After World War I, Atatürk’s revolutionary modernizing program brought a tremendous change in Ottoman Turkish. The Arabic script was replaced by a modified version of the Latin script and an attempt was made to remove the Arabic and Persian vocabulary and replace it with old or newly invented Turkish words. The extensive linguistic reforms carried out in the early years of the Turkish Republic made the Ottoman language antique and arcane, even to modern Turkish readers. To understand the resulting change one might try to imagine a revolution in English in which all French- or Latin-based words are dropped and replaced by resuscitated or newly invented Anglo-Saxon words and at the same time the alphabet is totally replaced by a new one. To give an example, the “remorse of conscience” would become the “againbite of inwit” (in a different alphabet).
There are several different kinds of records in the archives, and they are divided into two categories by their physical form: registers and papers. A lot of the records consist of bound registers, huge volumes into which scribes copied important documents. The other category, papers, consists of individual documents, and there are literally tens of millions of those.
The archivists, it would seem, never developed an efficient system of preserving and classifying incoming documents; if they survive at all, they are lumped together in miscellaneous collections. They were however aware of this problem and dealt with it by a simple and effective device—each outgoing message begins with a summary of the message or report to which it provides an answer. The outgoing messages were meticulously copied and filed in bound registers.
There are several kinds of bound registers. One category contains copies of orders sent out from the sultan’s government. Whether at home or abroad, in the city or in the provinces, wherever, every order issued by the imperial secretariat was copied into a register. There are hundreds of these volumes, in strict date order. Then there are the registers of complaints—of misbehavior by this officer or that governor, by this or that minor official. These complaints were conscientiously investigated and rulings issued. There are literally hundreds of registers of reports on complaints, again classified by region and, within region, by date.
Population and taxation records were meticulously kept. There are registers for various foreign consulates, and the dealings with them. There are special categories, like the different minority communities—Christian registers of various denominations and Jewish registers. There are those devoted to fiscal matters covering every town and village, house by house. For each village there is a financial statement—what they grew, what the yield was and what they paid in taxes. And there is a tremendous amount of material which is still imperfectly known.
The Ottoman Empire ruled over a large part of Europe for almost half a millennium. It held the Balkan Peninsula for centuries; it held half of Hungary for a century and a half. Twice the Ottomans reached as far as Vienna. They landed briefly in Italy and held Otranto for a while and of course, they held the whole of southwest Asia west of Iran and North Africa as far as the Moroccan frontier. It was a very large empire. It was also one which was highly literate and sophisticated. The Ottomans had their history, their historians, their chroniclers, their poets, their writers, and they also were very meticulous keepers of records. The archives in Istanbul document the activities of the government over the centuries and contain very detailed information about the affairs of the empire from Budapest to Basra and from Algiers to Baghdad. Further archives in the provincial centers are only now being discovered and exploited.
Before the opening of the archives one could read in a history book that such and such a sultan had built a mosque. What did that mean exactly? It meant that the sultan had summoned an architect and said, “Build me a mosque.” So we could correct the statement and say this architect built the mosque. If we are lucky, contemporary historians who chronicled the period may have said something about the time it took to build the mosque, and, rarely, how much it cost. But we are still not much the wiser. We know the name of the sultan who gave the order and we know the name of the architect who designed and supervised the construction of the mosque. For the historian of architecture there is the mosque, the actual building, which is in what he is most interested. But if you go to the archives, you will find the work sheets of the construction of the mosque; day-by-day records which give you the list of the plasterers, the masons, the carpenters and all the other people who worked on the construction. You will know how many there were and from where they came, what jobs they did and how much they were paid and so on. This is priceless historical information. For the social or economic historian it is a treasure trove of immense importance.
Ottoman imperial bureaucracy functioned pretty well for centuries and then, like everything else in the empire, it began to go wrong. Anyone can watch it going wrong in the archives. You can see them begin to get sloppy, to get careless. Instead of preparing new surveys, they merely repeat the old ones, and suchlike. I remember reading in a history of the time that at a certain date a new chief minister had come in and reorganized things so that they were running properly. This lasted for about twenty years and then he died and things went back to where they were before. If you look in the archives, you can see a change; the documentation suddenly becomes efficient and meticulous again. It lasts awhile, and then reverts to where it was before.
Although as a student I had studied both Turkish and Arabic, my previous work had been much more concerned with the Arab countries than with Turkey, and more with medieval than with Ottoman times. It therefore seemed a good idea to take, for my first project of research in the archives, the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, the first century of Ottoman rule. My studies hitherto, including my doctoral thesis, had concentrated on the Isma‘ilis and Assassins, and I decided to begin with the Isma‘ili districts in central Syria, and to see how my old friends, whom I knew from Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk times (from the eleventh to the early sixteenth centuries) had fared under the Ottomans. The rich archival documentation offered material of a kind wholly lacking in earlier periods, and therefore of special interest.
