Marc David Baer

Radical expression : political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790-1850

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The theatres of war : performance, politics, and society, 1793-1815

Based on new research, and informed by recent developments in literary and historical studies, The Theatres of War reveals the importance of the theatre in the shaping of response to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1793-1815). Gillian Russell explores the roles of the military and navy as both actors and audiences, and shows their performances to be crucial to their self-perception as actors fighting on behalf of an often distant domestic audience. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815 had profound consequences for British society, politics, and culture. In this, the first in-depth study of the cultural dimension of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Gillian Russell examines an important dimension of the experience of these wars - theatricality. Through this study, the theatre emerges as a place where battles were celebrated in the form of spectacular reenactments, and where the tensions of mobilization on an hitherto unprecedented scale were played out in the form of riots and disturbances. Members of the military and the navy were actively engaged in such shows, taking to the stage as actors in the theatres of Britain, in ships off Portsmouth, and in the garrisons and battlefields of continental Europe and the empire. A lively and original book, The Theatres of War is major contribution to the cultural history of late Georgian Britain.

Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul

This article provides a narrative of the rise and fall of two global cities, imperial Ottoman Salonica and nationalist Turkish Istanbul, as well as the experience of a marginal religious group known as the Dönme, descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who formed a distinctive group of Muslims in both cities, and the interrupted trajectories of indigenous globalization. It argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, indigenous religious groups with transregional connections created alternate nodes of long-since forgotten globalization in marginal spaces at the fringes of empire, but that nation-states that replaced empire limited their abilities by controlling the flow of finance and people, making their resources useless in provincialized global cities. This article thus explains why the globalizing economic and cosmopolitan cultural role of the Dönme should have a place in debates on the global city.

The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism

This chapter, based mainly on Donme writings and material provided by descendants of Donme, is the first to describe and analyze Donme attempts to come to terms with the conversion from a religious to a secular national identity in the period between the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and the first two decades of the Turkish nation-state. It explores how the Donme attempted to explain the groups past in the Ottoman Empire and their future in the Turkish republic. The chapter illustrates the inherent tension of creating a single, homogenizing, and secular national identity from a plural society that had been organized around religious identities. By investigating the conversion of the Donme to secular nationalism and the religious and racial hindrances they faced, the chapter contributes to the scholarly literature concerning identication, nationalism, and citizenship. Keywords: Donme; Ottoman Empire; Turkish Secular Nationalism

The GREAT FIRE OF 1660 AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH SPACE IN ISTANBUL

On 24 July 1660, a great conflagration broke out in Istanbul. An Ottoman writer conveys the horror of the event: “[t]housands of homes and households burned with fire. And in accordance with Gods eternal will, God changed the distinguishing marks of night and day by making the very dark night luminous with flames bearing sparks, and darkening the light-filled day with black smoke and soot.” The fire began in a store that sold straw products outside the appropriately named Firewood Gate ( Odun kapisi ) west of Eminonu, and it devastated densely crowded neighborhoods consisting of wooden homes. The strong winds of Istanbul caused the fire to spread violently in all directions, despite the efforts of the deputy grand vizier ( kaimmakam ) and others who attempted the impossible task of holding it back with hooks, axes, and water carriers. Sultan Mehmed IVs boon companion and chronicler, Abdi Pasa, notes that the fire marched across the city like an invading army: the flames “split into divisions, and every single division, by the decree of God, spread to a different district.” The fire spread north, west, and to Unkapani. According to Mehmed Halife, in Suleymaniye the spires of the four minarets of the great mosque burned like candles. The blaze reached Bayezid and then moved south and west to Davud Pasa, Kumkapi, and even as far west as Samatya. The flames did not spare the Hippodrome ( At Meydani ) in the east or Mahmud Pasa and the markets at the center of the peninsula, either. Abdi Pasa estimated that the fire reduced 280,000 households to ashes as the city burned for exactly forty-nine hours. Two-thirds of Istanbul was destroyed in the conflagration, and as many as 40,000 people lost their lives. Although fire was a frequent occurrence in 17th-century Istanbul, this was the worst the city had ever experienced. Thousands died in the plague that followed the fire as rats feasted on unburied corpses and spread disease. Because three months prior to this fire a conflagration had broken out in the heart of the district of Galata, across the Golden Horn from Eminonu, much of the city lay in ruins in the summer of 1660.

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 Turkeys 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 Donme (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 Donme, 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.

Tolerance and Conversion in the Ottoman Empire: A Conversation

Religious conversion has lately enjoyed a resurgence of scholarly interest. The topic is generating fascinating research across the social sciences and humanities, and it is well represented in recent issues of CSSH.1 Given our curatorial investment in this line of research, we were pleased to hear that the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award the Middle East Studies Associations prize for the best new monograph in the field was shared by two CSSH authors, Marc Baer (CSSH 46-4) and Ussama Makdisi (CSSH 42-1), for books that focus specifically on conversion. Baers study, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press, 2008), examines the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687), who brought new European territories under Ottoman rule, laid siege to Vienna, and, as a supporter of the Kadizadelis, a pietistic reform movement, encouraged the conversion of Christians and Jews (and Muslims) to an Islam purified of false teachings. Makdisi s book, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008), explores the attempts of American missionaries, beginning in 1822, to convert the Christians and Muslims of Greater

Paweł Maciejko. The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 376 pp.

disturb other readers, all will find ample compensation, and all of us are indebted to Professor Carlebach for making this superb contribution to historical scholarship. Among the many nuggets I will cherish for their insights into the motive for bookish activity and scholarship among the faithful is the citation of a text explaining why the initial word in calendar books, Z. iva (He commanded), is so ornately decorated. As Elisheva Carlebach explains, “the word emphasized the sense among the scribes that copying, calculating and preserving this [calendrical] knowledge fulfilled a mitzvah, a religious precept. It also illustrated the notion that the only way to fulfill the mitzvah of qiddush ha-h.odesh (sanctifying a new month), after the Jewish calendar had been set and publicized for all future time, was by learning how to construct the Jewish calendar and writing one’s own sefer evronot” (85).

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). Marcuss 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, Marcuss German-Islamic synthesis.

Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters. The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul . Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 244 pp., 3 maps.

Scholarly debates concerning cities in the Islamic world have focused on whether there actually is an Islamic city, and have often been framed by the paradigms of nationalism and modernization. Declaring at the outset that they do not believe there is a typical Islamic city, the authors of this volume attempt to redirect scholarly discussion of cities in the Islamic world by presenting narratives of the socio-economic developments of early modern Ottoman Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. They argue that the history of each city must be understood according to its internal dynamics. In so doing they aim to integrate Ottoman urban history into the study of world history and global cities, and demonstrate how fruitful comparative studies are for the field of Ottoman studies.