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Jewish Body, Jewish Quarter, Jewish Disease: Cholera Epidemics in Late Ottoman Izmir
Abstract
Within the late-imperial framework, the public space emerged as a dynamic political realm in which various groups existed through bodily performances grown out of their social identities. Concurrently, public space was embraced by the public domain where imperial authority was constituted over the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate practices. While the public realm became the locus for defining, describing and monitoring the appropriate central type and the socially abnormal and deviant characters, the public awareness of marginals intensified, and the body became the primary material of discourse and the main site of intervention. Accordingly, throughout this period, treating the body as something of a crisis was a common practice since it was believed that unruly and inappropriate bodies required repairing and disciplining. This paper explores the treatment of Jewish cholera patients and regulation of their mobility in Izmir during the cholera epidemics of 1865, 1893, 1910, and 1911. Through a corporeal analysis of the medical and social significance of cholera for the Jews of Izmir, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: What was the understanding of contagion of cholera among Jews and how did it shape their interaction with non-Jews? How did central and local Ottoman authorities and local Jewish leaders deal with the diseased Jewish body? Finally, what kind of histories of cholera in the late Ottoman context can be written using the archives despite the absence of personal testimonies of the patients? Drawing on Ottoman state sources, Jewish communal records, Turkish and Ladino press, and popular Ottoman and European medical literature of the period, I argue that both medical and social implications of cholera epidemics were embedded in discourses of modernization and civilization in the late Ottoman Izmir. Especially the medical discourse concerning diseased Jews was not limited to treatment of the disease, but it was also extended into social issues, racial configurations, and spatialized understandings of the epidemic. This paper contributes to discussions of historical geographies of epidemics while analyzing the social order within an Ottoman urban context which was based on a firm distinction between the healthy and contaminated. This study on cholera-stricken Jews of Izmir gives voice to the excluded members of the community who have long remained on the margins of a minority, as well as the fringes of urban reality.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries