by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Ahmet told me he had been married twice. ‘My first wife was African like me, but the second one is like you – with red ears.’ In answer to my quizzical look, he explained: ‘We say that to mean white; if you get angry or hot your ears show red, ours don’t. If we ask about someone in the extended community, we say, "Bizden mi kirmizi kulak mi?" – “Are they like us, or red-eared?’”
In the village of Yeniçiftlik, close to Naime, Afro Turk children play in the street, still unaware of their relative enlightenment in the history of their community. Adil was a beautiful eight-year-old boy with green eyes from his white father; his grandmother, Fatma, told me that her grandparents were brought to work in the cotton fields under Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the first decade of the 20th century. The family has the second name ‘Zenci’, a pejorative Turkish word for ‘black’ (roughly – but not quite – equivalent to ‘Negro’), which was given to her parents under Atatürk’s Surname Law in 1934, when Turkish citizens were first allocated surnames.
The fact that the Zenci surname has endured indicates that the Afro Turk community is still subjected to crude stereotyping; yet skin colour is also a token by which they have felt united. One young woman I spoke to after the festival told me that her parents’ generation has been plagued by competing desires: to become ‘whiter’, and to keep the community united by marrying within it.
‘We are concerned that our blackness is dying out, we are becoming diluted as a community, but at the same time we often marry white people. Our parents say ‘white is good’. They don’t want their children to live through what they’ve lived through.’
In 1961, the American writer James Baldwin moved to Istanbul, famously declaring of his native land that ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ Baldwin needed to work out his place as a black man in American society from a totally different cultural perspective. He lived on and off throughout the 1960s in Istanbul, in a house that I discovered to my delighted surprise was 100 metres away from mine in Gümüşsuyu, just behind the German Consulate. In that house, he finished his novel Another Country as well as a collection of essays No Name in the Street; Baldwin’s name in the streets of Gümüşsuyu was ‘Arab Jimmy’. Thirty years earlier, the attitude of the Turkish diplomats to civil rights in America was considerably more progressive than domestic attitudes. The Turkish ambassador Münir Ertegün, appointed by President Atatürk, caused an outcry when he welcomed African Americans to jazz evenings at the embassy in Washington DC; when the State Department advised him to invite them in through the back door, he responded that they should enter ‘through the front door as equals’. Both Baldwin’s experience and Ertegün’s actions show that perhaps it is only with distance that real perspective emerges regarding the place of minorities in society.
Baroness Hussein-Ece is a British Liberal Democrat working peer in the House of Lords; her cousin is the Turner Prize-winning artist Tracey Emin. Both are of Turkish Cypriot origin and share a great-grandfather who was kidnapped as a boy in Sudan and sold to a Cypriot trader in the late 19th century; eventually, he gained his freedom, married a local midwife and started a family near Larnaca. Shamelessly trading on my credentials as a fellow Turkish Cypriot of African descent, I went to meet the Baroness in the House of Lords to hear the full story.
We had tea in a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room steeped in Ancient Power, humming with ancient English voices; it seemed strange to use Turkish phrases as we talked, describing our relatives to each other. ‘Look,’ said the baroness, passing me her phone, on which there were black-and-white photographs. ‘Here’s my uncle, they called him Kara Mustafa [‘Black Mustafa’]. As you can see, he’s black, like my mother’s first cousin, Enver – Tracey’s father – that one there.’ The baroness has striking green eyes and pale skin but she battles her Afro-prone hair with straighteners, as my mother does. She shows me a photo of her own mother. ‘She was the keeper of our stories. I wish I’d asked her more about our family when she was alive.
‘When I was preparing my maiden speech in 2010, I knew I was the first woman with a Turkish Cypriot background to enter the House of Lords. So I decided to talk about my background, about Abdullah [her Sudanese great-grandfather] and how my family came to the UK. We do not know much about Abdullah, other than a few family stories, and our physical features tell a story of course. Some of our relatives in Cyprus rang my mum up after I gave the speech, saying, “Why did Meral have to talk about this slave in our family?” But I’m proud of where I am today, and where I’ve come from. Why hide that?’
