Hot on the heels of those four Lords members came another – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. In February 2018 he flew into Turkey and met with Erdoğan. The meeting was trumpeted in Sabah and other pro-government titles, but kept quiet by the archbishop’s office back in London. Turkey’s small band of Anglican priests said they were not told about the visit, and were ‘mystified’ as to why it had taken place now. Because as Welby met Erdoğan, Andrew Brunson, an American pastor who had been preaching to a tiny Protestant congregation in İzmir since the 1990s, was spending his seventeenth month languishing in a Turkish prison cell. He had been arrested in October 2016, accused of links with the Gülenists, and Erdoğan had then tried to trade him with the US government for Gülen, who was still hiding out in Pennsylvania. Weeks after Welby’s visit, Turkish prosecutors announced that they were aiming to ensure Pastor Brunson received a life sentence for ‘seeking to overthrow the constitutional order’. (Brunson was finally released from custody and handed back his passport in October 2018, but only after sanctions imposed by the US over the case sent the Turkish lira crashing to its lowest level in fifteen years.)
‘We have no doubt that Archbishop Welby’s visit was well-intentioned, though seen as deplorable,’ Canon Ian Sherwood, the chaplain of Christ Church Istanbul told the Church Times as news of the archbishop’s trip leaked out. ‘The Diocesan Bishop responsible for Turkey as well as HM Embassy in Ankara could not add any further light to the situation. We look forward to hearing about it. So far we have heard not a peep.’
When I called Lambeth Palace to find out why the archbishop had made the visit, I was told he had done so in a personal capacity. Welby has not only not revealed his motives for visiting Erdoğan, but has also not recorded his visit on his Lords register of interests. John Woodcock declined to comment. Meanwhile, the other Lords members did not answer my request to ask a few questions about their visit; instead, they forwarded my email to Hilâl Kaplan.
13
THE MISFITS
Welcome to New Turkey, a place where election rules bend like plasticine and news anchors lie like they breathe. Here, in this reborn country, we are transfixed by cute kitten compilations playing on the metro’s public video screens, as hundreds of thousands of people are arrested above us. No one talks about things that happened a few years ago, and after a while you forget all about them. It is a place where the people in power say they are the oppressed, and where corruption comes with God’s blessing.
New Turkey moves fast. Bridges, airports and mammoth housing blocks appear as you blink, and truth today can be lies tomorrow. It creeps up on the people who didn’t pay close attention, because they were either uninterested or still hopeful. Police officers raid university professors and newspapers as often as they bust drug dealers and terrorists. Village boys too poor and guileless to wriggle out of military service are whipped and denounced as traitors, while powers grapple unseen around them. New Turkey has consumed the actors, writers and musicians who are blocked from almost any big commercial job unless they pay some respect to Tayyip on Instagram.
The way to the top is fast and simple: block out the naysayers, wave the New Turkey flag, and prove your allegiance as often and as loudly as possible. If Tayyip says that America is waging economic war, go out there and burn piles of dollars in the streets. If your neighbour has put up a picture of Tayyip in their window, stick a bigger one across your balcony. At rallies arrive early, shout hard and sing along to all the songs. The rewards are rich, and it is easy to prosper when you are ready to suck up lies. But across the country there are scores of others who don’t fit into New Turkey, like those who crowd into the theatre of the last Jewish school in Istanbul on a dark Wednesday evening in February – singing, gossiping, and dressed up in their finest. Quietly, stoically, they are clinging on to the old Turkey amid Erdoğan’s wave of social reform, bracing as New Turkey crashes over them.
