Abstract
Mr. Nissim de Toledo was the subject of repeated inquiries advanced to the French Consulate in Edirne from the city’s governor between 1926 and 1933: What were the names, dates, and places of birth of his parents and siblings? Were his siblings married? Did they have children? If so, how many? Did Mr. de Toledo have French or Spanish subjecthood? If so, on what basis had he obtained it?
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Notes
- 1.
Ministère des Affairs Étrangères, Nantes, France. Vilayet d’Edirne to Consulate, December 31, 1927; Consul to Edirne Governor, January 7, 1928; Vilayet to Consulate, March 19, 1932; Governor to Consul, February 14, 1933; Consul to Governor, February 20, 1933.
- 2.
Aron Rodrigue, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
- 3.
Ottoman Bank Archives, Istanbul, Turkey. Personnel Files, PP225.11.
- 4.
For a brilliant analysis of Lausanne’s minority clauses, see Lerna Ekmekçioǧlu, “Republic of Paradox: The League of Nations Minority Protection Regime and the New Turkey’s Step-Citizens,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014), 657–679. Ekmekçioǧlu notes that Jews were not “as closely identified with territorial separatism and collaboration with the West [as Greeks and Armenians]” (ibid., 659), but this did not mean that they were treated as equal citizens, as several chapters in this volume demonstrate.
- 5.
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2016).
- 6.
They would eventually rescind Article 41 and 44 as well. Rıfat Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri: Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni 1923–1945 (Istanbul: İletişim, 1999), 54–76; 88.
- 7.
For instance, the Muhamat Kanunu [Bar Association Law], adopted in April 1924, used the term “Türkiyeli” (from Turkey) rather than “Turkish” in its text. TBMM, Turkish Grand National Assembly: https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/tutanaklar/KANUNLAR_KARARLAR/kanuntbmmc002/kanuntbmmc002/kanuntbmmc00200460.pdf accessed May 15, 2021. After the law came into effect, however, twenty-six out of sixty Jewish attorneys surveyed did not have their licenses renewed, a figure comparable to the percentage of Muslim lawyers, whereas Armenian and Greek lawyers were disbarred at larger rates. For Muslim lawyers, the overwhelming reason for disqualification was simultaneously serving in public office, whereas “morals” played a more important role for non-Muslims. See Samim Akgönül, Türkiye Rumları: Ulus-Devlet Çaǧından Küreselleşme Çaǧına Bir Azınlıǧın Yok Oluş Süreci (Istanbul: İletişim, 2007), 79–80. A summary list of similar laws can be found in Soner Çaǧaptay, “Citizenship Policies in Interwar Turkey,” Nations and Nationalism 9 (2003): 601–619.
- 8.
Ottoman Bank Archives, Istanbul, Turkey. Personnel Files, PP225.11.
- 9.
Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, 82–83. Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 154.
- 10.
Bali, Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, 47.
- 11.
Classic examples include but are not limited to: Stanford Shaw, History of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic (London: Macmillan, 1991); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Avigdor Levy, ed. Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002); and perhaps most formatively, Avram Galanti [Abraham Galanté], Türkler ve Yahudiler (Istanbul: Tan Matbaası, 1947).
- 12.
Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2000 (first edition 1993)), 4–8. A complete genealogy of this discourse and the origins of its famous yet apocryphal tropes such as Bayezid II’s derision of Ferdinand as “impoverishing his country and enriching mine” referring to the expulsion of Jews, can be found in the first chapter of Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020).
- 13.
The Quincentennial Foundation’s sterilized version of Ottoman Jewish history was disseminated widely in the United States and was integrated into the curricula of Jewish day schools as a “corrective to the Ashkenazi-centric curricula of most Jewish American institutions.” Marcy Brink-Danan, Jewish Life in 21st Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 37–55.
- 14.
In 2015, the collection was re-curated to include formerly omitted traumatic events like the Wealth Tax, the September Pogroms of 1955, and the bomb attacks on the Neve Şalom Synagogue, where the museum is now housed.
- 15.
The Turkish state’s efforts to influence international public opinion and avoid possible sanctions by enlisting the help of the “Jewish lobby”—itself an anti-Semitic construct—has a long history, see Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks.
- 16.
For a critique, see Rıfat Bali, Devlet’in Yahudileri ve Öteki Yahudi (Istanbul: İletişim, 2004).
- 17.
The anonymously authored article was published in August 1891, Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49.
- 18.
Julia Phillips Cohen analyzes both the “1892 celebrations” and their transatlantic counterpart in the 1893 fair in Chicago in Becoming Ottomans. For more on Ottoman Jews’ self-presentation and tactical embrace of Orientalism, see by the same author, “Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style and Performance of Heritage,” American Historical Review 119, no. 2 (2014): 364–398.