The Sudanese media had the opposite reaction to the disgruntled Turkish Cypriot relatives and exhaustively covered the baroness’s speech and Abdullah’s backstory. ‘They loved the detail about Abdullah refusing to convert to Christianity, even though his Christian owner hung him from a tree by his ankles . . . You can imagine their reaction: “What a good Muslim!’” Soon the Sudanese ambassador had introduced himself to the baroness and come to tea in this wood-panelled room. In 2013, the University of Khartoum invited the baroness to a conference and she set off for Sudan on a kind of ancestral pilgrimage.
‘We went to Friday prayers at the central mosque in Khartoum soon after we arrived, and the women came and embraced me after the prayers, it was really lovely. I kept looking round and thinking “You look like my uncle – you look like my cousin!” Suddenly our family aesthetic made sense.’
However, there were some dubious pretenders to the Hussein-Ece throne. ‘Somehow, people found out where we were staying and we had people turning up at the hotel saying, “Oh, we think we’re your cousins!” We weren’t convinced, the look just wasn’t right. Our hosts, including the Sudanese ambassador to London, took us on a trip up the Nile – they treated us so well, I have to say. I could imagine my great-grandfather playing by the banks of the Nile as a child, with his sister. It was such a moving experience.’
I asked the baroness whether there has historically been much racism against black members of the Turkish Cypriot community. ‘Not really – most of my black male relatives married white women.’ But perhaps it was worse for black women? ‘Perhaps . . . Actually, now I think about it, there were some incidents. Tracey’s uncle – my mother’s cousin – was not allowed to marry a white girl he fell in love with. It drove him mad and he ended up in a mental asylum.’
We ended our strange, nostalgic tea party, set in the historic headquarters of a former empire also built by slaves, hoping that snobbery about African ancestry is on the wane. ‘It’s just so stupid, isn’t it?’ said the baroness. ‘We’re all mixed up. I did a DNA test and it showed I have twenty per cent African heritage, which makes sense, and thirty-five per cent Italian-Greek, which must be from the Venetian occupation of Cyprus. The rest is Anatolian – in common with most Greek Cypriots, by the way.’
I started this chapter by noting the absence of signs of Ottoman minorities in Turkey. Yet their legacy is present in the blood of Turks themselves, and in the family histories handed down through the generations. I learned from the Afro Turks that it is, in fact, a luxury to be able to trace your family tree, to retain the language and culture of your ancestors – even to know in which country your grandparents were born. When that knowledge is missing, people celebrate what little they do know to create a sense of identity, however vague. In the words of Balthasar Embriaco, ‘Every family ought to have a tower named after them somewhere.’ When that tower doesn’t exist, we create it; once it exists, we can celebrate it.
Scattered Pomegranates
‘Here every man may dwell in peace under his own vine and fig tree.’
The European Rabbi Yitzhak Sarfati,
Ottoman Edirne, 15th century
‘I am an Armenian of Turkey, and a good Turkish citizen. I believe in the republic, in fact I would like it to become stronger and more democratic.’
The journalist Hrant Dink,
killed by an ultranationalist in Istanbul,
2007
Diaspora means ‘scattered seeds’ and it is striking that two of the major diasporas of the Ottoman Empire – the Armenians and the Jews – claim the pomegranate as their national symbol. The pomegranate represents fertility, abundance and prosperity; when applied to a diaspora, it suggests an ability to renew in adversity, far from home. This idea becomes even more powerful when the people in question has survived massacres, deportations and long-term persecution – such as the Armenians and the Jews. Like Persephone trapped in Hades, slowly eating pomegranate seeds from the world above, diasporas sustain themselves with memories of a lost home.
Sometimes a lost home persists more strongly in memory than in reality. Before I met minorities living in an empire-turnednation state, I had not grasped what it might mean to be the last of an indigenous minority living in a ‘homeland’ when most of your community have gone. If home is where your people are, what is left for those who stay behind?
