Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks

Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide

Marc D. Baer, Marc David Baer

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780253045447
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253045430
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

An examination of why Jews promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while denying the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey.
Based on historical narrative, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire and then, later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then how can we believe that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians?
Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to find the origin of these myths. He aims to foster reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront, accept, and deal with them. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer aims to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.
"[Baer] demonstrates not only his erudition and knowledge of the sources but his courage on confronting a major myth of Ottoman history and current Turkish politics: the tolerance and defense of Jews by the Ottoman and Turkish state." —Ronald Grigor Suny, editor of A Question of Genocide
"A very significant study regarding the origins of violence and its denial in Turkey through the empirical study of not only antisemitism, but also its connection to genocide denial." —Fatma Müge Göçek, author of The Transformation of Turkey

1

SULTANS AS SAVIORS

JEWS LIVING UNDER MUSLIM RULE IN AL-ANDALUS (CENTRAL and southern Spain) from the tenth through the twelfth centuries have long captured the imagination of modern historians and the public.¹ They seem to call out to us from the past, for “no other medieval Jewish community had so many high-ranking personalities in the political and economic spheres; no other produced a literary culture of such breadth, revealing an intellectual life shared with the Muslims.”² These Sephardic Jews (Sefarad, Hebrew for “Spain”) were remarkable for “the extraordinary cultural vitality of the elites, combined with their material prosperity, their participation in public affairs and in the administration of the courts of al-Andalus, their responsibilities within their communities, and their importance in Jewish history.”³ But due to Christian advances, by the mid-thirteenth century Muslim Spain was limited to the Kingdom of Granada, which fell to Catholic Isabella and Ferdinand at the beginning of 1492. That same year the Catholic rulers decreed that Jews would have to convert to Christianity or be expelled from all their dominions, including Castile, Catalonia, Aragón, Galicia, Mallorca, the Basque region, Sicily and Sardinia, and Valencia.⁴ Five years later, Jews were expelled from neighboring Portugal.

The masses of Iberian Jews fled first to the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa, especially Fez in Morocco and the Berber kingdom of Tlemcen in Algeria, then to Italian cities that still tolerated them, such as Ferrara, Genoa, Naples, and Venice.⁵ Eventually, over the course of a century and following many trials and tribulations, most settled in the Ottoman Empire. That Muslim-ruled realm already boasted a diverse, tolerated Jewish population of Greek, Arab, Central European (Ashkenazic), Kurdish, and Sephardic backgrounds. These Jews had either been incorporated into the empire as it conquered Byzantine and Arab-ruled territories—by 1517, including Jerusalem and Palestine—or had arrived as refugees from persecution in Central and Western Europe.⁶ When Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446, 1451–1481) conquered Constantinople in 1453, he brought Jews from over forty Anatolian and southeastern European towns to repopulate the devastated city and make it flourish. They would constitute 10 percent of the city’s population and be the majority in Ottoman Salonica. The sultan gave Jews autonomy to run their own civic and religious affairs under their own leaders. They were joined by many Conversos—Iberian Jews and their descendants forcibly converted to Catholicism, many of whom relished the opportunity to return to Judaism. For incoming Conversos, “emigration to Ottoman territory was a fully affirmed return to the faith of their fathers.”⁷

Among the empire’s Jews, the Andalusian exiles, whether Jews or Conversos, would soon become “dominant in population and cultural influence,” its elites filling many of the same roles they had in the Spanish Muslim kingdoms—as royal physicians, diplomats, courtiers, and merchants; serving in customs, the treasury, and as tax farmers; and playing a larger role than their predecessors had in international trade.⁸ Tenth- and eleventh-century al-Andalus boasted Jewish dignitaries such as Córdoban physician, diplomat, and man of Hebrew letters Hasdai ibn Shaprut (ca. 915–ca. 970),⁹ and Samuel Ibn Naghrela, head of the Jewish community of Granada, Hebrew poet, and vizier at court,¹⁰ both of whom served the Jewish community and the kingdom. Their fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman counterparts included the illustrious physicians and diplomatic agents Joseph (b. ca. 1450, Granada) and Moses Hamon (1490–1567); the Portuguese Converso migrants and international merchants Doña Gracia Mendes (1510–1568) and her nephew Don Joseph Nasi (1524–1579); the Duke of Naxos, who also served the Ottoman court as a diplomatic agent; and physician, advisor, diplomatic agent, and international merchant Salomon ben Natan Eskenazi (1520–1602).¹¹ While in al-Andalus Jews became viziers and even accompanied troops into battle while remaining Jews; in the Ottoman Empire some became viziers only after converting to Islam. The Ottoman sultans Mehmed II and his son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) were driven by pragmatism, and the latter, who allowed Iberian Jews to take refuge in his domains, was “interested in these Jews not because they were Jews and because they were persecuted or at risk of persecution, but for what they could contribute to his states, especially if they immigrated with their goods and capital.”¹² What interests us in the account that follows is the emotional state of early modern Jews and how it colored their view of the sultans. It is this affect that led early modern Ottoman Jewish authors to silence countervailing narratives in favor of six claims concerning Ottoman treatment of the Jews, claims that persist today within the dominant narrative of Turkish-Muslim relations.

