In a ground-breaking historiographical analysis of the Jewish community from the Ottoman Empire to the present day Turkish republic, Marc David Baer debunks the grand narratives of 500 years of Turkish–Jewish friendship and Ottoman and Turkish tolerance and protection for Jews, examining how these narratives have served to deny the Armenian genocide. Baer's central thesis is that, as bystanders and eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide, Turkish Jews sided with the perpetrators to safeguard their own future and have since been trapped in a public performance of loyalty originating in their gratitude for refuge after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. The author puts forward the idea that everyday experiences of anti-Semitism and the historical memory of what befell their Armenian and Greek neighbors have contributed to an emotional mindset that motivated Jews in Turkey to be silent about their own experiences and promote the utopian image of 500 years of Jewish–Turkish harmony. In this masterly work, Baer sympathetically demonstrates why and how Jews in Turkey, and their historians—both within and outside Turkey—took on this position, making the compelling case that the denial of the Armenian genocide is an essential prong in Jewish–Turkish identity.
It is clear that this is a deeply personal book for the author, with a clear moral purpose. As a young man, Baer recounts how his grandfather, a first-generation Russian Jewish American, refused to visit him while he was in graduate school in Turkey “on account of what the Turks had done” (viii) to the Armenians. Baer's time in Istanbul also provided him with firsthand experience of “pervasive anti-Jewish sentiment” (xii) throughout Turkish society. “Despite facing daily discrimination and occasional deadly violence” (15), the official line he encountered time and time again from Jews was that no discrimination existed and that they were grateful and loyal Turkish citizens. They performed loyalty and gratitude, playing “the role of the ‘good’ minority promoting the republic's interest to a foreign audience” (15). This cognitive dissonance between the public and private has only recently been addressed by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers (chapters 7–8).
As 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” (6), the book examines early modern and modern primary sources, history writing, and other forms of literature in its analysis of the treatment of Jews by the Ottomans and Turks. Baer's 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” (2). Spanning 500 years, the texts that Baer analyzes are written by Jewish authors and selected on the basis of being recognized as significant and representative of the time. He also draws upon a wide range of literary, artistic, and archival material, enriching its scope and depth. Baer's aim is to “connect historical event, historical memory, and the politics of history writing” (9) with the following guiding questions: “How did Jews perceive the sultans who ruled them and the Muslim—especially Turkish—population among whom they lived? How have modern historians, especially Ottoman and Turkish Jews, read (or chosen not to read) historical sources that provide answers to these questions? What public narrative have Turkish Jews adopted, and why have Jewish scholars outside Turkey used it so uncritically?” (9).
The popular narrative is that the Ottoman Empire welcomed Jews ousted from Iberia in 1492, and that the Turkish republic continued an unbroken policy of protection and tolerance toward its Jewish citizens (in contrast to an anti-Semitic Europe). This claim of Turkish tolerance of Jews was accompanied by “a particularly Turkish anti-Semitic concept of the ‘crypto-Jew,’ the Donme, who control Turkey as part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy” (11), as well as stereotypes about “rebellious” Christian Armenians and Greeks as ungrateful and treacherous. Reigning frames of late Ottoman studies emphasize tolerance and coexistence, minimizing discriminatory and debasing practices toward Jews and Christians. Scholarship and popular cultural production promote the fashionable idea of a convivial multicultural Ottoman Empire, which is not only reductive but also whitewashes the experiences of many within the empire and erases others. In particular, Baer calls out the failure of scholars to “intellectually or professionally” deal with the Armenian genocide and their failure to “integrate the Armenian genocide into Ottoman history” (13). The “illogical incomparable comparison” (11) line of argument goes as such: Since the Ottoman Empire was so welcoming to Jews (in contrast to Christian Europe), it could not possibly have perpetrated the genocide of its Armenian citizens centuries later. Key to the successful propagation of this skewed logic is the pivotal role played by Jewish Turks who were co-opted and instrumentalized to fight against international acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide for decades. Denialist activism extended to Jewish scholars outside Turkey, including pillars of Ottoman studies and Turkish studies (many of whose disciples still dominate the field), and international Jewish organizations, most notably in the United States, underpinned by Jewish leaders in Turkey, Israel, and beyond.
