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How Armenian Genocide impacts Turkey's Jewish community
http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2013-12-29-how-armenian-genocide-impacts-turkey-s-jewish-community
Published: Sunday December 29, 2013
Rifat Bali. Image via tundratabloids.com.
Related Articles
Rifat Bali examines fate of Turkish Jews and impact on Armenian
Genocide recognition
TORONTO - Mr. Rifat Bali, a noted scholar and author of Model Citizens
of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period, deals
with the treatment of the Jewish community in Turkey since 1950.
His studies deal also with the period 1923-1949, an era that includes
the Varlik Vergisi (wealth tax law, November 1942), a law which ruined
many Jewish families financially. Balidetails the process by which the
Jewish community strived to accommodate the demands of state and
society to become "model citizens." Jews were pressured to speak
Turkish in public and Turkify their names. Yet, no matter how much
they strived, they were always subject to second-class rights,
intimidation, anti-Semitism, and violence.
Bali demonstrates that all the non-Muslim minorities in
Turkey-Armenians, Greeks and Jews-have faced similar challenges in
their relationship with the Turkish state and society. Greeks, for
example, underwent a terrible pogrom in 1955. They all had to deal
with issues of maintaining their language, religion, culture and
identity in a society that demands total conformity, but they
responded to the challenges in different ways. Thus, the book gives
insight into the challenges of all minorities in Turkey today.
The opportunity arose for the Jewish community to become "useful" to
the state by using their influence with Israel and the Jewish
political lobby in the US to advance Turkish interests. In particular,
they worked against Armenian and Greek interests in Washington,
particularly to thwart efforts at gaining recognition of the Armenian
Genocide in the US.
The Zoryan Institute's interest in Bali's work arose for three
reasons. First, its relevance to the Jewish community in Turkey and
the US, as the Turkish State denial of the Armenian Genocide has been
an important element in Turkish-Jewish and Turkish-Israeli relations.
It is also an important obstacle in relations between Armenia and
Israel. Even though many Jewish scholars affirm the Armenian Genocide,
the official position of the State of Israel is that Armenians did not
experience anything comparable to the Holocaust, and therefore it is
not a genocide.
Second, the human rights aspects of the minorities in Turkey,
particularly the treatment of the Jewish community, both before and
after their instrumentalization by the Turkish State in its denial of
the Armenian Genocide, as Zoryan is a human rights organization with
educational and publication programs in that area.
Third, to show a Diaspora could be used by a host state as an
instrument of its foreign policy, as Zoryan is also devoted to the
study of Diaspora and Diaspora-Homeland relations.
Rifat N. Bali is a graduate of the distinguished École Pratique des
Hautes Études at the Sorbonne in Paris. Since 1996, he has been an
independent scholar specializing in the history of Turkish Jewry and
is an associate member of the Alberto-Benveniste Centre for Sephardic
Studies and the Sociocultural History of the Jews in Paris. Has
written or edited 28 books in English, French and Turkish, dealing
primarily with Jewish history and society within the Republic of
Turkey. He has also written numerous articles in newspapers and
scholarly journals, and contributed chapters to scholarly collections
and encyclopedias. He is the winner of the Alberto Benveniste Research
Award (Paris) for 2009 for his publications on Turkish Jewry and of
the Yunus Nadi award (Istanbul) in 2005 and 2008 for original research
in the social sciences.
One may view Bali's lecture in Toronto at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3V47fYmqQo
Interview with Rifat N. Bali, author of Model Citizens of the State:
The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period (Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2012)
In anticipation of his upcoming North American book tour, Rifat N.
Bali, born in 1948 in Istanbul, an independent scholar specializing in
the history of Turkish Jews and an associate member of the
Alberto-Benveniste Center for Sephardic Studies and the Sociocultural
History of the Jews (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/CNRS/Université
Paris-Sorbonne) allowed us to ask him some questions regarding his
book, his research, and his motivations. Bali is the winner of the
Alberto Benveniste Research Award for 2009 for his publications on
Turkish Jewry. The interview was conducted via email by Deborah Hay,
Outreach Coordinator at the Zoryan Institute in Toronto, Canada and
concluded on Oct. 3, 2013.
DH: Today I'm, very lucky to be interviewing Rifat N. Bali, author of
Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party
Period. My first question to you is can you tell us a little bit about
what is this book covers?
