The place of Jews was highly ambiguous in the newly founded Turkish Republic: In 1928 an assimilationist campaign was launched against Turkish Jews, while only a few years later, in 1933, German scholars—many of them Jewish—were taken in so as to help Europeanize the nation. Turkish authorities regarded the emigrants as representatives of European civilization and appointed scholars like Erich Auerbach to prestigious academic positions that were vital for redefining the humanities in Turkey. This article explores the country's twofold assimilationist policies. On the one hand, Turkey required of its citizens—regardless of ethnic or religious origins—that they conform to a unified Turkish culture; on the other hand, an equally assimilationist modernization project was designed to achieve cultural recognition from the heart of Europe. By linking historical and contemporary discourses, this article shows how tropes of Jewishness have played—and continue to play—a critical role in the conception of Turkish nationhood. The status of Erich Auerbach, Chair of the Faculty for Western Languages and Literatures at İstanbul University from 1936 to 1947, is central to this investigation into the place of Turkish and German Jews in modern Turkey.

The first line of the United States Marine Corps anthem, “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli,” refers to one of the earliest encounters between the United States and the Ottoman Empire, when the American navy attempted to suppress “pirating” along the northern coast of Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Field 1969, pp. 27-67). This ritualization of animosity, framing the American image of the Ottoman Empire, has elements carried over from Europe, in which Muslims in general, and the Turks in particular, are drawn as “cruel, fanatical, lustful and dirty” (Wheatcroft 1993, p. 231). According to the European vision, “[the Turks] were, from the first black day they entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity” (Gladstone 1876). American images mirrored this European perception. For example, as the United States entered World War I in 1917, Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, presented the war effort not just as aimed at the defeat of Germany, but as a crusade for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire:

[The Ottoman Turks] have been the pest and the curse of Europe, the source of innumerable wars, the executioners in countless massacres… Such a… government as this is a curse to modern civilization. Like a pestilence it breathes forth contagion upon the innocent air (USC 1917, vol. LVI, p. 64).

An overview of general elections and the party system from the beginning of multi-party politics in Turkey would indicate a proclivity towards an increasing number of major parties coupled with fragmentation of the party system. The predominant party system of the 1950s favored stability over representativeness (see Table 1). The 1961 Constitution established new electoral rules and a liberal political regime, which provided for more opportunity for representativeness. The 1965 and 1969 elections produced party governments, with a proportional representation formula that wasted almost no votes; even those parties with the smallest number of followers won some seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) (see Table 1). For a while in the 1960s Turkey therefore appeared to have discovered the optimal ground of converging stable governments with consummate representativeness. The party governments of the 1960s, however, gave way to the unstable coalition governments of the 1970s, which coincided with a wave of terror and political instability. Coalition governments came to be equated with political instability and terror in the minds of not only the masses, but also the most powerful political forces in the country.

Students of Eastern European affairs have pointed out that this part of the world shares in considerable measure the historical mode of thinking about itself; its self-perception is, in part at least, provided by its historical awareness and a tradition of historiography, that is, the past as organized and interpreted by the historian (Roberts, 1970). Unlike other societies, in which the historical component of self-identification is not at all prominent, its place being taken either by a set mythology or by all-embracing religious or legal norms, Eastern European societies have developed a historiographical tradition. It can truly be said that they have been obsessively preoccupied by history and the main reason for this obsession is that for over four hundred years these societies were an integral part of the Ottoman empire.

The Turkish novel became a national chronotope proper with the founding of the Republic in 1923 and the emergent conception of the national geography following the War of Independence (1919-1922). This was the Anatolian territory, with Ankara as the new capital of the nation instead of İstanbul which had been the Ottoman Empire's center for almost five centuries. Anatolia became the motherland on which the national consciousness of the new nation would be inscribed. In the novels of the republican era, Anatolian iconography and mythography illustrate how this setting became a persistent element of narrative structure as a significant topos in both senses of the word: as place and theme. An inquiry into the permutations of the theme of Anatolia since the War of Independence will reveal the changing attitudes and ideas related to Turkish nationalism and its most outstanding component, the cult of the father personified by Atatürk. This essay, however, does not only aim at a survey of an ideology's history via literature; it also investigates the Anatolian iconography and mythography, as they figure in the Turkish novel of the republican era, and touches upon the various narrative strategies that major Turkish novelists have employed in their search for the right form for this important content, the right form to either reinforce or undermine a sacred story.

Historiography generally has excluded the “oriental” empires from the competition for world economic power. The Chinese sailed to Africa in the early fifteenth century. Then one day the ships “just stopped coming.” The Mongols “swept” across the steppes for the love of conquest, pastures, space. The Ottoman armies marched to Yemen, Tabriz, Vienna. Yet this marching was somehow instinctual, a reaction of blood, training, temperament. One might suppose that this “oriental” failure to be an economic contender resulted from a state of mind rather than an act of will, a naiveté or an intellectual conceit rather than a lack of the power to compete. Thus, while Eurocentric historiography has not disarmed the Ottomans, it has mentally incapacitated them, thereby dispensing with the need to evaluate economies of conquest and ignoring competition with European states for markets rather than territory.

On 6 March 1995 the EU-Turkey Association Council took a decision regarding the inauguration of a customs union between the EU and Turkey, following the pattern set out in the Ankara Agreement of 1963 and the Additional Protocol of 1970. The Council's decision received the European Parliament's assent on 13 December 1995, enabling it to enter into force on 1 January 1996. Following the Association Council's customs union decision, the Turkish government has launched a series of democratizing and liberalizing reforms. It is apparent that the tactical goal of the Turkish government for initiating the reforms has been to persuade the European Parliament to give its consent to the Association Council's customs union decision. The government's strategic goal, on the other hand, has been to fulfill the necessary political conditions, such as those formulated in the June 1993 Copenhagen meeting of the European Council, of Turkey's qualification for full membership in the EU.

The gist of what I want to say by way of introduction was suggested to me during my recent visit to Hong Kong and China. Reading about the events which led up to the establishment of the British presence on the South China coast in the 1830s and 1840s, I was struck, once again, by two things. The first is the way in which the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Convention was so obviously part of a world-wide movement of European self-assertion, spearheaded by a coalition of merchants, military men and politicians. The second concerns the essentially dramatic nature of the confrontation between European might and the declining power of the states and empires whose commercial practices it sought to control—the kind of drama which doesn't always get properly represented in history textbooks, let alone works of political economy.