Turkey’s Jews
The Ottoman Empire was a place of sanctuary for the Jews. When Spain’s Catholic monarchy drove them out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the sultans opened their arms. Mehmet II – better known as Fatih Sultan Mehmet or Mehmet the Conqueror – had stormed into Istanbul from the east in 1453, expanding the Ottoman Empire into territories where there were already significant communities of Arabic- and Greek-speaking Jews. In the Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, Mehmet’s son Bayezid II saw an opportunity to turn the new Ottoman capital into an even more cosmopolitan hub. In 1492 he sent the Ottoman navy to Spain to pick up the Jews and bring them to their new home. By the start of the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire boasted the largest Jewish population in the world. Some 150,000 had settled, overwhelming and absorbing the native Jewish populations. They were granted citizenship, and cultural, religious and linguistic freedom, and were soon helping to make the Ottoman Empire the most powerful and prestigious in the world. In 1493, the same year the first group of Spanish Jews landed in Istanbul, they established the empire’s first printing press.
Separated from their homeland, the Spanish – or Sephardic – Jews mashed their native language with Turkish to form a creole known as Ladino. While back in Iberia the other Spanish dialects merged to form Castilian, Ladino developed along its own path. At first it was written in the Hebrew alphabet, then the Rashi script – a Hebrew variant – and finally, at the start of the twentieth century, in Latin letters. In its grammar, it retained the characteristics of fifteenth-century Spanish.
‘How does Shakespeare sound to you?’ asks Karen şarhon, the world’s leading Ladino expert, in her cluttered attic office one Wednesday afternoon.
‘Understandable but weird,’ I reply.
‘Exactly!’ she cries. ‘That’s exactly how Ladino sounds to modern Spanish speakers.’
Karen is one of the most vocal and visible members of Turkey’s Sephardic Jewish community. She attacks her wide-ranging projects with an unabating, infectious energy – at once, she is an academic, the editor of Shalom, a newspaper publishing in Ladino and Turkish, and the founder of Istanbul’s Sephardic Centre, an archive documenting the history of the community. She also plays the female lead in Kula 930 – the world’s only Ladino-language musical.
Kula 930 tells the story of a group of bawdy, gossipy Jewish mothers in an unnamed Istanbul suburb. Karen’s character, Bulisa, goes further than the others and cheats on her husband with a fishmonger. She is caught red-handed in her nightie and forced into a shameful exile. It is a character Karen plays to perfection – so well that after the show’s early performances, years ago, Istanbul Jews would approach her on the street and tell her she must behave better when she marries. Now in her fifties – well-preserved, glossy-haired, and with a face aged through laughter rather than trauma – she brings rich dashes of camp humour to her lines.
Kula 930’s final performance takes place on a drizzly evening in February 2018 – Karen says they will not perform it again as they have done, every few years, since the late 1970s. The audience is dying out and the venue, the Ulus Özel Musevi Okulları (Ulus Private Jewish School), is the last of its kind in Istanbul. Security is tighter than at an airport. First we pass through the heavy door in the gunboat-grey outer fence, topped with a mess of razor wire and security cameras. Then we queue to go through a second door, where security guards are letting in groups of four at a time to make sure no one slips through unchecked. They ask for our names and ID cards.
‘You’re not on the list,’ one insists, and I dig out the text message invite from one of the actors to show I’m legit.
Once he is satisfied, our bags take a slow roll through the scanner and we walk through a metal detector way too big for the cramped anteroom. A female officer pats me down and her burly colleague asks my friend to switch on his camera to show that it works. And then, finally, we are in, and we make our way through spotless corridors, painted in relaxing colours and lined with students’ artwork, to the plush theatre down in the basement. From th
e outside it could pass for a prison, especially with the two police cars parked outside day and night. But inside it is much like any other private school – clean, well-equipped and revelling in its history. There is a wall tribute to Atatürk in one of the spacious public areas – the school’s website says its mission is to ‘cultivate moral youth who follow Atatürk’s reforms and principles’. Children can attend from reception right through to their Baccalauréate exams.