RB: Very briefly, the book provides an exposé of the treatment of the
Jewish community in Turkey from 1950 to the present, their fight
against anti-Semitism, the struggle for their constitutional rights,
and the attitude of the Turkish state and society towards these
problems.
DH: What was your motivation to do research in this field and to write
this book?
RB: There are a number of factors which triggered my starting to
research the history of the Jews in the Turkish Republic. They can all
be summed up in the fact that I was tired of listening to and reading
the rosy narrative that was repeated over and over by the leaders of
the Turkish Jewish community, as well as by Turkish intellectuals,
politicians and historians. The same narrative was also predominant
outside Turkey. I wanted to discover what was really behind this
rhetoric.H: What was the reaction of the Jewish community in Turkey
towards the changes that you describe in your book, brought on by
Ataturk? Did those changes in policy make life easier for Jews in
Turkey, or harder?
RB: After the War for Independence, the founders of the fledgling
republic declared themselves prepared to accept the country's
remaining non-Muslims as full Turkish citizens, provided that they
adopted the Turkish language, Turkish culture, and the principle of
"Turkishness." A list of ten steps specified what this entailed. It
proved to be very difficult for the minority communities Istanbul to
fit into the mold of the "model" Turkish citizen as defined by Kemal
Ataturk, and regardless of the official government policy toward the
Jewish community, the anti-Semitic attitudes of the majority Muslim
population in Turkish society were ever present.
DH: Were there any significant global events that impacted the life of
Jews in Turkey?
RB: There were three pivotal events outside of Turkey that did just
that: various military clashes and wars between Israel, its neighbours
and the Palestinian organizations which resulted in bursts of
anti-Semitism in Turkey, the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the
movement for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The
Turkish government in the 1970s reversed its policy of prohibiting
minorities' links to outside organizations by encouraging the Jews of
Turkey to connect with American Jewish organizations, once it realized
the importance of American Jewish political lobby groups. Since then,
Turkey has adopted a policy of using the American Jewish lobby against
the Greek lobby to lift the Cyprus related arms embargo, and against
the Armenian lobby to further its genocide denial policies. There
were, and are, efforts to distance the American Jewish community from
the Armenian community by propagandizing that the Armenian Genocide is
a non-truth, or that whatever may have happened in 1915 it cannot be
compared to the Jewish Holocaust and therefore cannot be called
genocide, and that Turks have been very tolerant and friendly to Jews
since their expulsion from Spain in 1492.
DH: Have those efforts been successful? Has the American Jewish lobby
really been influenced by the Turkish government to serve the
interests of Turkey?
RB: Yes, those efforts have been successful so far. With this new
policy, successive Turkish governments have obtained the cooperation
of Turkish Jews to convince the American Jewish organizations to
actively support pro-Turkish measures, including fighting against
Armenian Genocide resolutions in the US Congress, excluding the
Armenian Genocide from the Holocaust Museums in Washington and Los
Angeles, prohibiting papers on the Armenian Genocide from being
presented at Israeli Holocaust conferences, prohibiting the showing of
Armenian Genocide related movies in US and Israel, et cetera.
DH: Could you explain how those Turkish governments have managed to
accomplish this?
RB: Some of the tactics they have used include financial assistance,
economic concessions and other privileges, but also veiled threats
that lack of cooperation by the Jewish organizations, the State of
Israel, or Turkish-Jewish leaders would jeopardize the safety and
economic well-being of the Jews in Turkey.
DH: Is the experience of the Jewish community's experience in Turkey unique?
RB: All the non-Muslim minorities in Turkey-Armenians, Greeks and
Jews-have faced similar challenges in their relationship with the
state and society. They all had to deal with issues of maintaining
their language, religion, culture and identity in a society that
demands total conformity, but they have responded to the challenges in
different ways.
DH: What do you hope to achieve through your research and through the
publication of this book?
RB: I hope that at last the English-speaking public will have the
opportunity to read the "real" story of Turkish-Jewish relations,
instead of an embellished one. I do not believe that the book will
have any sort of negative impact on Israeli-Turkish and/or
Turkish-Jewish relations. Real politics and strategic concerns always
dominate and even embellish past history.
DH: What do you see as the future for minorities in Turkey?
