Despite facing daily discrimination and oft violence, why do Turkish Jews publicly celebrate the tolerance of the Turkish Republic and its Muslim majority? Why do Turkish Jews willingly play the role of the “good” minority promoting the Republic's interests to a foreign audience? And if, as they publicly profess, they are secure, why do individual Turkish Jews only express their Jewish difference in private?
Based on over a decade of fieldwork in Istanbul, Brink-Danan has written the first book to successfully solve these central riddles of modern Turkish Jewish culture. Jewish Life in 21 st-Century Turkey presents an ethnographic study of the main tension between public discourse and private conversation that marks the lives of Turkish Jews. The author incisively notes how Turkish Jews alternate between articulating their difference as Jews and their sameness as Turkish citizens. Turkish Jews as collective present a public display of cosmopolitanism geared toward foreigners and Muslim Turks at official, choreographed events and sites celebrating Turkish tolerance. But individual Turkish Jews display patriotism in daily life, doing everything to erase their Jewishness in order to pass as unmarked citizens. They appear to disappear, so as not to invite physical danger, social discrimination, and to ensure communal cohesion.
Brink-Danan convincingly argues that Turkish Jewry publicly promotes a nostalgic vision of past Ottoman tolerance as a prescriptive means, a utopian vision of a time when the tiny, dwindling minority would not have to live in fear. Allowing themselves to be instrumentalized by the Republic in this way also allows this marginal group a viable public presence. Making itself useful to the government—promoting positive PR internationally—makes it relevant.
Jewish Life in 21 st-Century Turkey would be an outstanding study if it only explained the dichotomies of an understudied group. But Brink-Danan's book will appeal to a much wider, interdisciplinary readership, for it solves the riddles of Turkish Jewish culture by offering a critical contribution to the discussion of cosmopolitanism.
Successfully challenging tenets of recent scholarly debates, Brink-Danan demonstrates how, for Turkish Jews, lived cosmopolitanism is neither an individualistic pursuit nor a choice or ethical orientation. For cosmopolitanism in this case is ascribed rather than achieved, which makes Turkish Jews into eternal guests and foreigners, preventing them from being able to convince others of their being local.
Deploying performance theory, the author successfully demonstrates how cosmopolitans not only possess the ability to know about different ways of being, but most crucial, know when to perform or disavow cosmopolitan identity. This “cosmopolitan knowledge” is the key to Turkish Jewry's “outward performance of sameness and inward maintenance of difference” (163). Displaying remarkable semiotic awareness, they learn “what to say, how to say it, to whom, and when” (94).
