Ottoman History Podcast - Sultanic Saviors

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

with Marc Baer hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | The expulsion of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their arrival in the Ottoman Empire thereafter changed the relationship of Jewish communities to the Ottoman dynasty. The history of Ottoman Jews would become part and parcel of a narrative that contrasted the Ottoman Empire's beneficence and tolerance with the anti-Semitism of other European societies. Yet as Marc Baer explains in this second part of a two-part conversation, the image of "Sultanic saviors" became entangled with the denial not only of anti-Semitism in Turkey but also of violence against Christians in the late Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide. Adopting a history of emotions approach, Baer explores the reasons for the erasure of violence and persecution in the memory of the Ottoman Empire's relationship with Christians and Jews and uses the sentiments that animate this historiography and memory as a starting point for a way forward. « Click for More »

Ottoman Jewish history, Turkish Jewish history is built on silence. In the last century, Armenian genocide denial has gone hand in hand with denial of anti-Jewish racism in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. This is the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zeynep Azarbadagan. In this second episode of our two-part conversation with Mark Bearer on his scholarship, we discuss his latest book, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks, writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide, published in 2020. Mark is the Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Mark tells us about his personal reasons for writing the book, the long trajectory that the book covers from the 15th century to the present, and the entangled history and historiography of Ottoman and Turkish Jews with emotions of gratefulness and fear. In the second part of this episode, we talk about the silences and alternative narratives to this history. First, let's hear why Mark decided to write Sultan Xavier's. The book is very personal, and the story of this book, you can say, goes back quite a long time. I can even say it began with my grandfather, Harvey Baer, who was a first-generation Russian-Jewish American. As a young man, he joined the fight against the Nazis during World War II.

At the end of the war, making a bombing run over Vienna, his plane was shot down, but he survived. He found himself in Nazi-occupied Slovakia. Using his Russian, he linked up with the Slovak resistance led by Soviet guerrillas, and he fought with them in the winter of 1945 until Budapest was liberated and he could return to the U.S. Now, the experience was traumatic, and he would not talk about it until near the end of his very long life.

But one thing was clear. He would never forgive the Germans for having committed the Holocaust. He never bought a German car. When I was young and my family moved from the U.S. to Germany, he refused to visit us, saying he would never set foot in that country. When I was in my early 20s and lived in Turkey for the first time, I invited him to visit me in Istanbul. The Soviet Union had collapsed and Slovakia had become an independent country. He was honored as a war hero by the new republic. I told him it was only a short flight from Bratislava to Istanbul. But Grandpa Harvey saw the world in black and white terms. Mark, he told me, I will never set foot in Turkey.

Why, I asked him. Because what the Germans did to us, the Turks did to the Armenians. So this is how I thought we, Ashkenazi, or Central European and Russian Jews, saw the Armenian genocide. Jews and Armenians had been victims of the same crime and had empathy for the other groups suffering. And there are many famous examples of Jews who had this view. So Grandpa Harvey, Franz Werfel, Raphael Lemkin,

there's others too. This was how Ashkenazi Jews thought of the Armenian genocide, or so I thought. As I began graduate school in the early 1990s, I was confronted by the shocking, uncomfortable fact that the two towering Jewish historians of the Ottoman Empire at the time, Bernard Lewis and Stanford Shaw, not only lacked any empathy for Armenians, but in their scholarship and their public pronouncements, such as before the U.S. Congress, they denied that the Armenian genocide had even occurred. So let's hear about how Mark discusses and deconstructs this narrative of sultanic saviors, tolerant Turks, grateful and loyal Jews, and anti-Semitic Armenian and Greek traitors.