An Empire Enriched
In 2011, I lived in a flat in Galata, on a street of shops selling industrial light fixtures. In fact, I lived in a whole maze of light fixtures; in Istanbul, certain districts are traditionally devoted to selling one type of thing, so all the streets surrounding my flat were ablaze with 24/7 incandescence, broken only by the Neve Shalom Synagogue on Büyük Hendek Street. Built in 1951, the synagogue has no elaborate facade, just a calm art deco-style white front with a line of Stars of David etched above the doors. Sometimes, it was fenced off by police, particularly after a diplomatic dispute between the Turkish and Israeli governments or after a proclamation by the Islamic State, in the same way that police appeared outside the Syriac Church in Gümüşsuyu when I went for the Easter service.
The Neve Shalom is one of Turkey’s few remaining synagogues in operation, hosting some of the 17,000 mainly Sephardic Jews that remain in the country, 95 per cent of whom live in Istanbul. The Sephardic community (Sapharad being Hebrew for Spain) has produced some of the greatest cultural and business icons of 20th-century Turkey, for example Vitali Hakko, who started the famous Vakko fashion company in the wake of Atatürk’s 1925 Hat Revolution, which outlawed the fez and made the wearing of rimmed hats obligatory for all Turkish men. Hakko started a small shop called The Merry Hat, selling the Western-style hats which were suddenly, forcibly, in vogue, and today Vakko is one of the most successful companies in Turkey. Hakko’s funeral was held in 2007 at the Neve Shalom Synagogue, only four years after it was struck by an al-Qaeda car bomb along with the Bet Israel Synagogue in the nearby district of Şişli.
My friend Dalya is a Turkish Jew in her early thirties, from Istanbul. She is no longer religious, and as a teenager started to distance herself from the socially isolated community she had grown up in. However, the synagogue attacks in 2003 affected her profoundly, as did the atmosphere of anti-Semitism that followed an incident in the same year, when Israeli forces attacked the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish aid flotilla attempting to reach Gaza, causing a diplomatic rift that has never quite healed.
‘The Jewish community in Turkey get scared more easily these days. After the Mavi Marmara, we were basically being held responsible for whatever tactic Israel decided to take. Once I saw a swastika painted on a wall, around the time of the bombs. My parents had always told me that we were hated in our own country, and for me, that was a realization that they were right. I thought: “Yes, we are second-class citizens." It broke my heart. I had always said really proudly, “I am Turkish,” but after that episode, I did not feel that way.’
At the time of the 2003 attack, the Jewish community in Turkey numbered around 30,000; in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the number had been 200,000, partly bolstered by the influx of Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki who moved to Istanbul as nationalist tensions rose in the Balkans at the turn of the 20th century. The community is disappearing at an exponential rate. Part of that is down to Turkey’s decreasing prospects as an open and prosperous society, leading to a general exodus among middle-class Turks. However, there has been a revival of anti-Semitism in recent years that cannot be unconnected to a president who describes protesters as ‘spawn of Israel’ and tells his supporters that the anti-government Gezi Park protests were organized by the ‘interest rate lobby’, a mysterious group identified by his deputy prime minister as ‘the Jewish diaspora’.
For hundreds of years, churches and synagogues were a natural part of the architectural and social landscape in Turkey, not targets for Islamist zealots, and their congregations did not have to hide their identity. Ottoman sultans were more accommodating of Jews than the previous Byzantine emperors. In the 19th century, the emergence of Arab nationalism began to create divisions between Muslims and Jews in the south-eastern reaches of the empire; at the same time, the empire also absorbed thousands of Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia.
When Osman I captured Bursa in 1326, making it the first Ottoman capital, the indigenous Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews were already living throughout what would become the Ottoman heartland: in Istanbul, Smyrna, Edirne, Asia Minor and Thrace. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Romaniots were joined by Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine, who were so pleasantly surprised by life under the caliph that they invited others to join them from Europe. The major influx, however, came in 1492, when Sultan Bayezid II sent his navy to rescue the Muslims and Jews fleeing Spain during the Inquisition of Ferdinand II of Aragon. He insisted that the Jewish refugees should be welcomed throughout his lands, and was scathing of his critics: ‘You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler – he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!’
