Sultanic Saviors

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.

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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.

Contributor Bios

	Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include religious conversion, gender and sexuality, and interreligious relations and state violence in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Turkey, and Germany.
	Zeinab Azarbadegan is the post-doctoral fellow at the Vienna School of International Studies. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. Her research focuses on imperial knowledge production about the space of Ottoman Iraq by the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the British in the late nineteenth century.

Credits

Episode No. 519
Release Date: 29 January 2022
Audio editing by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: A.A. Aalto; Chad Crouch; Haim Effendi - Aben Yakir li Efraim; Isaac Algazi - Adonai Chamahti
Bibliography courtesy of Marc Baer

Further Listening

	Marc Baer	503 6/18/21	Conversion and Jewish Histories of the Ottoman Empire
	Sato Moughalian	471 8/13/20	David Ohannessian: Art, Exile, and the Legacies of Genocide
	Sarah Abrevaya Stein	434 11/20/19	Family Papers and Ottoman Jewish Life After Empire
	Ronald Grigor Suny	356 4/7/18	"They Can Live in the Desert"
	Deporting Ottoman Americans	411 5/2/19	Turkino

Select Bibliography

Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘”Down in Turkey, Far Away”: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany’, Journal of Modern History 79, no. 1 (March 2007): 80-111.

Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana University Press, 2020)

Marc David Baer, ‘17. yüzyılda Yahudilerin Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndaki nüfuz ve mevkilerini yitirmeleri’ (The Jews’ Loss of Influence and Position in the Ottoman Empire in the Seventeenth Century) (in Turkish), Toplum ve Bilim 83, Osmanlı: Muktedirler ve Mâdunlar (Kış 1999/2000): 202-222.

Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Avram Galanti, Türkler ve Yahudiler: Tarihî, Siyasî Tetkik, ikinci baskı (Tan Matbaası, 1947 [1928])

Corry Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust, translated from the German by Kathleen M. Dell’Orto, Sabine Bartel, and Michelle Miles (Cambridge University Press, 2013 [2008])

Halil Inalcik, ‘Foundations of Ottoman Jewish Cooperation’, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. Avigdor Levy (Syracuse University Press, 2002), 3-14.

Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984).

Cnaan Liphshiz, ‘Turkish Jews Defend Erdogan Against Antisemitism Charge by US’, The Times of Israel, 19 May 2021, https://www.timesofisrael.com/turkish-jews-defend-erdogan-against-antisemitism-charge-by-us/

Stanford J. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey’s Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945 (New York University Press, 1993).

Özgür Türesay, ‘Ebüzziya Tevfik ve Millet-i İsrâiliye (1888): Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda antisemitizmin Avrupalı kökenleri üzerine birkaç not, Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklaşımlar 6, (Güz 2007/Kış 2008): 97-115.

Gilles Veinstein, ‘Jews and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire’, in A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjanmin Stora, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith (Princeton University Press, 2013), 171-195.

Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, translated from the German by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel (David Godine, 2012 [1933])

The Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews (Jewish Museum of Turkey)

Avlaremoz (launched recently by young Turkish Jews)