The book takes a history of emotions approach. It's a study of history, of historical memory, and also the politics of history writing. So it. I mean, even Halil Inalcic, the great Halil Inalcic, who wrote hundreds of emotionless, objective articles about economics and society in the Ottoman Empire and dozens of books, the one time he sat down to pen an article about Jews in the Ottoman Empire, he practically says he can't do it. He's so overcome with emotion, in his case, positive emotion, the happiness of brotherhood, that he cannot write an objective history. And this is Haleoanalgic. So imagine how much more it's the case for Jewish historians. So what are these emotions? Well, the fact is that after 1492, when Jews were expelled from Spain, after having suffered massacres and being forcibly converted

to Catholicism, and after 1497, when Jews were expelled from Portugal, many of them, as many as 100,000 of them, eventually found their way to the Ottoman Empire. And there they found that unlike almost any other kingdom in Europe, they were able to be Jews and live as Jews. They also, those who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism, were able to return to Judaism. So this unleashed an emotion of gratefulness. Not only that, but an ecstatic sense of impending Messiah-hood. they saw the ingathering of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire and soon after, after 1517, the paving of the way of Jews to then migrate to Jerusalem, the holy city, the holiest city in Judaism. They saw this as a sign of the coming of the Messiah and the end of time and the beginning of a peaceful, perfect age.

So they saw these Jews in the empire and a peaceful perfect age so they saw these these Jews in the Empire and especially outside of the Empire Jewish writers in the 15th and 16th century outside the Empire in the Mediterranean saw the Ottomans the Ottoman Sultan in particular as in their words the rod of God. Just as Moses had a staff or a rod, the Ottoman Sultan, it was as if he was the staff that would beat the enemies of the Jewish people. So defeating the Byzantines, defeating the Catholic monarchs that had oppressed Jews. Jews saw this as a sign that the Ottoman, without any agency of his own, the Ottoman Sultan, was a tool of God helping the Jews. So this ecstatic messianic view we still find in historical scholarship today.

Not too long ago, Bernard Lewis had written that the Ottoman Empire was a utopia for Jews. I mean, where is there a utopia on earth, we have to ask, for any people. But this kind of messianic language is still there in the historiography. So this emotion of of gratefulness was a trope in Jewish writing to other Jews in Hebrew, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in Judeo-Spanish, across the period from the 15th century into the 19th century. In the late 19th century then, this discourse, this idea, this emotion of gratefulness and ecstatic messianism was then secularized and transferred when the leaders of the Turkish or leading Turkish or Ottoman Jews decided to go public with this emotional gratefulness and began around 1892, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Sephardic Jews in the empire. They began to then make this story public.

And it was at this point, at the end of the 19th century, then, when Ottoman Muslims, then when Ottoman Muslims, Ottoman Muslim leaders, also then became aware of this trope and began to pronounce it themselves for their own reasons. Already at the end of the 19th century, Turkish Jewish leaders began to see common cause with Ottoman Muslims against Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Greeks. And they pronounced this across Europe, not just in the empire, but European Jews also picked up on this and began to transmit it across the German-speaking and later French-speaking and English-speaking world. So this is the first emotion we have to grapple with. So what happens to this narrative, the emotion of gratefulness will continue it continues to this

day but the messianic element is going to drop out in a sense when the ottoman ottoman jews and jews in the world have their own messianic figure so shabbatai is going to replace the ottoman sultan as the messianic figure for Jews. So this idea of the Sultan as a messiah has to drop out. Around the 17th century also, the Jewish position in the Ottoman Empire goes through a radical decline. And here we're speaking mainly of the leadership. So for a couple of centuries, leading figures of the Ottoman Jewish community had had a very close, exceptional relationship with the sultan and had access to power and served

in the palace, especially as physicians and ambassadors, and they were spies, and they were wealthy merchants. In the 17th century, for both economic and ideological reasons, from the point of view of the Ottoman Muslim elite, there's a sharp decline in the fortunes of the Ottoman Jewish leaders. So we see this happening. By the 19th century, Ottoman Jewish leaders no longer have this close affiliation with the Sultan. They've been replaced, first by the Greeks in the 18th century, 17th and 18th century, then by the Armenians in the 19th century. The Ottoman Jews are much poorer than Greeks and Armenians by that point.

