanlı böreğı (The Jews’ bloody börek), whose cover depicts a Hasidic Jew cutting into a flaky pastry, which, rather than being filled with spinach and feta cheese like the böreks I had enjoyed at Turkish synagogues, was stuffed with bleeding children. It was an Islamification of the medieval Christian calumny of Jews as Christ-killers and child murderers. I was troubled by how, facing an onslaught of such anti-Jewish hate, Turkish Jews continued to present themselves as being grateful for Turkish tolerance. This jarred my Jewish American sensibilities. But it also made me wonder why this pervasive Turkish anti-Semitism and the Turkish Jewish response to it did not also bother other Jews raised in liberal societies, particularly those who become historians of the Ottoman Empire.

I have been studying, researching, and writing about Ottoman and Turkish history and the interactions of Jews and Muslims for nearly three decades. Having lived on and off in Istanbul since that first summer, I am perpetually impressed by the passionate feelings aroused when the topic turns toward Jews and Armenians, for good and ill. But it is only very recently that I have begun to openly confront the emotions and questions that marked my first two years of graduate study and those first summers spent in Istanbul all those years ago. What moral responsibility do the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of the victims of another? What role have Jews played in genocide denial? What is the relationship between the utopian depiction of the experience of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic and efforts to counter recognition of the annihilation of the Armenians? Finally, what are the moral and ethical obligations of historians on these counts?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALTHOUGH I HAVE BEEN ENGAGED WITH THE TOPIC of this book for nearly three decades, the stimulation for writing came in the form of an invitation to give the 2014–2015 Poullada Lecture Series at Princeton University. I thank the Poullada family, whose generous contribution enabled this endowed lecture series, and my host, Cyrus Schayegh, who invited me. At Princeton, I presented versions of chapters 1 and 2 as Ottomans and Jews in the Literary Imagination of the Other, from the Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, receiving stimulating audience feedback, as well as insightful criticism and commentary during the final roundtable discussion from Mark R. Cohen and Molly Greene. I also presented a version of chapter 1 as the David Patterson Lecture at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Oxford (2015); at the international conference, Visions, Vows, and Wonders: Religion and the Sea in the Eastern Mediterranean, 15th–19th Centuries, organized by Gelina Harlaftis and Nikolaos Chrissidis at the Forth Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Rethymnon, Crete (2018); and as part of the Middle East Lecture Series organized by Ebru Akçasu and Stefano Taglia at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Charles University, and Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic (2018). Paul Bessemer and Shimon Morad assisted with Hebrew-language scholarship cited in chapter 1. Yorgos Dedes and Baki Tezcan helped with difficult Ottoman-language material. Chapters 1 and 2 also benefited from the insights of my undergraduate and graduate students in my courses at the London School of Economics and Political Science: The Ottoman Empire and its Legacy and A History of Muslim-Jewish Relations (2014–2018).

I presented the theoretical framework of the introduction at the London School of Economics Contemporary Turkish Studies Conference organized by Rebecca Bryant, Interrogating the Post-Ottoman (2016), and received valuable insights from fellow presenters, including Amy Mills, Christine Philiou, and Müge Göçek. I also presented the introduction, along with much of chapter 1, at Cornell University (2016). I thank Ziad Fahmy in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Jonathan Boyarin of the Jewish Studies Program for having invited me, and for the stimulating discussions.

I presented material on the Turkish novels discussed in the book at several conferences: at the German Studies Association Annual Conference in Washington, DC, as part of the panel entitled Berührungspunkte: Triangulating the Discourse on Jews, Turks, and ‘Germanness’ organized by Leslie Morris with discussant Deniz Göktürk (2015); at the Nationalism, Revolution & Genocide: A Conference Inspired by Professor Ronald Grigor Suny organized by the University of Michigan (2016); and at the Past in the Present: European Approaches to the Armenian Genocide Workshop on Armenian and Turkish History in Potsdam, Germany (2017). I received valuable insight about the novels from Aslı Iğsız and Kader Konuk.