RB: I believe that they will be used more and more as a cosmetic
element for giving the impression that Turkey is a multicultural
country where non-Muslims live peacefully.
DH: Why did you choose to bring this book to the Zoryan Institute, for
work on the publication and now for hosting the international book
tour of Model Citizens?
RB: This book serves as a valuable case study of how Realpolitik in
domestic politics and foreign relations distorts the truth and how
coercion by the powerful contributes to the violation of collective
human rights. It will be of interest to academics and students of
non-Muslim minorities in Turkey, political lobbyists in America,
Israeli policy-makers, as well as to the Jewish, Greek and Armenian
communities around the world. Because the mission of the Zoryan
Institute is to serve the cause of scholarship and to raise public
awareness relating to issues of universal human rights, genocide, and
diaspora-homeland relations, this book is really a perfect fit.
DH: What has been the reaction to this book in Turkey?
RB: In a review of the Turkish edition, Turkish journalist and human
rights activist Ay?e Gunaysu described the book as "groundbreaking ...
unearthing facts and first-hand accounts that unmistakably illustrate
how the Turkish establishment blackmailed the leaders of the Jewish
community-and through them Jewish organizations in the United
States-to secure their support of the Turkish position against the
Armenians' campaign for genocide recognition." Gunaysu noted that,
"The book also offers rich material about how Turkish diplomats and
semi-official spokesmen of Turkish policies, while carrying out their
lobbying activities, threatened both Israel and the US by indicating
that if the Jewish lobby failed to prevent Armenian initiatives
abroad, Turkey might not be able to guarantee the security of Turkish
Jews."
DH: That's a positive reaction I'm sure, but I also wonder if you are
not worried by issues such as the assassination of Hrant Dink and the
harassment of journalists and writers, such as Orhan Pamuk. Do you
believe that your research puts you in any personal danger?
RB: No, but regardless, it is something I feel I have to do.
DH: Mr. Bali, thank you for your time and for answering these questions.
Rifat Bali was on a book tour for Model Citizens beginning October 14,
2013, visiting New York, Boston, Montreal and Toronto. For details
about the book tour please visit www.zoryaninstitute.org/news.html
http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2013-12-29-how-armenian-genocide-impacts-turkey-s-jewish-community
Published: Sunday December 29, 2013
Rifat Bali. Image via tundratabloids.com.
Related Articles
Rifat Bali examines fate of Turkish Jews and impact on Armenian
Genocide recognition
TORONTO - Mr. Rifat Bali, a noted scholar and author of Model Citizens
of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period, deals
with the treatment of the Jewish community in Turkey since 1950.
His studies deal also with the period 1923-1949, an era that includes
the Varlik Vergisi (wealth tax law, November 1942), a law which ruined
many Jewish families financially. Balidetails the process by which the
Jewish community strived to accommodate the demands of state and
society to become "model citizens." Jews were pressured to speak
Turkish in public and Turkify their names. Yet, no matter how much
they strived, they were always subject to second-class rights,
intimidation, anti-Semitism, and violence.
Bali demonstrates that all the non-Muslim minorities in
Turkey-Armenians, Greeks and Jews-have faced similar challenges in
their relationship with the Turkish state and society. Greeks, for
example, underwent a terrible pogrom in 1955. They all had to deal
with issues of maintaining their language, religion, culture and
identity in a society that demands total conformity, but they
responded to the challenges in different ways. Thus, the book gives
insight into the challenges of all minorities in Turkey today.
The opportunity arose for the Jewish community to become "useful" to
the state by using their influence with Israel and the Jewish
political lobby in the US to advance Turkish interests. In particular,
they worked against Armenian and Greek interests in Washington,
particularly to thwart efforts at gaining recognition of the Armenian
Genocide in the US.
The Zoryan Institute's interest in Bali's work arose for three
reasons. First, its relevance to the Jewish community in Turkey and
the US, as the Turkish State denial of the Armenian Genocide has been
an important element in Turkish-Jewish and Turkish-Israeli relations.
It is also an important obstacle in relations between Armenia and
Israel. Even though many Jewish scholars affirm the Armenian Genocide,
the official position of the State of Israel is that Armenians did not
experience anything comparable to the Holocaust, and therefore it is
not a genocide.
