Just six years ago, a small group of Turkish citizens performed their civic duty as members of a secular democratic regime by going to the polls, voting by secret ballot, and inaugurating their leader in a lavish ceremony; on October 24, 2002, Jews throughout Turkey participated in a community-wide election of the Turkish chief rabbi. Through anthropological fieldwork in Istanbul, I observed how Turkish Jews, a minority which generally eschews political participation, held this community-wide election at the same time as Turkish national elections were going forward. This parallel exercise in democracy gave the Turkish Jewish community a unique space to debate the meaning of democratic citizenship, to discuss their role as a distinct religious community in the Turkish Republic, and to perform that identity in a semi-public, highly orchestrated event: the ritual investiture of the chief rabbi. This paper describes how the election and investiture of a chief rabbi in 2002 created a unique space for Turkish Jews to debate the meaning of democracy. The election year coincided with a general increase of intensity of the “democratization” discourse, spurred by European Union demands for Turkish political reform. What emerged during the election and investiture of the chief rabbi was a strong debate about Turkey’s weak democracy. This is perhaps not surprising, given that European Union debates about Turkey’s candidacy for admission currently occupy so much media time, judging Turkey against an ever-shifting democratic yardstick. That this debate should be so prominent among Turkish Jews, however, sparks certain critical questions: Who in Turkey still has a stake in the definition of democracy? To answer this question, I document current Turkish-Jewish discourses about democracy by combining ethnographic observations of the election season with an analysis of the production and reception of local narratives (speeches, news articles and interviews) about the process. I then analyze the election and inauguration as a “politics of presence” (Phillips 1994) in which democracy is seen not only as a practice through which to debate ideas but a discursive move to represent collective difference in the public sphere. As such, this article contributes to discussions about the performative nature of minority politics and how these alternative discursive spheres relate to the broader contexts in which they occur.