I also discussed ideas regarding the tangled relations of Armenians, Jews, and Turks presented in this book at the Turkish-German Studies: Past, Present, and Future seminar organized by Ela Gezen, David Gramling, and Berna Gueneli as part of the German Studies Association Annual Conference in Kansas City, MO (2014); at the Jewish History/General History: Rethinking the Divide roundtable organized by Lisa Leff with discussant Leora Auslander as part of the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in New York City (2015); at the Coming to Terms with the Armenian Genocide: 100 Years On international workshop organized by Kader Konuk at the Institute of Turkish Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), in Essen, Germany (2015); at the Conspiracy and Democracy Project, Centre for the Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University (2015); Genel’de Yahudi Çalışmaları (Trends in Jewish Studies), Türkiye’de Yahudi Çalışmaları Çalıştayı (Workshop on Jewish Studies in Turkey), İstanbul Bilgi University, Yahudi Toplulukları Çalışma Birimi (YATOÇ) (2015); at the Christians and Jews in Ottoman Society international workshop organized by John-Paul Ghobrial at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University (2017); at the Jews in Muslim-Majority Countries: History and Prospects international conference organized by Yasemin Shooman at the Jewish-Islamic Forum of the Academy of the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2017); at the Europäische Sommeruniversität für Jüdische Studien, Krypto Jüdisches im Verborgenen, Hohenems, Austria (2017); at the Jewish-Turkish Entanglements: Resilience, Migration and New Diasporas international symposium organized by İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu and Kerem Öktem at the University of Graz, Austria (2018); and at the workshop Talat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide, organized by Rolf Hosfeld at the Lepsiushaus, Potsdam, Germany (2018).

Former Ann Arbor housemate Theresa Truax-Gischler did a marvelous job editing the complete manuscript. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu and Esra Özyürek read the entire manuscript and offered helpful criticisms.

I am fortunate that Esra is still with me all these years later, after I left Michigan to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago. We have spent the past two decades mainly in Istanbul, Berlin, San Diego, and London, and some unique places in between, including Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Our daughters, Azize and Firuze, have arrived at an age where they are beginning to ask questions about evil men like Hitler who kill children. Literally stumbling over Stolpersteinen in Berlin, brass-plated cobblestones inscribed with the names and life dates of those murdered by the Third Reich, we began to teach them about the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. As German-speaking Turkish Jewish Americans growing up in London, they will find their own myths against which to rebel, as have Esra and I.

SULTANIC SAVIORS AND

TOLERANT TURKS

INTRODUCTION:

FRIEND AND ENEMY

IN JANUARY 2014, HIGH-LEVEL TURKISH GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS PARTICIPATED for the first time in the Turkish Jewish community’s public commemoration of the Holocaust—an annual event first authorized only a few years earlier. Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish minister of foreign affairs, gave a speech on that day filled with meaning for the Turkish Jewish community. He began by honoring the memory of millions of Jews, Roma people and other minorities who lost their lives in a systematic annihilation by the Nazi regime. This crime against humanity is the common grief and shame of humankind.¹ He then quickly pivoted to Turkey, which not only embraced Jews who were sent into exile from Spain in 1492 in the Ottoman period, but also helped and protected its Jewish citizens and became a safe haven for all Jews, especially scientists and academicians, during World War II.² Based on these events, his conclusion was unambiguous: There is no trace of genocide in our history. Hostility towards the other has no room in our civilization.³

In his statement, originally available in English on the Turkish Jewish community’s official website, Çavuşoğlu contrasted European Christian persecution of Jews from the medieval era to the Holocaust, which he termed the shame of humankind, with five centuries of Turkish tolerance of Jews.⁴ Embedded in his short speech is the straightforward implication that because Turks have always rescued Jews, they could not possibly have committed crimes against humanity, certainly not the Armenian genocide, perpetrated in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire by their ancestors. Thus, in a spare five sentences at an event meant to commemorate the murder of European Jewry—itself remarkable, as Holocaust denial is rampant in Turkey—the foreign minister of Turkey shifted the focus from the Holocaust to a performative conscience clearing of his own country.⁵ To deny the Armenian genocide, the foreign minister deployed a specific, dominant, utopian narrative of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish history. That historical narrative, how it came to be, and how it functions is the focus of this book.

Representatives of the Turkish Jewish community also deny the genocide by contrasting Turkish Muslim tolerance with Christian persecution of Jews. In 1989, Turkey’s chief rabbi, David Asseo, wrote in a letter sent to all one hundred US senators that the resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide then pending before the US Congress is of great concern to our community. . . . We cannot accept the label of ‘genocide’; the groundless accusation is as injurious to us as to our Turkish compatriots. Asseo went further in his grateful praise of the Turks. As Turkish Jews, we have received for the last five hundred years the protection, the rights and the freedom granted to all Turkish citizens, at times when the concepts of human rights, liberty and tolerance were unknown in most Western countries.⁶ Using the same logic that the Turkish foreign minister would use a quarter of a century later, the rabbi argued that the Armenian genocide never happened because Turks have always tolerated Jews. What both Çavuşoğlu and Asseo are asking us to accept is an if/then assumption about tolerance and genocide: if one buys the myth that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony as friends for five hundred years, then one trusts that Turks could not possibly have committed genocide against the Armenians.

