Tablet Magazine
Jan 6 2014
In Trouble, Turkey’s Leader Blames Israel’Raising Tension for His
Country’s Jews
Many blame Recep Tayyip Erdogan for rising anti-Semitism, but the
legacy of his conspiracy-mongering may outlast his rule
By Jenna Krajeski|January 6, 2014 12:00 AM
One recent sunny Shabbat morning just after services, the congregation
of Istanbul’s Italian Synagogue, in the city’s Galata district, sat
down at long tables for breakfast. Plates laden with cheese, boiled
eggs, and savory Turkish pastries called poÄ?aça were passed around to
the hungry members, whose numbers totaled about 38, most of them men.
Carafes full of strong tea offered warmth in the drafty room, but some
who were feeling festive drained a bottle of raki, an aniseed liquor
with an alcohol content slightly higher than most whiskeys.
The conversation, between the tea drinkers and raki drinkers alike,
quickly turned to politics. A few days earlier, high-ranking
businessmen with ties to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
and his Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP’including the
sons of a few of Erdogan’s Cabinet ministers’had been arrested on
charges of corruption, a scandal that has prompted protests and calls
for Erdogan’s resignation. Erdogan responded by blaming `international
groups”by implication, Israel’for conspiring to unravel the Turkish
state from within.
Erdogan has long been aggressively critical of Israel, and his
rhetoric includes some show-stoppers. In 2009, at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, he told Israel’s president Shimon Peres, `When it
comes to killing, you know well how to kill”and then walked off the
stage. The 2010 Israeli commando raid on the Mavi Marmara `Gaza
flotilla’ ship, in which nine activists were killed, further fractured
the relationship; only last year, and only under the personal
ministrations of President Barack Obama, did the conversation become
something close to constructive. When protests against Erdogan’s
government spread from Istanbul’s Gezi Park throughout Turkey in the
summer of 2013, Deputy Prime Minister BeÅ?ir Atalay blamed the `Jewish
diaspora,’ members of which were `jealous of Turkey’s growth,’
although he quickly retracted the statements.
The breakfasters at the Italian Synagogue were transfixed, and
exasperated. A man sitting to my left rolled his eyes. `We have a
problem,’ he told me, `called Recep Tayyip Erdogan.’ Certainly
Erdogan’s repeated decision to scapegoat Israel and the idea of Jewish
power’whether out of genuine conviction or simple political
expediency’increases the pressure on individual Jews by erasing the
line between the personal and the political. For at least the past
decade, the narrative around Turkey’s Jewish population has been that
they are leaving, often because of political or social alienation
owing to Erdogan’s rhetoric against Israel. It’s become a familiar
headline which, for the congregants wiping poÄ?aça crumbs from their
laps and plotting their ferry rides home, seems like a
less-than-subtle push out the door.
Of course, not all of Turkey’s Jews plan on leaving, and many emigrate
for reasons having nothing to do with politics or religion. But those
who stay see ties between a rise in casual anti-Semitism and Erdogan’s
habit of conspiracy-mongering, and they worry that the longer Erdogan
remains in power, the more deeply ingrained and reflexive the impulse
among Turks to blame Jews for the country’s problems will become’even
after Erdogan leaves the stage. `I’ve heard things like when someone
owes a Jewish person money,’ a young Jewish artist, Sibel Horada, told
me, `they give them half and say, `Yeah, I donated the rest to Gaza.’
‘
***
The total population of Jews living in Turkey today is reported
anywhere from 17,400 to 22,000’a steep drop from the hundreds of
thousands who lived in the region under the Ottoman Empire, which
included Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain. (The Jewish Museum in
Istanbul devotes much of its exhibition space to the celebration of
this period of tolerance.) The vast majority of those who remain live
in Istanbul. Izmir, a coastal city to the south, is home to a couple
thousand, and in Antakya, a city on the border with Syria, the number
of Jewish families is barely in the double digits.
When the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, a campaign to carve a
national Turkish identity from the remains of the vast Ottoman Empire
clashed with the existence of minorities. Compared to Armenians and
Greeks’who were intensely persecuted, pushed from the country, and
killed’the emigration of the Jewish population was more gradual. `In
the Turkish Republic they were a `good minority,” Horada told me. But
pogroms whose primary targets were the Greeks and Armenians had an
impact on the Jewish population as well, and a `wealth tax’ in
1942’ostensibly to fill war coffers but seen by critics as an attempt
to reclaim economic power from minorities’resulted in the emigration
of thousands of Jews to Palestine. After Israel was established,
nearly half of Turkey’s remaining Jews left.