They're also much less important in anyone's eyes. So as a way to regain that close affiliation with power and to improve the situation for their own community, Ottoman Jewish leaders then began to pronounce this myth. Let's not use the word myth at the moment, but they begin to, again, make public and make vocal the idea that actually they're the most grateful and they're the ones that the Ottoman Sultan and the elite, the Ottoman Muslim elite should trust the most. So that's where at this time, at the turn of the 20th century, the late 1890s, early 1900s, when Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, the founder of political Zionism, also begins to promote this view of Ottoman tolerance of Jews or the Ottoman close Jewish relationship. And he does it explicitly, working together with

Abd al-Hamid II. Now, this goes against the way the relation between Abd al-Hamid II. Now this goes against the way the relation between Abd al-Hamid II and Theodor Herzl is depicted today. But the historical fact is that Abd al-Hamid II and Theodor Herzl saw each other as partners who could help each other with their goals. So Theodor Herzl thought that if he were to promote the view that the Ottomans always saved Jews and they were the friend of the Jews and that then he could and if he could deny the Armenian massacres were taking place in other words if he could while Central European and European newspapers were full of stories about Armenian massacres Herzl and like-minded journalists,

Jewish journalists, used all of their efforts to not talk about the Armenian massacres, but to talk about relations between Ottomans and Jews. So it was a bait and switch. It was a, let's not talk about that group. Let's talk about how good the Ottomans have always been to Jews. So that discourse became explicit in the 1890s. Abd al-Hamid II believed that Jews were super powerful. He believed in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control all politicians in the West. And so therefore, if Herzl could just meet with prime ministers and kings and so on, kaisers in the West, then the bad press about the Armenians would just go away. So there was a bargain between Herzl and Abd al-Hamid II to suppress, to silence

what was happening to Armenians, and to talk instead about Jews. And then this plays into the second emotion. I talked about how the first emotion, the historical emotion that we have when we deal with Ottoman Jewish history is gratefulness. The second one is fear. Because there, beginning in the 1880s, we have the first expressions of anti-Jewish racism in the Ottoman Empire. These are Ottoman Muslims who are publishing books using all of the latest Russian and French

and English anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. So Ottoman Jewish leaders are facing this as well. They're facing negative views being disseminated by some leading Ottoman Muslim writers and they want to counter this. It's also the case that they're well aware of what's happening to Armenians. The massacres of 1896 that take place in Istanbul. Some take place in Haskoy, which was heavily populated by Jews. Jews are eyewitnesses to Armenians being killed by Kurds and Turks in their neighborhood. Some Jews help the Armenians. They tell the mobs that these are Jews, or they hide them in their homes. There are reports they even give them Jewish prayer shawls to cover as if they're walking to the synagogue. So this we know.

We also know that some Jews joined in in the violence and the looting and attacked Armenians. So we know these two. Now at that moment in 1896, the Turkish Jewish leaders, let's call them Ottoman Jewish leaders at the time, of course, they had a choice. Will they promote the fact that Jews helped Armenians? And will they condemn the violence against Armenians? Or will they promote a different story? Will they say, ah, those Armenians, they're terrorists, they're traitors, we always side with the Muslims. That's the path they chose. So from that point, from the 1890s to today, the official Turkish-Jewish leaders have promoted this view that Armenians are terrorists, Armenians are liars, the genocide never happened, and that Jews are ever loyal, ever faithful to the Ottoman and then Turkish Muslims. I asked Mark how the situation of the Ottoman Jews changed in the Turkish Republic.

Several things happened. One major turning point for Turkey was, of course, the invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus. And this led to an arms embargo, and this led to very difficult relations between Turkey and Western Europe and North America. And so Turkey needed a lobby. They needed a lobby. They needed a way to lift the arms embargo. They needed to find a way to restore good diplomatic relations with Western Europe and North America. And so who do they turn to? Well, they turn in part to Jews. turn, in part, to Jews. This was a historical reflex, again, when the Ottomans, when Abd al-Hamid II needed good press in Europe, he turned to Theodor Herzl. After the invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus, again, they turned to some of the leading Turkish Jewish industrialists.