In fact, Jews have been giving the Ottomans and Turks favorable press for five centuries.⁷ Here, I analyze the emotional frames of mind that have driven them to do so, demonstrating how for the past century Jews have been joined by Ottoman and Turkish Muslims in promoting a historical narrative of sultanic saviors, tolerant Turks, grateful and loyal Jews, and anti-Semitic Armenian and Greek traitors, a narrative that has simultaneously served to deny the very possibility of an Armenian genocide. Even during the genocide, Talat Pasha asked Jewish American US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau why he bothered complaining about persecution of the Armenians when the Ottomans had always treated the Jews well. Such views have in fact been predominant in Jewish historiography until only recently.

As a historiographical analysis of the treatment of Muslim and Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, this book examines early modern and modern primary sources, history writing, and other forms of literature. Its focus is on historical events, perceptions, and motivations, and in particular how history is depicted by modern historians and what kinds of emotional worlds propel them. The book is therefore also an exploration of how entangled modern Jewish accounts of the Turks and early modern Jewish accounts of the Ottomans are. Its primary focus is on Jews: how Ottomans and Turks have treated them, how they wrote about that experience, and how their writing has changed over time.

Much scholarship has been devoted to understanding genocide denial, mainly focusing on the perpetrators and their descendants at the level of the state and public memory.⁸ In the Turkish case, this has involved denying intentionality as well as rationalizing, relativizing, and trivializing the mass murder of Armenians carried out in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.⁹ This book concerns another type of denial—that expressed by members of a group that was neither perpetrator nor victim of the genocide in question. How can we understand that group’s identification and alliance with the perpetrators and their propagation of denial? What emotional world or affective disposition compels them to take this public stand?¹⁰

Where Ronald Suny and Müge Göçek have written of the emotions and events that are utilized to mobilize Muslims in general and Turks in particular to commit genocide against the Armenians and deny its occurrence afterward, I explore instead Jews’ public expression of affective states toward Ottomans and Turks.¹¹ To do so, I tell a story that pivots on a key historical legitimating event that first gave rise to this emotional state: the welcome given Jews expelled from Iberia in 1492.¹² Memory of that event in turn was used to shape collective emotions during the four-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the arrival of the Sephardim in 1892; the five-hundredth-anniversary celebrations in 1992; and the invention of the claim in 1993 that Ottomans and Turks have continuously given Jews refuge from the Expulsion to the Holocaust. It was only at the turn of the new millennium that certain Turkish Jews ceased publicly ascribing to this affective disposition and instead began to criticize the mantra of five hundred years of peace and brotherhood.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews depicted the Ottoman sultan as their redeemer, as God’s rod who had struck down their enemies the Byzantine emperors as part of a divine plan. Giving refuge to Jews expelled from Christian Spain in 1492, the sultan thus also opened the way to Jerusalem and the dawning of the messianic age. After Jews proclaimed Sabbatai Zevi the messiah in 1665, they ceased referring to the Ottoman ruler in messianic terms. But in the nineteenth century, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recycled medieval and early modern tropes, thereby converting the sultan—and by extension all Turks—into tolerant hosts of their Jewish guests. In 1892, during the four hundredth anniversary of the 1492 welcome given Iberian Jewry, Ottoman Jews promoted this new version of the Turk as humanitarian protector. Identifying with the Muslim, with whom there could be no conflict, Jews depicted themselves as loyal subjects. Armenians and Greeks, both Christian minorities within the empire, became eternal traitors and enemies, alleged anti-Semitic heirs of the Byzantines. Ninety-seven years later, the 500. yıl vakfı (Quincentennial Foundation), established by the Turkish state and Turkish Jewish elites in 1989, saw itself as the celebration of five hundred years of friendship between Turks and Jews. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish accounts in Turkey and abroad of the Ottomans and the Turks offered the same stock figures of tolerant Turks, loyal and useful Jews, and anti-Semitic Christians. It is my contention that to accomplish this staging of five hundred years of harmony, the most significant and influential Jewish historians needed to both deny the Armenian genocide and ignore or deny the existence of Turkish anti-Semitism.