I have brought along a Turkish friend who is a Sephardic Jew on his mother’s side (‘and a Kemalist on my father’s!’ he tells me as we take our seats among pensioners wrapped in sparkly shawls and dapper suits). Many of them sing along to the songs in perfect Ladino. For those who don’t know the language, a simultaneous Turkish translation flashes onto an LED screen above the stage. That is a modern addition: when Kula 930 was first performed in 1978, there were still enough Ladino speakers that translation was not necessary.
‘Ladino was born in the Ottoman Empire and it is dying in Turkey,’ Karen says. ‘I am in the last generation of native speakers. It’s a phenomenon, because nowhere in the world has such a language been preserved for so long. Usually, newcomers are assimilated and the language disappears within four generations. But my father, for example, he only learnt Turkish when he went to military school!’
The Ladino language has recently been dealt several death blows, some of them self-inflicted. In the 1860s, the French-Israel Institute opened fifteen schools across the Ottoman Empire, which quickly became the choice of the Jewish elite. The language of instruction was French – and it was here that Ladino speakers had their first contact with the Latin alphabet. Such was the sustaining pull of the French schools that Karen herself was educated in one in Istanbul a century later – and today she speaks five languages with a melodic fluency that comes out best when she skips across several of them in the same sentence. But the institutes created a two-tier Jewish community, with French the language of the upper classes and Ladino the tongue of the lower.
‘Until I was five, I only spoke French!’ Karen laughs. ‘On my first day at school I didn’t understand anything. And the teachers suggested to my parents that, you know, they might want to start speaking Turkish to me at home.’
The next step came in 1925, two years after the foundation of the republic, when the Jewish community announced that it was collectively renouncing its minority rights to become full Turkish citizens. The statement read:
Seeing that the political and general order of the Turkish Republic is completely based on the separation of religion from things of this world, the Jews, who consider themselves at all times to be true children of this fatherland, cannot conceive of a situation of incompatibility concerning the application against them of separate arrangements which are in contradiction to this principle and to the duties of patriotism. As a consequence, we, as Jewish Turks, express the view that we will benefit from secular laws and arrangements as well as from all other civil laws which the republican Government intends to promulgate in reference to personal status and to family laws, and we present to the Government the feelings of our unwavering gratitude.
Under the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities had been mostly left alone to organise their affairs. Now, though, being a citizen of Turkey meant allowing your minority identity to fall within the shadow of Turkish nationalism. The Sephardic community could no longer have its own schools teaching in the Ladino language, because all schools run by the state taught in Turkish. Furthermore, all Jewish hospitals, orphanages and synagogues were now classed as independent institutions and had to pay taxes to the state.
The move was championed by Jewish intellectuals, some of whom formed a society to encourage the spread of the Turkish language among the Sephardic community. Jews were also represented among the principal ideologues of Kemalism, the political philosophy of Atatürk. One such intellectual was Moiz Cohen, born in Atatürk’s home city of Salonica two years after Atatürk himself. After changing his name to the Turkified Munis Tekinalp during Atatürk’s era of language reforms, he joined the CHP and the Turkish Language Association, and lobbied furiously for the new nation’s minorities to assimilate.
Atatürk’s views on the Jews appear to have shifted as his Turkish national project progressed. In 1923, eight months before the foundation of the republic, he stated that all religious minorities would be guaranteed protection. A year later, however, he told the New York Herald that the authority of the Greek and Armenian patriarchs and the rabbinate must be removed at the same time as the Caliphate was abolished. Then in 1931 he launched the ‘Citizen, speak Turkish!’ campaign, followed up by the alphabet reform of 1934. Meanwhile, the Jews’ renunciation of their minority rights almost brought financial ruin for the chief rabbinate of Turkey, which no longer even had the authority to control and verify kosher meat.