to some of the leading Turkish Jewish industrialists. Now those industrialists didn't really have a choice. If they wanted to, this is 1970s when Turkey still had a controlled economy, if they wanted large government contracts how could they say no? There's no way they could they could refuse it would it would it would harm them. So they then traveled. There was a group. They traveled. They went to London. They went to Paris. They went to Washington. This was the first Turkish lobby, and it was effective. It did work. It really helped Turkey. So this was a turning point. And then the next turning point was, of course, 1992, which would be the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Sephardic Jews in what was then the Ottoman Empire. So this was turned into a major propaganda campaign

by the Turkish foreign ministry and the Turkish office of the president. So again, Turkey in the early 90s was waging a very dirty war against the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK, and also in the 80s and into the 90s. So again, Turkey needed a lobby that could sway views in Western Europe and North America about the country. And the way to do that was not to and North America about the country. And the way to do that was not to improve their human rights record. It wasn't to end the dirty war against the Kurds and to free political prisoners and so on. It wasn't any of that.

The attempt, the effort, wasn't even about Turkey. The whole effort was to talk about a medieval event of a defunct empire in order to improve relations in the present for a secular nation-state. It makes no sense. So, of course, when a nation-state seeks to write its history, you're not going to have very good history. But here's the thing. This is what compelled me to write this book. Fear is the second emotion that's driven this discourse from the 1890s to today. They saw, I mentioned a second ago,

they saw what happened to the Armenians in Istanbul in 1896. They were eyewitnesses. Ottoman Jews were eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide in 1915. Jews in the Turkish Republic faced a number of incidents of persecution, discrimination. So this element of fear, combined with gratefulness, continues to propel the Turkish Jewish leadership today, the leading newspaper, the chief rabbi, the unofficial historian, to continue to promote the view that Armenians and Greeks are unloyal, disloyal, Jews are loyal, and it also compels them to always deny that there has ever been

Muslim anti-Semitism. What I mean by that is anti-Jewish racist opinions or actions by Muslims in the Ottoman Empire or in Turkey. In the first part of this episode, Mark talked about the historical context that led to a series of choices made by the Ottoman and Turkish Jewish community to employ a narrative of gratefulness towards the Ottoman Sultan and the Turkish state, and how fear since the late 19th century led to amplification of this narrative in service of denial of the Armenian Genocide, going hand in hand with the denial of existence of anti-Semitism. I asked Mark about how this narrative silenced other narratives of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish history. Ottoman Jewish history, Turkish Jewish history, is built on silence. So Ottoman Jewish history, Turkish Jewish history is built on silence. The fact that the Sephardic Jews were not the first Jews in the empire is silenced. The fact is that they were, of course, Greek Jews, Byzantine Jews that suffered greatly from the Ottoman conquest

of Constantinople in 1453. Byzantine Jews were killed. Byzantine Jews were sold into slavery. So this narrative we have from Byzantine Jewish sources, from Greek sources, has been completely suppressed. Likewise, the fact that there were Arab Jews and there were, you know, a whole host of different Jews is utterly forgotten. Other aspects are forgotten, such as the fact that there were Jews who were socialists at the turn of the 20th century. Some of the leading socialists in the empire were Jews who were advocating a different kind of empire, who were arrested and jailed and imprisoned. This sort of, the idea that there were ever Jews who would oppose the sultan is constantly being silenced. The fact that there were Zionist Jews, Jews who believed in the establishment of a Jewish state on its own,

this is also usually not discussed. And this goes all the way back, again, to the 15th century, the silencing of the Byzantine Jewish perspective and narrative. Also the silencing of Shabbatai Tzvi and his messianic movement. This is something that is not something that Turkish Jews are proud of. And if you go to the Turkish Jewish Museum in Galata today, there's a panel on a wall that says, we have nothing to do with Shabbatai Tzvi and the Dönme, the descendants of his followers. We are Jews, we are different, we are separate.

So there's always this silencing going on. Every group does this. Every group wants to silence things that they're embarrassed about or events that would go against the public perception of the group. So it's not strange. So it's not strange. We also have to remember the position of Turkish Jews in the Republic, which is part of the reason why they're promoting this kind of view. They continue to promote the public image of Jews as loyal. It's also a survival strategy.