In the 1970s, belief in the power of world Jewry was one of the motivating factors that led the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the president to turn to Turkish Jews to serve as lobbyists on their behalf, primarily so as to counter international recognition of the Armenian genocide. As part of this effort, in the early 1990s the myth of the Turk as rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust was introduced. The Turkish president and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkish Jewish elites and their foreign allies, historians of the Ottoman Empire, major American Jewish organizations, and the state of Israel—together they promoted the myth of the virtuous, humanitarian Turk for audiences in Europe and North America. A resurrected version of the 1892 propaganda efforts, this campaign was a brew made of one part Armenian genocide denial and one part stale Jewish tropes of a Muslim-Jewish alliance against the Christian enemy. Promoted by the Quincentennial Foundation, diplomats, politicians, journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and historians, it had all but drowned out critical countervoices in both national and international arenas until the turn of the millennium. This is similar to how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century utopian Sephardic accounts worked to muffle lachrymose fifteenth-century Byzantine Greek (Romaniot) Jewish narratives. Or how the Sephardic 1892 celebrations silenced socialist and Zionist protestations at the turn of the twentieth century. Counternarratives failed to gain traction because they were inconvenient. The dominant narrative succeeded, especially in the modern period, because it allied with the foreign interests of Ottoman and later Turkish Muslims.

Beginning with the turn of the new millennium, major transformations in Turkey have led to new approaches to the past. Among these is the rise of critical Jewish and Muslim voices and the breaking of taboos in Ottoman and Turkish studies, both within and outside of Turkey. These new appraisals demonstrate the continued relevance of the concepts of friend and foe and the triangulated relationship among the three groups, which have in turn contributed to realignments in narrating Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations. What they establish is that the only way for Jews in Turkey or those defending Jews living in Turkey to end old enmities and forge new friendships is to divest themselves of those old affective dispositions in favor of new stances.

To those who would object that Ottoman and Turkish Jews generally enjoyed a better life than their European counterparts, I would point to the consequences of making such a blanket assertion. In my view, the more significant question and the one worthier of analysis is how such a claim has been politicized, instrumentalized, and deployed by Jews and Muslims alike over the past century so as to counter recognition of the Armenian genocide. Without critically engaging with the political uses of history, we cannot hope to compel historians to uphold the ethical standards of the profession. Nor can we aspire to bring about reconciliation between Jew and Armenian, forged when each sees the other as victim of a common experience, rather than competitor in a zero-sum game of recognition.¹³

Beyond Myth and Countermyth

After 1492, the Ottomans allowed as many as one hundred thousand Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal to settle in the empire and to live as Jews with relatively little interference from authorities, rather than as converted Christians as many had been compelled to do in Iberia. Some elite Jewish men and women rose during the same century to great heights of political power, wealth, and influence. This has led to the conventional wisdom that on balance, the record of the Jewish experience in the Ottoman Empire was exceptionally good.¹⁴ Such an assessment reflects the fact that, as Jonathon Ray has pointed out, in Jewish studies, discussions of comparative tolerance and discrimination have often been reduced to the question of Was it good for the Jews? or "Where was it better for the Jews?"¹⁵

These studies typically use a framework locating Muslim treatment of Jews on the spectrum of either utopian or lachrymose extremes—as either a golden age of Jewish-Muslim harmony and "an interfaith utopia of tolerance and convivencia [coexistence] or a countermyth of Islamic persecution." In these accounts, the point of reference is always to compare the experience of Jews in Christendom with their experience in Islamdom.¹⁶ Historians of both schools of thought have used the same method to prove their position, sifting through archives in order to find evidence of either peaceful coexistence or persecution and enmity.¹⁷ Those looking for a rosy Jewish-Muslim symbiosis promote an ideological vision of the tenth- and eleventh-century Spanish golden age of Jews under Islam, as exemplified by the career of Samuel the Nagid Ibn Naghrela (993–1056), Jewish courtier, vizier of Granada, and general of Muslim armies; and they point out that the expelled Iberian Jews took refuge in Muslim North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. However, those of the opposing view hasten to point out that a decade after the peaceful death of his father, Samuel Ibn Naghrela’s son was lynched by a Muslim mob that went on to massacre the Jews of Granada.¹⁸ This history is the battleground on which we fight over the present, as historians cite examples and counterexamples, quotations and counterquotations, myth and countermyth.¹⁹

Because the main focus of most studies of Muslim-Jewish relations is the arabophone region,²⁰ the Israeli-Palestinian struggle casts its long shadow over this historiography, as does the search to contrast good Muslims with bad Muslims. For this reason, many scholars who support Israel focus on the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, al-Haj al-Amin Husseini, who collaborated with Hitler during the Holocaust. They seek to smear all Palestinians, the Palestinian movement, and, by extension, all Arabs and all Muslims with constant reference to the iniquitous mufti.²¹ Such a figure is then contrasted with the Turkish consul on Rhodes, Selahattin Ülkümen, who during the same years saved Jews from the Nazis.

