Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
222
result(s) for
"Baer, Marc"
Sort by:
The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism
For over two centuries the Dönme lived an open secret in Ottoman Salonika following their conversion from Judaism to Islam in the wake of the conversion of the messianic rabbi Shabbatai Tzevi in 1666. Neither the category “Jewish” nor “Muslim” expresses their religious identity. Unlike Jews, the Dönme ostensibly followed the requirements of Islam, including fasting at Ramadan and praying in mosques, one of which they built. Unlike Muslims, the Dönme maintained a belief that Shabbatai Tzevi was the messiah, practiced kabbalistic rituals, and recited prayers in Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. According to the descendants of Dönme in Istanbul, the Dönme in Salonika saw themselves as a community apart; fulfilling the commandments of Shabbatai Tzevi caused Dönme to only marry among themselves, avoid relations with Jews, maintain their separate identity guided by detailed genealogies, and bury their dead in distinct cemeteries. (Dönmeler 1919:15; Galanté 1935:67; and Stavroulakis 1993).
Journal Article
Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide
What has compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of anti-Semitism in Turkey? The dominant historical narrative is that Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire, and then later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us to accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians. In this article, the author confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, the author sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.
Journal Article
Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus
From 1923 to 1936, Dr Hugo Marcus (1880-1966) was among the leading German Muslims in Berlin. The son of a Jewish industrialist, and a homosexual, Marcus studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century. To support his family after financial reverses caused by World War I, he tutored foreign Muslim doctoral students in German. This led to his conversion to Islam, and for a dozen years, under the adopted name Hamid, he was the most important German in Berlin's mosque community. Nevertheless, he did not terminate his membership in the Jewish community, nor his ties to friends in the homosexual rights movement. Here, Baer details Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim-Jewish relations.
Journal Article
An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic
The main focal point in Ottoman and Turkish antisemitism is the figure of the Dönme—the descendants of Jews who converted to Islam along with their messiah Shabbatai Tzevi. The focus on the Dönme arises from the perception of the Salonikan-based Young Turks as a cabal of Dönme, or secret Jews. It was immediately in the wake of the 1908 constitutional revolution—which culminated in the dethronement of Abdülhamid II, and ultimately led to the construction of the secular Turkish republic—that antisemitic conspiracy theories centering on the Dönme were first voiced. These arguments were expanded after 1923 to claim that the man who abolished the caliphate and established the secular state, the Salonikan Atatürk, was a Dönme. Turkish antisemitism was fed by Nazism and Turkish anti-Zionism from the mid 1920s to 1945, and was more openly articulated after the creation of Israel, but it remained a retelling of the events of 1908. From 1908 to today, the Dönme character—a secret Jew hiding in the guise of the nation’s leader who surreptitiously aims to destroy Turkey on behalf of world Jewry—has been the stock figure in anti-government conspiracy theories promoted by Islamists dispossessed of their authority, extreme rightists, and secularists divested of their power. Antisemitic conspiracy theories gain traction among all elements of Turkish society based on the racist assumption that only a Turkish Muslim can have Turkey’s interests at heart, while a Jew—here the false convert, the secret Jew Dönme—can only serve foreign interests at odds with those of the Turks.
Journal Article
Mistaken for Jews: Turkish PhD Students in Nazi Germany
The history and memory of “Turks” in Germany during World War II is a “blind spot” in Turkish-German studies. What still needs to be examined are nonarchival Turkish texts and contexts of that era, especially autobiographical accounts, written in Turkish and German, which complicate our understanding of Turkish, German, and Jewish entanglements, encounters, and exchanges. This article fills this gap by presenting the accounts of citizens of the Turkish Republic who earned PhDs in Nazi Germany and were eyewitnesses to the antisemitic persecution of that era, especially the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9, 1938, which led them to fear being mistaken for Jews.
Journal Article
Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Germany and the Shoah
In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
Journal Article
Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and “The Message of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to Europe”
The article explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent German converts to Islam in Weimar Germany, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880–1966). Marcus's understanding of Islam is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. It is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. His ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. While many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This article engages with German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, Marcus's German-Islamic synthesis.
Journal Article