Unfortunately I soon ran into a difficulty—the impossibility of revisiting these communities on the ground. I had been to some of these Syrian Isma‘ili villages in earlier, easier times and was able to recognize some of them in the documents. There were others I could not identify and there was no way I could return now. I was a Jew, and therefore not welcome. In the meantime I had conceived a rather more ambitious project—a study of the whole of the Fertile Crescent for which I had identified several relevant series of records. I soon decided that the right place for me to start, for both practical and scholarly reasons, was the four southernmost districts of the province of Damascus, namely the sanjaks of Safed, Nabulus, Jerusalem and Gaza. A scholarly reason for this choice was that these four districts offered the richest independent documentation, Christian and Jewish travel and religious literature, without parallel in any other province of the Ottoman East. The practical reason was that the greater part of these four districts was included in the newly created State of Israel, where I could enter, travel and study without impediment.
Israel and Iran
In the spring of 1950 I went on a trip from Istanbul to Israel, where I was able to check some of my data and meet Israeli colleagues interested in this topic. Among them were the late J. W. Hirschberg, U. Heyd, and Isaac Ben-Zvi, who used some of my material in his book on Palestine and its Jewish settlements under the Ottomans. It was at that time that I gave my first lectures based on the Ottoman records. One of these lectures, with additional material, was published as a booklet in Jerusalem by the Israel Oriental Society in 1952.
While my principal concern had for some time been mainstream Islamic history, I had never forgotten the Hebraic and Judaic interests and concerns which had first led me into the field of Middle Eastern studies. My first published venture in this field was due to the initiative of a truly remarkable man whom it was my good fortune to meet
in London just before the war. Dr. Simon Rawidowicz, a refugee from Poland, made his home in England for several years before moving to the United States.
Rawidowicz was a man of driving energy and immense determination. At a time when the whole of Continental Europe was ruled, cowed, or threatened by Nazi Germany, he was acutely conscious of the position of English Jews as the last free Jews in Europe. He felt this imposed special obligations on them, and one of the most important of these was to safeguard Jewish culture, and in particular, to provide a forum for Hebrew letters and studies. He therefore decided to found a journal, in the Hebrew language, devoted to scholarship and literature.
This was a time when England stood alone and under siege. And in wartime England there were shortages of everything, including paper and printing facilities. To start a new publication required a permit. Very few such permits were given, and then only for publications related to the war effort. With other friends, I told Rawidowicz that he was attempting the impossible, and that we saw no way of persuading harassed civil servants that a journal in Hebrew devoted to scholarship was essential to the British war effort. I vividly remember his answer, “You English don’t know about permits. It is all new to you and you don’t understand it. Where I come from, we had to have a permit to be born, a permit to grow up, a permit to eat, a permit to breathe, a permit to live, and a permit to die. I know how to get permits.”
And he did. To everyone’s astonishment he was able to find not only the permit but also the printers, the paper, and the money to produce Metsuda (in English, “fortress”), a collection in Hebrew published at irregular intervals in London during the war.
Not the easiest part of his editorial task was finding contributors who had something to say, the ability to say it in Hebrew, and the time to do so. I was persuaded to contribute and devoted some moments of my scanty leisure to writing small contributions on aspects of the history of Jews in Arab lands. I wrote these in Hebrew and Rawidowicz corrected them, something which I found the less wounding in that he also corrected everyone else’s Hebrew, including that of native Hebrew speakers. In later years I wrote one or two other articles in Hebrew and even ventured to give a few lectures in that language, but later decided to keep to English. It is only in my mother tongue that I can say exactly what I want to say, and in the way I want to say it. In any other language I am restricted and constrained by the limitation of the words and idioms available to me.
In 1950 I went to Iran for the first time. The history of Iran was part of the syllabus that I was teaching at the university and I felt some direct personal experience was necessary. Iran borders Turkey, so it was not a difficult journey from Istanbul. At that time there was no piped water in Tehran. Water was circulated round the city through open gutters and getting clean water was a problem; you could buy drinking water but not bathwater. You got bathwater and heaters in the hotel—if you were lucky.
I was told that I should register at the British Embassy as soon as I got there and make myself known. I went to the embassy and gave my name and that of my hotel and was given the usual guidance and warnings. Then the embassy clerk suggested I had better see the embassy doctor as there were some things to take note of. An appointment was made and I saw the doctor, who warned me about eating this and not drinking that and then he asked what I was going to do about baths. I concurred that this was a problem. To my astonishment he said that if I wanted to I could bathe at the embassy. The embassy had a private water supply from its own springs and all I would have to do is let them know and they’d arrange it. I was profoundly grateful, thanked him, and regularly took advantage of the offer.
I traveled extensively around the country for a few weeks and found it a fascinating and hospitable place. The people were most tolerant of my fragmentary Persian.