An ambitious and multilayered work, the book is clearly and chronologically structured and connected through clear threads of argument. In Chapter 1, Baer unpacks the “half-dozen myths” (19) regarding the Ottoman treatment of Jews beginning in the sixteenth century as the foundation of utopian claims about Turkish–Jewish relations today. Chapter 2 looks at how this affective disposition continued in the first Ashkenazi and Sephardi histories of the Ottoman Empire, even as Armenians were being massacred from 1896. Chapter 3 looks at how, following the Armenian genocide, Turkish Jews continued to promote the utopian narrative, contrasting “grateful Jews” with “treacherous and anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks.” It also looks at the silence maintained by Jewish historians outside Turkey regarding the Armenian genocide and Turkish anti-Semitism, blaming the latter on Christians.
Chapter 4 analyzes the lobbyist role that Turkish Jews have played since the 1970s in denying the Armenian genocide in international arenas. Crucially, Baer demonstrates how this role had a direct effect on the historiography written by Turkish authors, as well as on Jewish historians like Bernard Lewis and Stanford Shaw. Chapter 5 focuses on how the activities of the Quincentennial Foundation, established in 1989, worked ceaselessly in partnership with the Turkish foreign ministry to deny the Armenian genocide and to improve Turkey's image abroad. The foundation's pivotal role in influencing academia and the mainstream is uncovered in interesting detail. Chapter 6 examines the false claim, introduced by the Quincentennial Foundation in 1992, that Turkey had played a part in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. Baer demonstrates that, on the contrary, Turkish diplomats stripped Turkish Jews of their citizenship and chose not to take the opportunity to save tens of thousands of Jewish citizens in Europe from the Nazis. This false narrative of Holocaust heroism was explicitly conjoined with the denial of the Armenian genocide and actually served as a means of Holocaust denial, covering up “the extent to which Turkish ambassadors facilitated the Holocaust by not recognizing Turkish Jews living in Europe as their fellow citizens” (279). The final two chapters deal with more recent developments in Ottoman and Turkish historiography and the emergence of critical Turkish Jewish historians and novelists.
The author demonstrates that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the power of international Jewry motivated the Turkish state to recruit Turkish Jews for the purpose of international lobbying. Turkish state machinery, Turkish Jewish elites, and their international allies recruited scholars and authors to work along with major American Jewish organizations, and the state of Israel to promote the myth of humanitarian Turks, loyal Jews, and treacherous Armenians and Greeks, alongside the active denial of the Armenian genocide—a narrative that dominated mainstream discourse until the twenty-first century. For example, Baer shows how Turkish Jews lobbied U.S. Jewish organizations to prevent any mention of the Armenians in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., or the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, both of which opened in 1993 (132–33). Baer demonstrates how the Jews of Turkey had no choice but to side with the perpetrators of genocide and cover up the latter's crimes in order to ensure they did not befall a similar fate. Baer quotes a Jewish aide to U.S. President Carter, who reported that the Turkish ambassador to the United States warned that if the Armenian genocide were included in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, “Turkey could no longer guarantee the safety of the Jews in Turkey” (124).
What makes this pact so destructive is its pervasiveness. Jewish historians in Israel, Europe, and the United States disseminated the same narratives that for decades reigned in the academy and continue to cast shadows today. Until the turn of the century, only a handful of historians of the Ottoman Empire referred to the events of 1915–23 as a genocide, and the academy was replete with scholars recruited and supported by the Turkish state in various forms. While the slew of scholarship has since irrefutably documented the Armenian genocide and exposed the denialist campaigns by the Turkish state and its agents, there remain deep pockets of denialism, revisionism, and silences within the academy and beyond.
This book dismantles key tenets in Ottoman and Turkish studies, uncovering practices of power and dominance that have served to whitewash Turkey's imperialist past and present. Baer's momentous work overturns well-worn narratives with compelling insight and a clear moral voice. This important book operates on several levels, woven together into a sophisticated and compelling narrative. On one level, it is a history of over 500 years of Jewish Turkish history. On another, it is a study of how myths construct and shape deep memories and emotions. More broadly, this book is a challenge to historians—their role, their integrity, and their politics. It will be of interest to scholars of Ottoman and Middle East studies, and to historians more widely.