Second, the human rights aspects of the minorities in Turkey,
particularly the treatment of the Jewish community, both before and
after their instrumentalization by the Turkish State in its denial of
the Armenian Genocide, as Zoryan is a human rights organization with
educational and publication programs in that area.
Third, to show a Diaspora could be used by a host state as an
instrument of its foreign policy, as Zoryan is also devoted to the
study of Diaspora and Diaspora-Homeland relations.
Rifat N. Bali is a graduate of the distinguished École Pratique des
Hautes Études at the Sorbonne in Paris. Since 1996, he has been an
independent scholar specializing in the history of Turkish Jewry and
is an associate member of the Alberto-Benveniste Centre for Sephardic
Studies and the Sociocultural History of the Jews in Paris. Has
written or edited 28 books in English, French and Turkish, dealing
primarily with Jewish history and society within the Republic of
Turkey. He has also written numerous articles in newspapers and
scholarly journals, and contributed chapters to scholarly collections
and encyclopedias. He is the winner of the Alberto Benveniste Research
Award (Paris) for 2009 for his publications on Turkish Jewry and of
the Yunus Nadi award (Istanbul) in 2005 and 2008 for original research
in the social sciences.
One may view Bali's lecture in Toronto at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3V47fYmqQo
Interview with Rifat N. Bali, author of Model Citizens of the State:
The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period (Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2012)
In anticipation of his upcoming North American book tour, Rifat N.
Bali, born in 1948 in Istanbul, an independent scholar specializing in
the history of Turkish Jews and an associate member of the
Alberto-Benveniste Center for Sephardic Studies and the Sociocultural
History of the Jews (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes/CNRS/Université
Paris-Sorbonne) allowed us to ask him some questions regarding his
book, his research, and his motivations. Bali is the winner of the
Alberto Benveniste Research Award for 2009 for his publications on
Turkish Jewry. The interview was conducted via email by Deborah Hay,
Outreach Coordinator at the Zoryan Institute in Toronto, Canada and
concluded on Oct. 3, 2013.
DH: Today I'm, very lucky to be interviewing Rifat N. Bali, author of
Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party
Period. My first question to you is can you tell us a little bit about
what is this book covers?
RB: Very briefly, the book provides an exposé of the treatment of the
Jewish community in Turkey from 1950 to the present, their fight
against anti-Semitism, the struggle for their constitutional rights,
and the attitude of the Turkish state and society towards these
problems.
DH: What was your motivation to do research in this field and to write
this book?
RB: There are a number of factors which triggered my starting to
research the history of the Jews in the Turkish Republic. They can all
be summed up in the fact that I was tired of listening to and reading
the rosy narrative that was repeated over and over by the leaders of
the Turkish Jewish community, as well as by Turkish intellectuals,
politicians and historians. The same narrative was also predominant
outside Turkey. I wanted to discover what was really behind this
rhetoric.H: What was the reaction of the Jewish community in Turkey
towards the changes that you describe in your book, brought on by
Ataturk? Did those changes in policy make life easier for Jews in
Turkey, or harder?
RB: After the War for Independence, the founders of the fledgling
republic declared themselves prepared to accept the country's
remaining non-Muslims as full Turkish citizens, provided that they
adopted the Turkish language, Turkish culture, and the principle of
"Turkishness." A list of ten steps specified what this entailed. It
proved to be very difficult for the minority communities Istanbul to
fit into the mold of the "model" Turkish citizen as defined by Kemal
Ataturk, and regardless of the official government policy toward the
Jewish community, the anti-Semitic attitudes of the majority Muslim
population in Turkish society were ever present.
DH: Were there any significant global events that impacted the life of
Jews in Turkey?
RB: There were three pivotal events outside of Turkey that did just
that: various military clashes and wars between Israel, its neighbours
and the Palestinian organizations which resulted in bursts of
anti-Semitism in Turkey, the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the
movement for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. The
Turkish government in the 1970s reversed its policy of prohibiting
minorities' links to outside organizations by encouraging the Jews of
Turkey to connect with American Jewish organizations, once it realized
the importance of American Jewish political lobby groups. Since then,
Turkey has adopted a policy of using the American Jewish lobby against
the Greek lobby to lift the Cyprus related arms embargo, and against
the Armenian lobby to further its genocide denial policies. There
were, and are, efforts to distance the American Jewish community from
the Armenian community by propagandizing that the Armenian Genocide is
a non-truth, or that whatever may have happened in 1915 it cannot be
compared to the Jewish Holocaust and therefore cannot be called
genocide, and that Turks have been very tolerant and friendly to Jews
since their expulsion from Spain in 1492.