Food
I became interested in the history of food when I was a schoolboy, and learnt with delight how our lives had been enriched by the discovery of America which brought us such previously unknown items as potatoes, tomatoes and chocolate. Our gustatory lives were enriched from the East as well as from the West, by exploration and empire, by commerce and cultivation. At some stage in my Persian studies I learnt the words sheker and qand, denoting a substance used for sweetening food and drinks. These are of course the roots of sugar and candy. Sugar, unknown in the Greco-Roman world, was introduced from Persia, possibly originating farther East. It became an important part of the trade between the Eastern and Western worlds.
Perhaps the most exciting was the history of coffee. In most cases, the process from the natural product to the end product that we eat or drink is fairly short and simple. The journey from the coffee bean to a cup of coffee is long and complex and one can only marvel at the ingenuity of the people of Ethiopia who first brought this gift to humanity. The earliest documentation is from the beginning of the fifteenth century, when we hear about coffee being imported from Ethiopia to Yemen. From the southern end of the Red Sea it spread northward along both sides, reaching Egypt, Syria and Turkey, where it was discovered, with delight, by Western travelers.
My work in the Ottoman archives opened new doors and revealed new opportunities for the study of the history of food. On the one hand, the detailed records of taxes on agriculture, from villages all over the empire, indicated what food crops were being grown, in what regions, and in what quantities. On the other hand, the archives of the imperial palace in Istanbul, in particular those of the kitchens, showed what foods were being cooked and consumed, in what quantities, and sometimes from what region.
Sometimes the history of food produced amusing details. For example, the bird which in English is known as the turkey was a native of the Western Hemisphere, unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere before the discovery of America. The English called this strange bird the “turkey,” naming it after the most exotic country that they could think of. The French, more familiar with the Near East, called the bird dinde, literally “from India.” When, in the course of time, the turkey was introduced to the Middle East, it was sometimes known as habashi, the Ethiopian bird, again using the most exotic name that came to mind. It would have been more accurate to call the bird the “American,” but neither the name nor the place was familiar at that time.
Turkish Democracy
One of the most moving experiences of my life happened in that year. That was the time when the Turkish government held a free and genuinely fair election—the election of 1950—in which it was defeated. Even more remarkably, the government then quietly and decently withdrew and handed over power to the victorious opposition. This was a totally new experience for the people of Turkey or indeed of any Muslim country. It was also a profound and informative experience for me to be there and witness it.
I did not visit Turkey during the war, but in the course of my war duties I was kept fully informed of what was happening there. Despite a treaty of alliance with Britain signed in 1939, Turkey remained ambiguously neutral during the war. It was not until late February 1945 that they finally declared war on the Axis. The Turkish record was, to say the least, somewhat dubious, and the democratic achievement of 1950 provided a necessary and welcome corrective.
What followed I can only describe as catastrophic. Adnan Menderes, the leader of the party which won the election, soon made it perfectly clear that he had no intention whatever of leaving by the same route by which he had come. He regarded this as a change of regime and had no respect at all for the electoral process. People in Turkey began to realize this. I vividly remember sitting in the faculty lounge at the school of political science in Ankara after several years of the Menderes regime. We were discussing the history of different political institutions and forms. One of the professors suddenly said, to everyone’s astonishment, “Well, the father of democracy in Turkey is Adnan Menderes.” The others looked around in bewilderment. They said, “Adnan Menderes, the father of Turkish democracy? What do you mean?” Well, said this professor, “he screwed the mother of democracy
.”
The Emergence of Modern Turkey
When I returned to London in 1950 I was asked by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, and the Oxford University Press to write a book on modern Turkey, to be sponsored by the one and published by the other. It was to be part of a series they were planning on the interrelations between the Islamic world and the West. If I agreed they would finance my future trips to Turkey, as many as necessary. I liked the idea, agreed and eagerly set off for my first trip to Turkey for this project.
My sponsors suggested that it would be useful to make myself known to the British ambassador, Sir James Bowker, which I did. He invited me to lunch; not as good as dinner but better than merely coffee. At lunch, and in accordance with tribal custom, we talked of anything and everything except the business at hand until the coffee was served. Then Sir James asked why I was there and could he do anything for me. I explained my mission, to write a book on Turkey, and that this was the first of what would probably be several visits to collect material. Sir James said, “I’ll do anything I can to help you. You will probably want to talk with politicians and government officials—let me know which and I’ll set up appointments for you.” I said, “Are you sure that would be wise? You know how sensitive people are in this part of the world. I don’t know how this book will turn out. They may like it or, on the other hand, they may decide it’s insulting and anti-Turkish, in which case it would be an embarrassment for you to have introduced me officially.” He replied, “That’s a risk we’ll have to take. You are a British scholar and I am your ambassador, and it is my duty to help you.” Which he did. Fortunately, although the book, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, was critical in some respects, the Turks liked it, translated it, and it has been in print for over half a century.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 10