This idea of enrichment is an important one; Ottoman rulers welcomed Jews and Christians not for humanitarian reasons but because they knew these subjects could make important contributions to the economic life of the empire. Jews were sometimes preferred over Christian subjects for certain positions of trust when the Ottoman authorities suspected that the latter might sympathize with the enemies of the empire, particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries as the empire expanded west into Christian lands. Some sultans were more pro-Jewish than others, but the trailblazing Bayezid II was proved right: within a year of arriving in 1492, two of his new Jewish subjects, David and Samuel ibn Nahmias, had established the first printing press of the Ottoman Empire and had started printing books in Hebrew (Bayezid II forbade the publishing of Arabic script on religious grounds), a crucial step in the intellectual enrichment of the empire. More than 500 years later, a parallel situation occurred in Atatürk’s republic: in September 1933, Albert Einstein wrote to Ismet İnönü, Turkey’s then prime minister, asking him to take in forty Jewish intellectuals who were being persecuted in Nazi Germany. Inonii agreed, inviting them to come and set up courses at Turkey’s newly founded Western-style universities – it would be a symbiotic exchange, not an act of pure altruism.
Suleiman the Magnificent built on the legacy of his predecessor Bayezid II in trying to minimize anti-Semitism. In around 1554, he took the advice of his Jewish doctor, Moses Hamon, and formally denounced blood libels (accusations made by Christian subjects, particularly in Europe, that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children to use their blood at religious holidays). Moses Hamon also introduced Suleiman to Joseph Nasi (later known as ‘the Great Jew’), whose family had been forced to convert to Christianity in Europe but had then escaped to Istanbul. He became hugely rich through Suleiman’s support, and ended up settling Italian Jews in Galilee, where Suleiman granted him some properties.22
Jews fared much better throughout the empire than in Europe; in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a letter to a friend back in England from the town of Adrianople in Thrace, in which she expressed her surprise at their prominence in public life.
‘I observed most of the rich tradesmen were Jews. That people are in incredible power in this country. They have many privileges above all the natural Turks themselves, and have formed a very considerable commonwealth here, being judged by their own laws. They have drawn the whole trad
e of the empire into their hands, partly by the firm union amongst themselves, and partly by the idle temper and want of industry in the Turks.
‘Every bassa [pasha - lord and commander] has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires; he is let into all his secrets, and does all his business. No bargain is made, no bribe received, no merchandise disposed of, but what passes through their hands. They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all the great men. You may judge how advantageous this is to a people who never fail to make use of the smallest advantages. They have found the secret of making themselves so necessary, that they are certain of the protection of the court, whatever ministry is in power. Even the English, French, and Italian merchants, who are sensible of their artifices, are, however, forced to trust their affairs to their negotiation, nothing of trade being managed without them, and the meanest amongst them being too important to be disobliged, since the whole body take care of his interests, with as much vigour as they would those of the most considerable of their members. They are many of them vastly rich, but take care to make little public shew of it, though they live in their houses in the utmost luxury and magnificence.’23
Montagu, while broad-minded for her time, betrays the anti-Semitism of an early 18th-century English perspective: ‘Even the English, French, and Italian merchants, who are sensible of their artifices, are, however, forced to trust their affairs to their negotiation’. Her attitude explains the letters of Rabbi Yitzhak Sarfati to the congregation he left behind in Germany in the first half of the 15th century, encouraging them to join him in Edirne, the capital of the empire at the time: ‘Is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians? Here every man may dwell in peace under his own vine and fig tree. Here you are allowed to wear the most precious garments. In Christendom, on the contrary, you dare not even venture to clothe your children in red or in blue, according to our taste, without exposing them to the insult of being beaten black and blue...’24