`The best way for a Jew today in Turkey is to keep quiet and silent
and a bit invisible,’ Ishak Alaton, an octogenarian businessman, told
me when we met in his spacious office overlooking the Bosporus bridge.
Alaton is charismatic and outspoken’a man set free by success to do as
he pleases. `I have passed age 80, and my friends tell me that after
80 they don’t put you in jail,’ he told me, both joking and not.
Alaton is close to Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic scholar living in
self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania who has a deep and far-reaching
influence in Turkey. Gülen and Erdogan were once allies, working
together to challenge state secularism and the Turkish army, but as
their influence increased they grew apart. The corruption scandal is
widely seen as the eruption of this mostly behind-the-scenes conflict.
Gülen has himself been called anti-Semitic, but Alaton was quick to
come to his friend’s defense. `Gülen is not anti-Semitic,’ he told me.
`He’s accused of being anti-Semitic because of a few sentences he
uttered 30 years ago.’ Now, Alaton insisted, he sees no trace of bias
in his friend. `He started knowing the Jews,’ Alaton went on, `and he
came to the conclusion that these are not bad people.’
The day before we met, Alaton delivered the opening speech at a
conference on Jews in Turkey at Kadir Has University in which he
criticized the current government led by Benjamin Netanyahu for its
treatment of the Palestinians and stressed that the citizens of Turkey
and Israel would be fine partners, much better than their leaders. He
was annoyed at some of the coverage from the conservative Turkish
press, which was negative. `They just want to be nasty,’ he said.
`There is a latent anti-Semitism.’ But he was happy about the
conference itself, which was the first of its kind. He saw it as a
chance to set the record straight about Jews in Turkey and reclaim the
narrative from the state.
Alaton was adamant that the only reason there is anti-Semitism in
Turkey is lack of information. Before the AKP came to power in 2002,
Alaton told me, a survey was taken of Turkish society, in which 76
percent of those asked whether they would like to have a Jewish
neighbor answered `no,’ but 85 percent admitted to never having had a
close relationship with a Jew. Alaton, who cited the statistics from
memory, concluded, `Without knowing a Jew you are prone to say, no I
don’t want a Jewish neighbor.’
Alaton has no false nostalgia for a more tolerant and moderate past.
He was 14 years old in 1942 when the MV Struma, a ship carrying
hundreds of Jewish refugees from Romania bound for Palestine, broke
down in the Bosporus. `Every evening I transported sacks of bread to
the Jews on the ship,’ he told me. `They would shout at us and cry and
beg and nothing would happen because the police wouldn’t let them off
the ship.’ After spending over two months motionless in view of
Istanbul’s waterfront, the boat was dragged from the Bosporus into the
Black Sea where, hours later, it was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine.
The incident shook Turkey’s Jewish population, and it still informs
Alaton’s perception of his place in society. `A barge without sails
and without an engine is a coffin,’ Alaton told me.
Eleven years ago the sole survivor of the Struma, David Stoliar,
traveled to Istanbul to make a 45-minute television documentary about
the incident. The film was made, in spite of strong objections from
the government, according to Alaton. `They were worried it would be
another Midnight Express,’ Alaton told me, referring to the 1978 movie
about an American in a Turkish prison. `The government wanted to
muzzle it all the way.’
More recently, Alaton was involved in an exhibition, currently touring
Turkish cities, called Never Again!, which chronicles historical
apologies, such as Bill Clinton’s for the American government’s
inaction during the Rwandan genocide and Tony Blair’s decision to
commission a new inquiry decades after the Bloody Sunday massacre in
Northern Ireland. The cover photo on the accompanying book is of West
German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling in front of the Warsaw Ghetto
monument.
`There has always been this policy of negation, of hiding, of putting
it under the carpet,’ Alaton told me. In Turkey, he went on, `this has
been the policy for the past hundred years.’ The exhibition, he said,
is a statement about the revisionist history that has been the fuel of
Turkish nationalism and anti-Semitism. `We are giving an indirect
message to the Turkish people,’ Alaton said. `People will see how the
world is coming to terms for the sins of the past. Meaning, you have
to do the same.’