What then is to be gained by looking at the Ottoman and Turkish case? Why undertake a historiographical study of approaches to Muslim-Jewish relations focusing on turkophone regions from the early encounters of Muslims and Jews in the medieval period to the present?²² First, consider the utopian tenor of much writing on Ottoman and even Turkish Jews. A common argument offered by an academic is that Turks and Jews have enjoyed periods of remarkable close ties, as these relations were always a contrast to the experience of Jews in Western Europe where anti-Semitism thrived, unlike in Turkish lands where no trace of it [could] be found, until it was imported after World War II.²³ But as Bernard Lewis notes, it is misleading to compare one’s best with the other’s worst. If we take the Spanish Inquisition or the German death camps as the term of comparison for Christendom, then it is easy to prove almost any society tolerant.²⁴

Second, to have a meaningful debate about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, one must include studies that focus on areas outside the arabophone region. The Ottoman Empire and Turkey did not follow the historical trajectory of lands that were directly colonized, such as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Tunisia. After gaining independence, these new nations progressively lost their Jewish populations to exile, either to Europe or Israel. Following repeated wars against Israel, the last Jews departed, leaving behind lacunae in the national narratives of their former countries. For some, these lost Jewish communities came to symbolize a nostalgic memory of a vanished world.²⁵

Turkey offers a different perspective. Colonization, the struggle for Palestine, and the disappearance of Jewish minorities is not the experience that marks the Muslim-Jewish relationship in modern-era Turkey. The Ottoman Empire annihilated its Armenian population with Jews as eyewitnesses. Although largely depleted, Turkish Jewry survived the transition from empire to nation-state as the Turkish Republic replaced the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Despite the bombast of the current Turkish regime, Turkey has never been at war with Israel, so is one step removed from the bitter conflicts of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. Here is a land where the Palestine question is one among many, and not the primary one. The Kurdish issue is more important. Despite violence and discrimination, Turkey today still has the second-largest Jewish community in a Muslim-majority country after Iran. Taking these differences into consideration, a detailed study of the historiography of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic can reframe the debate.²⁶ Focusing on Turkish Muslims and Jews rather than on Arabs and Jews may lead us to reevaluate current interpretative frameworks and address new questions. Freed of the intellectual constraints that bind the study of Muslim-Jewish relations in Middle Eastern studies, especially colonialism and the impact of Zionism, this study utilizes instead the interrelated lenses of messianism, imperial memory, genocide, and anti-Semitism.

Religious impulses, especially messianism, influenced the writing of the history of Muslim-Jewish relations. This can be seen in premodern depictions of the Ottoman sultan as redeemer of the Jews, a benevolent ruler who defeats the Christian enemies and welcomes the Jews exiled from Europe to settle in the land of Israel in anticipation of the end-time. Imperial memories shaped nation-state narratives as the earlier Jewish trope of the sultan as messianic figure was secularized in the 1892 celebrations of the ingathering of the Andalusian Jews.

Messianism may have been abandoned, but its positive sentiment was retained. As a consequence, Jews began to depict the sultan (and later, by extension, all Turks) as benevolent, tolerant humanitarians who have always treated Jews well. A century later, in 1992, as Turkish Jews marked the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, the trope of the Turkish rescuer motivated only by humanitarianism was extended to the Turkish Republic. This time, Turks had allegedly saved Jews from the Nazis, a historical narrative promoted as proof of the same timeless, humane Turkish nature.

The Armenian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Greeks in Anatolia shaped Muslim-Jewish relations as well, as Turkish Jews sided with the perpetrators in order to ensure their own survival. Turkish Muslims promoted the view of themselves as tolerant toward Jews so as to deflect attention from their ancestors’ past crimes. In this way, Turkey could appeal as an aspiring member state to a European Union in which the litmus test for accession is the manner in which Jews are treated.²⁷ Denial of genocide and promotion of Turks as rescuers of Jews became prevalent in twentieth-century historiography on the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic, as Turkey’s alleged rescue of Jews during World War II was added to the concerted effort to counter recognition of the Armenian genocide.

The historiography of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey is so rife with myths that it is tempting to wonder whether they emerged to provide palliatives to the gloomy ‘lachrymose’ episodes in Jewish history.²⁸ Scholars have found that the discourse of harmonious relations between Turks (Muslims) and Jews is evident throughout a range of historical accounts: the historiography of early modern Sephardic Jews; the narrative of Ottoman