It's absolutely a survival strategy. Only a vulnerable group would write about themselves in this way. Only a group that is absolutely afraid continues to do so. And that's why by the end of the book, I talk about the Jewish leaders in particular over the last few decades who themselves, from the 1950s to the 1990s, were survivors of synagogue bombings, were the survivors of lynch mobs, were the survivors of assassination attempts, even despite all of this violence directed against them because they were Jews, they continued to promote the view that Jews in Turkey are happy and that there was no Armenian genocide. This is to say that in the last century Armenian genocide denial has gone hand-in-hand with denial of anti-Jewish racism in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. I understand why the leaders of the Turkish Jewish community act as they do.

They are in a position, a very vulnerable position, having been subjected to violence, having or being subjected to daily discrimination, having eyewitnessed even worse violence against other non-Muslims in the country. against other non-Muslims in the country, they're afraid. And they fear for their lives. And they want to be able to continue to have their synagogues and have a community life.

And they do what they can to do so. So my main concern is not with, my main criticism is not with Turkish Jews. I understand why the leaders act the way they do. My main criticism in the book is with historians like myself, Jewish American or Jewish British or French and Jewish historians, who know fully well that the story they tell is 100% political and is mythologizing a much more complex and even a richer past, but they continue to promote these views.

That's really what compelled me to write this book, to talk about how some of the leading figures in Ottoman history have even falsified documents or purposely misread Ottoman language material so as to fit their contemporary political position. I'll give you an example of this. Beginning in 1993, Turkey and Turkish Jewish leaders and Jewish communities outside of Turkey began to proclaim not only that the Ottomans had saved the Jews,

but Turkey had saved Jews during World War II. Again, what this was doing was whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust heroism. And the stories they tell about the Holocaust are actually primarily false ones. about the Holocaust are actually primarily false ones. So Stanford Shaw, in his book, has the interview with Nejdet Kent, where Nejdet Kent, and it's been the subject of a couple of films already, and also Turkish fiction, Nejdet Kent narrates how he jumped into a train, a cattle car, that was going to transport Turkish Jews from France onwards east to their death. But he and his assistant jumped into the car, the cattle car, and because of that, the Germans who were about to send the train on its way had to stop the train. And Kent narrates how he said, they're not going anywhere, they're my

citizens, what have you, and tells how the Germans then allowed all the Jews off the train, and then they were saved. Now this is what Kent told Shaw in an interview, which Shaw then published in his book. There isn't a single German or Turkish record that confirms this. There hasn't been a single Jewish person who was allegedly on that train who has confirmed this. In fact, one Jewish woman says that she actually escaped. She jumped out of that train further on the line. The train was sent on. She had to escape. Somehow she crawled out. Somehow she escaped.

So there's no evidence. There's no German evidence. There's no Turkish. There's no French documents. There's no Jewish eyewitnesses. So in other words, this story, if there's no evidence, we have to see it as a fabrication it's a great story

again it's been in a couple films but until there's evidence then we can't believe it so the question is why? The question is why would Bernard Lewis, why would Stanford Shaw, why would other historians, Guy Weinstein in France, for example, why would they tell a story

which goes against historical evidence. One reason is that they believed, they sincerely believed, that they were helping Turkish Jews. They sincerely believed that if they promote the view of Turks as saviors of Jews, if they promote the view that Turkey is actually a good country that actually saves Jews,

then Turkey would continue to do so. And again, this also goes back to medieval myths. There were a number, a half dozen myths, that modern historians have taken from the 15th and 16th century. And one of those myths is that the Ottoman Sultan will always save Jews from his officials. And so again, this is this old reflex. If we have good relations with the leader,

then if there's ever a problem anywhere in the country, then he'll be able to save this. Mark then told us about how the approaches of the historians, as well as the Turkish-Jewish community itself, have recently changed. I can also say that the book does end on a positive note. So the book is very personal. The book is very critical. Again, it's more critical of fellow Jewish Ottoman historians than it is of Turkish Jews. But I do end the book on a positive note because there is a young generation, people in their 20s and 30s, either still in Turkey or now having left Turkey, who began a website. The website is devoted to documenting the real experience of Turkish Jews, both the good days and the bad. And they have an anti-Semitism tracker where they follow public pronouncements, newspapers, what have you, and they put it all out there on the web for people to see and read and to understand. So

these are young Turkish Jewish people, some of whom are part of the leadership, who have had enough and are calling out the discrimination they face and also are trying to have a more balanced view of Turkish Jewish and Ottoman Jewish history that includes, again, the good days and the bad. Their website's called avlaramos.com. Avlaramos is Judeo-Spanish for let's speak now. Let's get it out there. Let's not hold it inside.