***
I met Horada, the artist, in a café near the Galata Tower, a medieval
landmark that dominates the neighborhood. Horada’s father is prominent
in the Jewish community, and I was counting on her to help me gain
entry to one of the city’s synagogues. In 2003 two of the city’s
synagogues were bombed, and since then security has been especially
tight. After our coffee we walked by Neve Shalom, where one of the
bombs went off. The synagogue, located on a narrow bustling street, is
a subtle fortress of back entrances and security cameras. We couldn’t
get in.
Horada is of a different generation than Alaton, but they nevertheless
share both a common sense of insecurity and perseverance as Jews in
Turkey. Where Alaton has gone to great lengths to promote public
programming and cultivate relationships with influential figures like
Gulen, Horada has created a less conspicuous but no less rooted life
in Turkey. After attending university in the United States, she
returned to Istanbul to live and base her career. She is married to a
Turkish Jew. But she, like Alaton, accepts that she may have to leave
Turkey again one day. What little faith she had in Erdogan’built on
some progressive policies’faded during the Gezi Park protests and has
been further eroded by the corruption scandal. `Always have a back-up
plan,’ Horada told me.
But Horada was quick to point out that the atmosphere in Turkey’the
tension reverberating from Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism and
now anxiety over the political instability’affects the whole country,
not only the Jewish minority. `Things are crazy here for everybody,’
she told me. `We never know who’s going to use what, when, how. And
that scares people.’
Horada attended the summer’s antigovernment demonstrations in Gezi
Park, and there she saw hope that Turkey could move beyond `identity
politics,’ in which otherness can be a threat. `The people in Gezi
were anti-racist,’ Sibel told me. She said she hopes that means they
recognize the hypocrisy in Erdogan’s anti-Israel rhetoric. `He says we
are siding with the people in Gaza,’ she said. `He says that to make
himself look moral and in the meantime he’s taking people’s homes
away.’
The next day, after breakfast, I followed Horada’s father, Michael,
into the Italian Synagogue office, where he and a visiting academic
pored over some record books. He piled heavy, dogeared volumes with
split spines in front of the scholar and ordered some tea. The books
were artifacts, their heft a reminder of how expansive the Jewish
population here once was, when the hilly streets of Galata were known
for their diversity and the synagogue entrance wasn’t capped with
guarded doors. They read the names of the dead in one book that
diagrammed the layout of an Istanbul cemetery. Another thick volume
was a log of foreign visitors to the synagogue, all written in
meticulous blue cursive.
`All Jews have a suitcase under their bed,’ Michael Horada told me,
and then laughed, thinking of a joke. `Do you know why Jews play the
violin?’ he asked me. `Because it’s easy to carry.’ Then, for good
measure, before I left: `Do you know why Jewish men always wear a hat?
Because they don’t know whether they’ll be coming or going.’
***
In late December, after more than a week of a thickening scandal
during which Erdogan held fast to the idea of conspirators out to
dismantle his government’an idea he continues to repeat, including in
his New Year’s message to the nation’protesters took to Istanbul’s
streets. `They are hoping to resurrect the spirit of Gezi,’ an
activist friend told me. The protests were not as big, but their
message was strong: If the walls around Erdogan were crumbling,
perhaps the protesters could help push them down. This time, rather
than helping him, Erdogan’s talk of `international conspiracies’
seemed to be hurting his cause, making him appear defensive,
irrational, and, perhaps, guilty. If Turks have grown weary of this
particular line of defense, some felt, it could mark a turning point
for Turkey’s Jews.
This point was not lost on the congregants at Galata’s Italian
Synagogue. When Michael Horada addressed them during my visit, it was
on the topic of retribution. Those who discriminated against Jews
would eventually be punished and not simply by divine forces, but
social, political, and economic failures as well. At the breakfast
table, the speech seemed to go over well. A few days into what would
prove to be a long and, for Erdogan, agonizing investigation into the
conduct of his inner circle the sermon’s underlying message’that
bullies get it in the end’hit close to home.
This story was reported with support from the Pulitzer Center on
Crisis Reporting.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/157689/istanbul-jews-erdogan-problem