In 1942 Atatürk’s anointed successor, İsmet İnönü, levied a punitive wealth tax that hit minorities disproportionately hard. Officially, its purpose was to fill the coffers to insure against Turkey’s financial ruin should it be dragged into the Second World War. In practice, it was a strike against the groups who had been promised equality under Atatürk’s constitution only two decades earlier. Before the tax was imposed, the press filled with (fake) news of how businessmen from the minorities were hoarding their wealth and profiteering, even as the country was scrimping and saving lest it be forced into the conflict. The prime minister, şükrü Saracoğlu, initially announced that the tax would eliminate foreigners from the Turkish market and put Turks in control of their own economic destiny. He was forced to retract when the foreign consulates cried out in dismay – but Turkey’s minorities had no such powerful friends lobbying for them. Officials charged with gathering the tax were ordered to pursue payments at higher rates from non-Muslims, while the arbitrary assessment of incomes, which formed the basis for the taxes individuals were charged, left plenty of room for discrimination. Faik Ökte, Istanbul’s finance director at the time, revealed that non-Muslims were being charged taxes around four times higher than Muslims. Payments had to be made in cash within two weeks of the notice being served, and anyone who couldn’t pay was taken to a labour camp. Many sold everything they had to avoid that fate – and one study found that almost 40 per cent of the real estate sold to pay the wealth taxes had been owned by Jews, while a further 30 per cent was sold by Armenians and 12.5 per cent by Greeks. Around 30 per cent was bought by the state – and the rest by Muslim citizens.
The wealth tax had sombre implications for the whole country beyond the minorities. The liquidated businesses tended to be older and better established, and their replacements far less productive ventures run by inexperienced owners. Many quickly went out of business and the turmoil stunted the economy for decades. For the minorities the tax was devastating: around 30,000 Jews and 20,000 Orthodox Christians left Turkey in its wake.
Pluralism à la Erdoğan
Cosmetically, Erdoğan has brought some relief to Istanbul’s Jews. The president, keen to prove his credentials as a leader for all of Turkey, sends warm messages of congratulation on the Jewish and Christian holy days, and regularly meets with the country’s top rabbis and priests. One Ottoman-era synagogue and fourteen churches have been restored in the AKP era – projects that have been widely trumpeted by the pro-Erdoğan press.
But such gestures look token next to the expensive facelifts bestowed on scores of the country’s old mosques, and by the more than 17,000 new mosques built around the country since 2002. Meanwhile, what is said over the religious feasts is not what the masses are hearing. While Erdoğan’s assurances of togetherness stroke the feathers of the rabbis with one hand, he stirs the boiling pot of Islamic victimhood with the other, nourishing a fierce sense of otherness among Turkey’s pious. The sentiment can be expressed in ways that make sense for the faithful, from the top rung to the bottom. Sabah columnist Hilâl Kaplan believes it is the Kemalists running Turkey’s universities who are keeping her husband f
rom completing his Ph.D. The masses at Erdoğan’s rallies believe it is the West – various European states and America, cyclically – that is plotting to hold Turkey back. Erdoğan’s genius is that he manages to present himself as the antidote to both – as well as to problems afflicting the rest of the Sunni Muslim world.
‘I thank my friends and brothers all over the world who prayed for our victory,’ Erdoğan boomed to his supporters from the balcony of the AKP’s headquarters on the night of his victory in the presidential elections of August 2014. ‘I thank my brothers in Palestine who saw our victory as their victory. I thank my brothers in Egypt who are struggling for democracy and who understand our struggle very well. I thank my brothers in the Balkans, in Bosnia, in Macedonia, in Kosovo and in all cities in Europe who celebrate our victory with the same joy we have here. I thank my suffering brothers in Syria who pray for our victory although in a great pain, facing starvation and under bombs and bullets. I express the gratitude of my people to all our brothers and friends who gave a support to Turkey’s independence struggle just like before the Independence War of Turkey.’
In Palestine Erdoğan has found his perfect cause. Until the AKP era, Turkey had been one of the few Muslim-majority states to enjoy a close military and intelligence relationship with Israel, though not without occasional scuffles. That all changed in 2009, when Erdoğan used Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders in the glitzy Swiss alpine resort, as his stage to pick a fight with Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Erdogan Rising Page 33
