Jewish Life in Twenty-First-Century Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance

THREE. The Limits of Cosmopolitanism

Throughout my fieldwork research, my Turkish Jewish friends advised me to follow their example and erase my own Jewishness from the public sphere, citing a list of “don’ts” that sometimes seemed endless: don’t nail your mezuzah to the outside of the doorframe, don’t wear a Jewish star necklace, and, just in case, don’t tell your landlord you are Jewish. I constantly confronted the seemingly ironic claim Turkish Jews make of feeling at home in a country where Jewish difference is carefully maintained in the private domain, while public space is seen as a universal sphere in which difference must be erased. This chapter describes how the Turkish Jewish community deals with these tensions by maintaining its appearance of disappearance, particularly as this relates to expressions of difference from the Muslim majority. By focusing on cosmopolitanism’s limits, I argue—following Werbner (2006) and against many popular theories of the phenomenon—that expressions of difference are not always celebratory ethical choices made by individuals faced with multiple ways of being . Indeed, the erasure of difference reveals that cosmopolitan affects are often censored when and where difference is imagined to invite danger. Becoming Turkish, along with the fear of not being perceived as Turkish enough, has engendered a profusion of effacing social practices among Jews in Istanbul. Layered upon these assimilationist conditions, local anti-Semitism and the complicated relationship Turkish Jews have with Israel (and, perhaps more importantly, the relationship that antiSemites and/or anti-Zionists perceive them as having with Israel) generate an additional set of incentives to disappear. three The Limits of Cosmopolitanism 84 Jewish Life in 21st-Century Turkey If we are indeed in a “cosmopolitan moment,” as many have argued, the process of “‘cosmopolitanization’ occurs as unintended and unseen side effects of actions which are not intended as ‘cosmopolitan’ in the normative sense” (Beck and Sznaider 2006:7). The Turkish Jewish case illuminates some of these unintended side effects, including the denial and erasure of cosmopolitan affects despite their public celebration. In tension with official participation in public cosmopolitanism, Jews in Turkey regularly opt for a low profile in the public sphere, and this choice plays out recursively in architectural, bodily, and linguistic domains. In order to develop this notion of cosmopolitanization, this chapter deals with the key symbol of güvenlik (security) and the role it occupies in Turkish Jewish life. In Lakoff’s terms—“What type of security is meant? What are its political objectives and what are its technical methods?” (2008:402)—I outline how, in light of security concerns, Turkish Jews conform to what they perceive as the correct kinds of erasure of cosmopolitan difference from the public sphere. I then discuss sites where concerns about assimilation and security overlap in spaces where the borders between private and public are ambiguous and must be negotiated. The dangerous—and often disavowed—cosmopolitanism I observed in Istanbul underscores Beck and Sznaider’s “rejection of the claim that cosmopolitanism is a conscious and voluntary choice” (2006:7). If cosmopolitanism is not always an individual choice, what kind of “actually existing cosmopolitanisms” does ethnography reveal? Studying cosmopolitanism through the experiences of Turkish Jews allows us to focus on a number of lessons to be learned about the contours of lived cosmopolitanism, especially at a time when officials seem to embrace cosmopolitanism but when everyday practices seem like classically ethno-parochial performances. “Security” as a Key Symbol Getting through security at official Turkish Jewish buildings (such as the rabbinate, synagogues, or the Jewish Museum) resembles boarding a plane on an international flight since the World Trade Center attacks. From adolescence on, many young Jewish adults in Istanbul are trained to monitor and guard these passages and will say that they work for the security of the community, or simply “in security.” As volunteer 85 The Limits of Cosmopolitanism security personnel, they operate the steel doors at synagogues, checking passports (of foreigners) and faces (of community members) before allowing guests to pass through a second door that provides access to the site itself. The system’s design ensures that the two doors can never be opened at the same time—the theory being that if an attack began, only the few people in the liminal space between the doors would be compromised. Since the most recent bombings, many Jewish community buildings have had their security structure redesigned. Entrances are now surrounded by concrete walls...