DH: Have those efforts been successful? Has the American Jewish lobby
really been influenced by the Turkish government to serve the
interests of Turkey?
RB: Yes, those efforts have been successful so far. With this new
policy, successive Turkish governments have obtained the cooperation
of Turkish Jews to convince the American Jewish organizations to
actively support pro-Turkish measures, including fighting against
Armenian Genocide resolutions in the US Congress, excluding the
Armenian Genocide from the Holocaust Museums in Washington and Los
Angeles, prohibiting papers on the Armenian Genocide from being
presented at Israeli Holocaust conferences, prohibiting the showing of
Armenian Genocide related movies in US and Israel, et cetera.
DH: Could you explain how those Turkish governments have managed to
accomplish this?
RB: Some of the tactics they have used include financial assistance,
economic concessions and other privileges, but also veiled threats
that lack of cooperation by the Jewish organizations, the State of
Israel, or Turkish-Jewish leaders would jeopardize the safety and
economic well-being of the Jews in Turkey.
DH: Is the experience of the Jewish community's experience in Turkey unique?
RB: All the non-Muslim minorities in Turkey-Armenians, Greeks and
Jews-have faced similar challenges in their relationship with the
state and society. They all had to deal with issues of maintaining
their language, religion, culture and identity in a society that
demands total conformity, but they have responded to the challenges in
different ways.
DH: What do you hope to achieve through your research and through the
publication of this book?
RB: I hope that at last the English-speaking public will have the
opportunity to read the "real" story of Turkish-Jewish relations,
instead of an embellished one. I do not believe that the book will
have any sort of negative impact on Israeli-Turkish and/or
Turkish-Jewish relations. Real politics and strategic concerns always
dominate and even embellish past history.
DH: What do you see as the future for minorities in Turkey?
RB: I believe that they will be used more and more as a cosmetic
element for giving the impression that Turkey is a multicultural
country where non-Muslims live peacefully.
DH: Why did you choose to bring this book to the Zoryan Institute, for
work on the publication and now for hosting the international book
tour of Model Citizens?
RB: This book serves as a valuable case study of how Realpolitik in
domestic politics and foreign relations distorts the truth and how
coercion by the powerful contributes to the violation of collective
human rights. It will be of interest to academics and students of
non-Muslim minorities in Turkey, political lobbyists in America,
Israeli policy-makers, as well as to the Jewish, Greek and Armenian
communities around the world. Because the mission of the Zoryan
Institute is to serve the cause of scholarship and to raise public
awareness relating to issues of universal human rights, genocide, and
diaspora-homeland relations, this book is really a perfect fit.
DH: What has been the reaction to this book in Turkey?
RB: In a review of the Turkish edition, Turkish journalist and human
rights activist Ay?e Gunaysu described the book as "groundbreaking ...
unearthing facts and first-hand accounts that unmistakably illustrate
how the Turkish establishment blackmailed the leaders of the Jewish
community-and through them Jewish organizations in the United
States-to secure their support of the Turkish position against the
Armenians' campaign for genocide recognition." Gunaysu noted that,
"The book also offers rich material about how Turkish diplomats and
semi-official spokesmen of Turkish policies, while carrying out their
lobbying activities, threatened both Israel and the US by indicating
that if the Jewish lobby failed to prevent Armenian initiatives
abroad, Turkey might not be able to guarantee the security of Turkish
Jews."
DH: That's a positive reaction I'm sure, but I also wonder if you are
not worried by issues such as the assassination of Hrant Dink and the
harassment of journalists and writers, such as Orhan Pamuk. Do you
believe that your research puts you in any personal danger?
RB: No, but regardless, it is something I feel I have to do.
DH: Mr. Bali, thank you for your time and for answering these questions.
Rifat Bali was on a book tour for Model Citizens beginning October 14,
2013, visiting New York, Boston, Montreal and Toronto. For details
about the book tour please visit www.zoryaninstitute.org/news.html