- 19.
Sibel Zandi Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840–1880 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
- 20.
Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, 48.
- 21.
The timing and format change happened thanks to a tactical intervention by the grand rabbi Moshe Halevi, who, according to Julia Phillips Cohen, “managed to merge Ottoman Jewish patriotism with Judaism” with this move. Becoming Ottomans, 59.
- 22.
Selim Deringil, The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998).
- 23.
Julia Phillips Cohen notes that the bazaar of the village was designed to “recall those of the Yeni Camii” Becoming Ottomans, 66—a strange choice since the original had been built over the razed grounds of a major Jewish working-class neighborhood in the seventeenth century (Marc David Baer, “The Great Fire of 1660 and the Islamization of Christian and Jewish Space in Istanbul,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 2 (2004): 159–181.
- 24.
These included “typically” Turkish offerings such as baklava and Turkish delights. Rıfat Bali, From Anatolia to the New World: Life Stories of the First Turkish Immigrants to America, trans. Michael McGaha (Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık, 2013), 78.
- 25.
Aron Rodrigue, “From Millet to Minority: Turkish Jewry,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, eds Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 238–261.
- 26.
Devin E. Naar, “Turkinos Beyond the Empire: Ottoman Jews in America, 1893 to 1924,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 2 (2015), 174–205. While Naar makes a convincing argument that the major driving factor was money rather than draft dodging, and some immigrated after they served in the Ottoman army, the numbers suggest that the Committee of Union and Progress’ Turkification policies and the state of constant war, if not the compulsory military service alone, were contributing reasons. The American Jewish Yearbook for 1913 attributes the increase in numbers for that year to the Balkan War, but noted that the trend had been on the rise since 1905. American Jewish Yearbook, volume 15 (1913), 431.
- 27.
D. E. Naar, “Turkinos Beyond the Empire,” 201.
- 28.
Argentinian Consul General in Constantinople to Scarlatt Tottu, Mexican honorary consul, April 1924, cited in Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passport, 152.
- 29.
Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports, chapter 4.
- 30.
Raşel Meseri and Aylin Kuryel, Türkiye’de Yahudi Olmak: Bir Deneyim Sözlüǧü (Istanbul: İletişim, 2017), 248.
- 31.
Bryan Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948–1966 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015); and Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
- 32.
Walter F. Weiker, The Unseen Israelis: The Jews from Turkey in Israel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Center for Jewish Community Studies, 1988).
- 33.
Yaǧmur Karakaya & Alejandro Baer, “‘Such Hatred Has Never Flourished on Our Soil’: The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Turkey and Spain,” Sociological Forum 34, no. 3 (2019), 705–728. The Minister in question was Cemil Çiçek. Mois Gabay, in his column at Ṣalom on February 4, 2015 writes that everything went as planned despite the discomfort in the audience because, once again, kayadez prevailed. https://www.salom.com.tr/arsiv/haber-93989-kayadez_.html.
- 34.
Amy Mills, Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul (University of Georgia Press, 2010).
- 35.
Leyla Neyzi, İstanbul’da Hatırlamak ve Unutmak: Birey, Bellek, ve Aidiyet (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1999); Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism, and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); İlay Romain Örs, Diaspora of the City: Stories of Cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
- 36.
Sisman, Cengiz. The Burden of Silence. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 37.
Leyla Neyzi, “Remembering to Forget: Sabbateanism, National Identity, and Subjectivity in Turkey,” Comparattive Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (2002), 137–158.
- 38.
Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010); idem, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 4 (2013), 523–555; Türkay Salim Nefes, “The Function of Secrecy in anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories: The Case of Dönmes in Turkey,” in Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East: A Comparative Approach, eds. Maurus Reinkowski and Michael Butter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 139–156; Cengiz Şişman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 39.
As of October 2019, when the window for applications for Spanish citizenship closed, 4313 applications had been filed by Israelis, while the number from Turkey was 1994. Data on how many of those immigrated to Spain is only anecdotal. The Times of Israel, “At Least 27% of Applicants under Spain’s ‘Sephardic Law of Return’ are not Jews,” November 6, 2019. https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-least-27-of-applicants-under-spains-sephardic-law-of-return-are-not-jews/.
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Yosmaoǧlu, İ.K., Öktem, K. (2022). Introduction: Turkish-Jewish Entanglements from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. In: Öktem, K., Yosmaoğlu, I.K. (eds) Turkish Jews and their Diasporas. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87798-9_2
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