MENA Jewry after "the Middle Eastern Turn": Modernity and Its Shadows

Abstract

MENA Jewry after "the Middle Eastern Turn":Modernity and Its Shadows Michelle Campos (bio), Orit Bashkin (bio), and Lior Sternfeld (bio) In the fall of 2021 Netflix began broadcasting an original Turkish dramatic series, "Kulüp" (The Club), which centered on the tragic story of a Sephardi Jewish convicted murderer, Matilda Aseo, as she earned early release from prison and attempted to rebuild her new life. Based on the family story of one of the screenwriters, Rana Denizer, and directed by Zeynep Günay Tan and Seren Yüce, the series' ten episodes follow Matilda as she navigates old ghosts and new relationships in 1950s Istanbul. The streets are peopled with Matilda's fellow Jews but also with Armenians, Greeks, secret crypto-Greeks and various other characters who "pass" as Muslims, and migrant Muslims from the countryside struggling to survive in the big city.1 The viewer is exposed to Ladino conversations and songs in the homes, synagogues, courtyards, and streets of Istanbul, as well as in Matilda's place of employment, a cutting-edge nightclub owned by "Orhan Bey," the crypto-Greek Niko who, battling his own ghosts, employs numerous minorities in addition to its star entertainer, a closeted gay Muslim singer who has been disowned by his family. With the intimacy and familiarity of the street-level scenes, "The Club" reembeds non-Muslims into Istanbul's urban landscape, visually and sonically, as well as historically and socially.2 However, "The Club"'s Istanbul is anything but a cosmopolitan paradise, [End Page 3] and darker forces wait in the wings to threaten its fragile everyday coexistence. The dangers of communal boundary crossing are at the center of Matilda's personal story, a tragic tale of star-crossed intercommunal romance, betrayal, and murder. On the state level, virulent Turkish nationalism appears first in shattering Matilda's nuclear family, then in the club with demands made on the owner to fire all non-Muslim employees in order to "Turkify" the institution, until—in the climax of the series—horrendous violence overruns the streets when state-instigated rioters attack its "non-Turkish" residents. Matilda and her estranged daughter Raşel, herself claiming a Turkish name (Aysel) to chase after a Muslim suitor, survive, aided by her Muslim coworkers, and the series ends with "their" Istanbul shrunken into a tiny but safe island of tolerance, enclosed within the four walls of the club. The tragic stories at the heart of "The Club"—and the visceral images of the impact of the darker side of Turkish nationalism on Turkey's Jews and other non-Muslim minorities—are a sharp departure from the alternatively silent or celebratory narrative of Turkey's tiny Jewish community, which at least officially and publicly lauds Turkey as the successor to the Ottoman "safe haven" for expelled Iberian Sephardi Jews.3 As such, "The Club" provides an important platform for digging up painful periods in republican Turkish history, from the 1942 wealth tax (varlık vergisi) that disproportionately affected the Jewish and Christian communities, to the 1955 Istanbul riots that decimated the Greek community in the city with which the series ends.4 These events are long overdue for sustained public awareness and scholarly conversation, and the wide-ranging reactions to "The Club" in Turkey, Greece, Israel, and the rest of the world reflect the gap between the collective memory of ethnoreligious minorities and the public discussion of their experiences, not to mention the anxiety about the current and future direction of the Turkish republic. At the same time, as the series vacillates between hope, inclusion, and harmonious relations on the one hand, and exclusion, violence, and erasure, on the other, it also serves as a reminder that urban belonging for Istanbul's Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and migrant and working-class Muslims has always been fragile and contingent, and not just in the face of nationalism. The jealousy, greed, hatred of the "other," political and economic expediency, and various petty or weighty motives that shape actors' individual and collective choices in the series have, of course, shaped history itself. More broadly, the series and its local and global reception reflect a major change from past historiographical and cultural trends that...