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

360 Pages·2020·6.219 MB·English

by  Marc D. Baer

SULTANIC SAVIORS and
TOLERANT TURKS
INDIANA SERIES IN SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES
Harvey E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
S U LTA N IC
SAV IOR S a n d
T OL E R A N T
T U R K S
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—
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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 vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Friend and Enemy 1
1 Sultans as Saviors 30
2 The Empire of Tolerant Turks 53
3 Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks 73
4 Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists 116
5 “Five Hundred Years of Friendship” 154
6 Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust
Heroism 191
7 The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices 212
8 Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear? 242
Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies 275
Epilogue 293
Bibliography 299
Index 321

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, convic-
tions, and material circumstances that have compelled Jews in the Ottoman
Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote the tenacious image of sultanic sav-
iors 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 Kaiserslaut-
ern’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
vii
viii | Preface
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 Jew-
ish 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 Arme-
nians.” 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 Lem-
kin, 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” dur-
ing 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 Jew-
ish historians of the Ottoman Empire lack sympathy for Armenian suffer-
ing, but, worse, they publicly denied that the Armenian people had been
subjected to genocide. I could not comprehend why Ashkenazi Jewish his-
torians, not subject to the same pressures as their Sephardic Jewish coun-
terparts in Turkey, would deny the Armenian genocide. Why could they not
Preface | ix
empathize with Armenians? Where were the Morgenthaus, Werfels, Lem-
kins, 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 undergradu-
ate 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 soci-
ologist 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 explain-
ing 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 rec-
ognized and commemorated—given a capital letter and its own special
word, Holocaust—while theirs was denied and dismissed. They were well