Ancient presence

Publish date 21-05-2022

by Claudio Monge

In spite of the fact that, in the last twenty years, Turkey has decisively supported the Palestinian cause in the interminable Middle-Eastern conflict, the Republic born on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, cannot ignore the role of the Jewish community in its own history, especially cultural and economic.
At the end of December 2021, although without giving it particular media emphasis, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hosted a delegation of rabbis for the first summit of the alliance of rabbis of Islamic states at the presidential palace in Ankara. Most of the delegates came from Muslim-majority countries such as Kazakhstan, Iran, Albania and the United Arab Emirates. In his speech, the Turkish president referred to the importance of Turkish-Israeli relations and the common fight against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the world.

He then evoked the expulsion of Sephardi Jews from Spain in 1492, at the height of the Reconquista, underlining how the spirit that allowed the Ottomans to embrace the Jews then (reigning Sultan Bayezid II) is still alive today. Net of a message that is pragmatically political and propaganda (it seems out of place to see openings in the sense of an "interreligious dialogue"), it is important to underline how the date of 1492 is the key to a historical discourse that considers the arrival of Sephardi Jews in Ottoman lands, as the beginning of a special era of coexistence and tolerance between Muslims and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.

Although this idea has had a great influence on the academic and popular perceptions of Jewish history in Turkey, it has the fault of ignoring that 1492 does not actually mark the beginning of coexistence between Muslim Turks and Jews in Anatolia.
Reducing the Jewish presence to the Sephardi erases the memory of the Romani communities (Jews of the Greek language of Rome and then of the Byzantine Empire, finally assimilated by the Sephardi community), Karaïtes, Ashkenazi, neo-Aramaic and Arabic-speaking pre-existing to the Ottoman conquests.

Secondly, it is a perspective that makes Jews, like all other Islamic and non-Islamic minorities, perpetual guests, who cannot aspire to full citizenship, but at most hope to be tolerated, expressing eternal gratitude to those who kindly have them. welcomed. Archaeological discoveries, which continue to this day, show how the Jews arrived in Anatolia even between the sixth century. and 133 BC, when the Romans arrived in these lands. Their first settlements were in Phrygia and Lydia and in Greek cities in western Anatolia. In Priene, Sardi, Mileto and Andriache (in the vicinity of Demre and Mira), several vestiges of the ancient Jewish communities have been found, with inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew and engravings of menorahs. Precisely in reference to these archaeological finds, last November, for the first time in its history, the Jewish Museum of Turkey in Istanbul organized a temporary exhibition entitled: Jewish identity engraved in stone and dedicated to the ancient synagogues of Anatolia, evidently prior to the mythical date of 1492.

The effort is precisely to slowly broaden the historical perspective on the presence of Jews, at the heart of a wealth of cultures and belonging that has always characterized the history of these extraordinary crossroads of antiquity. This without renouncing to tell, the epic, especially Istanbuliot, of the Sephardic Jews who came from Spain, who still speak Ladin today and who certainly exceed twenty thousand units, despite being massively emigrated also to Israel, especially in the years of the Second World War and of Nazi madness.


Claudio Monge
NP February 2022

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