Mixing Musics by Jackson Maureen;

Author:Jackson, Maureen; [Jackson, Maureen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Sinagog Maftirim Korosu in concert at the Büyükada Turing Kültür Evi in the Third Annual Princes Islands International Festival, July 16, 2006. Called Birlikte Yaşam (Life Together), the concert is distinct from the annual Birlikte Yaşamak (Living Together) concerts after Conquest Day, but includes similar programmatic content. Photo by author.

Funded by the Greater Istanbul Municipality and communally supported by the chief rabbinate, the Birlikte Yaşamak concerts and related performances thus stage an Ottoman music world in which contemporary Islamist and Jewish versions of Turkish history intersect. The nationalization of an Islamic-Ottoman heritage, through music, locates the nation’s foundations in a pre-republican golden age, retrograding Turkish national history back from 1923 to 1453 and raising up alternative founders and national heroes to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, specifically Mehmet the Conqueror.54 The benevolence of “Turkish Islam” and an Ottoman administration of millets infuse this historical portrait with multiethnic coexistence, completing a usable past for a range of Islamist party interests in the present.55 Arguably, such contemporary cultural productions are the logical outcome of two five-hundred-year celebrations of historical origins, the Conquest Day of 1953, which recently resurfaced to challenge secularist republican national history, and, in 1992, the commemoration of the Sephardic expulsion from Spain, which narrated a favorable history of Jews in Ottoman and Turkish lands, in contrast to contemporary Armenian and Greek claims. Although official and individual motivations may diverge in complex ways, both historiographies meet onstage to fold an Ottoman music world into officially sanctioned Islamist or Jewish presentations of Turkish history. Both historical narratives strategically elide the republican period for distinctive reasons: one to trace national roots to a presumably pre-secular imperial and religious past, the other to emphasize Jewish culture in the Ottoman period over twentieth-century adversities to represent and motivate integration in the present.

If we return to the nonpublic performances of Maftirim music at Şişli synagogue, how can we understand these two groups, the broader community and Turkish society, in relation to each other? Whereas one appears embedded in an active liturgical life largely hidden from public view, the other performs both inside and outside of the synagogue, making contact with non-Jewish audiences and enabling Islamic-Ottoman heritage productions. The apparent tension between a hidden living community and a harmonious public face, as reflected in these two groups, correlates with other recent ethnographic scholarship on Turkish Jewry focusing alternatively on citizenship and nonmusical productions. For example, research on Turkish Jewish views on citizenship has posited a consistent tension between “invisibility” and “loyalty,” that is, a belief that cultural survival depended on repressing Jewish cultural or religious difference, while maintaining a self-representation of nonthreatening loyalty to the Turkish nation.56 Likewise, a semiotic study of Turkish Jewish cultural negotiation probed the seeming contradictions between community discourses of threat, fear, and security needs following the 1986 Neve Şalom attack, and official declarations of five centuries of Turkish tolerance of Jews. The celebration of a publicly absent tolerance is prescriptive rather than descriptive, “[casting] not a backward glance but instead a wishful eye toward the future and a secure legacy for Turkish Jewry.

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