So you've talked about the implications of this book and the argument it makes for historians. But of course, this book is not going to be just read by historians. So what are its other sort of implications or other conclusions that you wanted to, arguments you wanted to put across? Of course, the largest aim is to foster some kind of reconciliation between Jews and Armenians. And Jews and Armenians have a very similar history, not only because of the Holocaust and genocide, the two genocides, but also we have many, many similarities in our histories of nationhood and diaspora and the prejudices against us and the discrimination and being a trans-global group. There's many, many similarities between us. similarities between us. But there also are many reasons why relations between Jews and Armenians are not what they should be. And the relation is not helped when the state of Israel, which proclaims itself to be the spokesperson for all Jews in the world, denies the Armenian genocide, or when the state of Israel helps Turkey attack,

fight, crush, wage war in Nagorno-Karabakh. This isn't going to help relations between Jews and Armenians unless Armenians can understand that Israel is just another sovereign state like any other state making its decisions based on its own interest. If that could be put aside and we can forget about that and just look at ourselves as Jews and Armenians, whatever country we live in, and say we have a common past, we have a common future in getting our experience recognized, commemorated, written into textbooks, and so on. If we can work together, then it'll be much better for both of us. So as a final question, a lot of what we talked about was what the leadership is doing and what the states are doing. what the leadership is doing and what the states are doing. And at the end, you talked about this is about people and how they need to sort of, for them to come together and recognize each other's experiences and commemorate it.

What is the importance of that commemoration for the people? Well, again, it goes back to the history of emotions. And here we're talking about the present emotions. It would be such a relief for the Armenian people, for Armenians everywhere, if Israel were to recognize the genocide. It would be such a relief for them because, you know, having suffered genocide

and then having the genocide denied is like a second mass murder, right? It's a murder. It's not even letting people say, talk about what happened to them. So it would be, it's a huge emotional catharsis when Jews say, you know, some leading Jewish people have spoken in my name and they have denied what happened to you, but I don't accept that. I know what happened to you. I recognize it. And so if not only some of the Jewish organizations,

but more Jewish organizations could come out in this way and to ally with Armenians, that would be helpful. So there's a lot of bad blood, obviously. This has caused a lot of negative Armenian views of Jews. So this would help. And then for Jewish people, This has caused a lot of negative Armenian views of Jews. So this would help. And then for Jewish people, it would help if Armenians, when they see people in their Armenian environment attacking Jews,

using Jewish stereotypes, if they were to confront that and say, I know you're angry about genocide denial. I know you're angry about what Israel has done. But there are Jews out there who condemn those things and who recognize what happened to you. And so what is needed then amongst Armenians is to look at their own emotions against Jews, just as Jews need to look at our own emotions in favor of Turks, which then leads to negative emotions towards Greeks and Armenians. So this book is trying to establish that, try to promote that. And the reactions from Armenian readers have been very

positive. Armenian readers in Europe, in North America, in Armenia itself. Responses from American Jewish readers have been interesting. One person who was the vice president of an American Jewish, leading American Jewish organization, which had publicly denied the genocide for decades, told me that he had met Armenians already in Jerusalem decades earlier, and he knew all about the genocide. And he worked as hard as he could to try to get his organization to recognize it, but wasn't able to until very recently. So there are readers who told me this, that they appreciate that I'm saying, or I'm writing, what a lot of people know, but have never put down in words. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. You can find more information, including a bibliography, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com,

as well as links to some of our 400 episodes. You can also join us on Facebook, where our community of listeners is over 35,000 strong. Until next time, take care.