Early Modern Jewish Accounts Make Saviors out of Sultans

The earliest articulation of the myth of Turks as saviors of the Jews comes from Isaac Tzarfati, a French Jew born in Germany who settled in the Ottoman Empire and became the chief rabbi of Edirne (Adrianople).¹³ Put “together in collaboration with, if not at the instigation of, Ottoman authorities,” Tzarfati’s account, composed shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, is “a type of propaganda.”¹⁴ Describing the life of Jews in Christian-majority lands, he writes, “I have heard of the afflictions, more bitter than death, that have befallen our brethren in Germany—of the tyrannical laws, the compulsory baptisms and the banishments, which are of daily occurrence. . . . They are driven hither and thither, and they are pursued even unto death.” He contrasts this horror with the supposed Jewish utopia in the Ottoman Empire: “I proclaim to you that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking, and where, if you will, all shall yet be well with you. The way to the Holy Land lies open to you through Turkey. Is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians?”¹⁵ Whereas Jews “are allowed to wear the most precious garments” in the Ottoman Empire, “in Christendom, on the contrary, you dare not even venture to clothe your children in red or in blue . . . without exposing them to the insult of being beaten black and blue, or kicked green and red.”

Buried within the text is the key line that allows us to understand the mentality of this medieval Jew: “The way to the Holy Land lies open to you through Turkey.” Keeping in mind the questions “Where was it good for the Jews?” and “Where was it better?” modern historians focus on Tzarfati’s comparison of the torments suffered by Jews in Christian Europe with the purported Muslim Ottoman paradise he describes. But the questions that motivated premodern Jewish history writing revolved around an effort to understand the working of God’s plan in human life; Jews were less concerned with the actions of humans in history than with how human actions were signs of God’s plan for the Jews.¹⁶ The questions these writers asked were thus “When would God’s kingdom on earth be established?” and “When would the Jews return to the Holy Land to witness the rebuilding of the Temple and the end-time?” Tzarfati makes no comment on the Turks’ character. The Turks have no agency; God does. The Jews are hapless creatures subject to God’s mercy.

More influential than Tzarfati’s letter has been the 1523 chronicle of Rabbi Elijah ben Elkanah Capsali (b. ca. 1485–1490; d. ca. 1555), whose ecstatic sentiment, exuberant messianism, and exaggerated claims have dominated Jewish historiography for five centuries.¹⁷ Capsali introduced four claims that have figured prominently in myths regarding Ottoman treatment of Jews: that Mehmed II invited and did not force Jews to settle in Istanbul; that Mehmed II established the chief rabbinate and that Capsali’s great-uncle Moses was the first holder of the position; that Bayezid II invited the Iberian Jews to settle in his empire; and that the sultan was a protector of last resort, who always saved Jews from his own officials.¹⁸

Capsali was a native of Candia (Heráklion) in Venetian Crete and a member of a wealthy family of Greek origin distinguished by its learning.¹⁹ His great-uncle Moses Capsali had been a confidant of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II.²⁰ Rabbi Elijah Capsali’s famous chronicle Seder Eliyahu zuta: Toldot ha-‘Ot’omanim u-Venitsi’ah ve korot ‘am Yisrael be-mamlekhot Turki’yah, Sefarad u-Venitsi’ah (Minor order of Elijah: History of the Ottomans and Venice, and the people of Israel in Turkey, Spain, and Venice) mainly focuses on the reigns of Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman I.²¹ Capsali deploys the ancient Jewish tropes of the dialectical link between destruction and redemption, the idea that what occurred in earlier ages explains what is transpiring in one’s own day. Drawing from the tradition predicted in the Book of Daniel that four world empires would precede the messianic age, Capsali sets the newest, the Ottoman Empire, into the final slot. The final conflict between two world powers, Gog and Magog, Islam and Christianity, was to come before the advent of the messiah.²² Capsali’s chronicle is “saturated with Biblical messianic language and typologies” as he casts the Ottoman sultans “in the redemptive image of Cyrus the Great who restored the Jews to the Land of Israel from their Babylonian captivity.”²³

Capsali comforts Jews with the idea that the Ottoman sultans had gathered together the dispersed Jews in their lands not because of any inherent humanitarianism, but because the sultans were tools of God’s plan. “Although we thought the expulsion [from Iberia] was a great evil,” he writes, “in fact, ‘God designed it for good’ [Genesis 50:20]”—in other words, to keep the Jewish population alive. For “‘who knows whether at a time like this we will attain the kingdom?’ [of the messiah] [Esther 4:14] and salvation may have begun ‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the angels of God shouted’ [Job 38:7], for the Gatherer of the Dispersed of Israel has gathered us together to be ready for the ingathering of the exiles . . . a sign of the coming of the redeemer.”²⁴

Reading events in history as divine writ, Capsali composed Seder Eliyahu zuta to foretell the salvation of the Jews and the punishment of their enemies—the Christians—at the hands of the Ottomans. Referred to in ecstatic, messianic terms, the sultans are “messengers of God” who punish “wicked” nations and gather together the exiled Jews.²⁵ Referring to Jeremiah 1:10 (“See, I appoint you this day over nations and kingdoms: to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant”) and to Daniel 2:21 (God “removes kings and installs kings”), Capsali claims that God had promised Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, “a kingdom as hard as iron.” This is a reference to the fourth kingdom of the vision of Daniel, the last before the redemption to smite the Jews’ oppressors. “‘A voice came from heaven, which said’ [Daniel 4:28]: Osman, a strong and mighty kingdom will be given to you . . . ‘it will be as strong as iron; just as iron crushes and shatters everything—and like iron that smashes—so will it crush and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Friend and Enemy
• 1. Sultans as Saviors
• 2. The Empire of Tolerant Turks
• 3. Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks
• 4. Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists
• 5. “Five Hundred Years of Friendship”
• 6. Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism
• 7. The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices
• 8. Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear?
• Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author