From December 1909 to December 1910, the Society for Rumelian Muslim Immigrants (Rumeli Muhacirin-i Islamiye Cemiyeti), based in Istanbul, published the Muhacir (Immigrant) newspaper as its official gazette. The newspaper’s range of didactic and political articles discussed religious practice, education policy, foreign politics, and unity among the Muslim population within and outside the Empire. Muhacir reflected the Society’s mission to defend Muslims’ rights and encourage successful immigrant settlement, agriculture, industry, and trade. Despite renewed interest in immigration within the late Ottoman period, historians have overlooked the Society and its newspaper as a source to evaluate how immigrants and their descendants articulated their role within Ottoman society in the Second Constitutional Period. This paper argues writers for Muhacir conflated religious identification and economic worth in defining Ottoman belonging. The newspaper served as a venue to articulate Ottomanism and social rights from a Muslim and immigrant perspective. Over the course of the paper’s ninety-issue run, editors and reporters relied on “the immigrant” to define the ideal Ottoman subject as an individual who would contribute to the Empire’s economic and civilizational progress. In the pages of its newspaper, the Society promoted education as a way to augment migrant productivity and to foster the social cohesion of Muslims within and beyond the Empire’s territorial boundaries. Strengthening trans-imperial religious ties and fashioning productive subjects served in tandem as the route to save the Ottoman Empire and Islamic civilization. Editorials juxtaposed the shared plight of destitute migrants in the Empire and their oppressed Muslim brethren in the Balkans and emphasized education as the solution for both populations. Writers for Muhacir adopted a blend of moral, emotional, and economic rationalizations to advocate for immigrant rights, and the economic value of immigrants to Ottoman society enhanced writers’ argument for defending Muslim compatriots in the Balkans. Though Muhacir promoted a trans-imperial community of “Rumelian” Muslims, writers for the newspaper delineated membership in Ottoman society by linking notions of productive capacity to religious identity.

As outlined in the official propaganda of the Turkish state, one of the major goals of the Turkish language reforms of 1920s and 1930s was to facilitate the integration of Turkey’s minorities to the new Republican polity by providing a standardized, calculated and self-contained language that was cleansed from unwanted foreign elements. Yet the fact that these reforms coincided with semi-official repressive campaigns that targeted the minorities, such as “Citizen Speak Turkish!,” and how they effectively barred and criminalized the use of minority languages in public spaces show that the language reforms were essentially a shift from the de facto multilingualism of the Ottoman Empire towards the exclusionary monolingualism of the new Turkish state. In this sense, the language reforms were a key aspect of the assimilationist projects of the early Republican period. To illustrate the contentious dynamic between language and citizenship, this presentation focuses on the notion of monolingualism (by looking at the script and language reforms and tracking the rise of fervor surrounding Modern Turkish) and how these changes affected one of these marginalized, “other” communities, and as an complex example focuses on the life and works of the Armenian linguist Agop Dilâçar, who was instrumental in implementing the language reforms. The existing scholarship on language reforms predominantly focuses on the linguistic differences between Ottoman-Turkish and Modern Turkish and the erasure of Ottoman-Turkish literary output. In this presentation, I will be utilizing literary texts, newspaper articles, op-eds and political discussions from the journals of the time and will place them within the broader debates concerning minorities of Turkey. In this respect, my goal is twofold, first, to shed light on the overlooked aspects and consequences of these reforms and argue for the transcommunal and transnational essence of the linguistic changes and, second, to read the creation of the new Turkish vernacular and its effects on minorities against the contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism, specifically Homi Bhabha’s notion of "vernacular cosmopolitanism" (1996).

During the Eastern Crisis of 1876-1878, Ottoman authorities witnessed large-scale movements of refugees who fled from the Balkans to Istanbul. War-torn, impoverished, and in need of shelter and supplies these Ottoman refugees sought protection from the violence of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. Although the Treaty of San Stefano ended the war and the Treaty of Berlin engendered new Balkan states, these agreements did little to address the refugee crisis in the Ottoman Empire. Much secondary scholarship has effectively covered the stakes involved in the Treaty of Berlin and referred to the demographics of the refugee movements and their resettlement into Ottoman lands. However, little attention has been paid to how Ottoman authorities managed to address the refugee crisis in Istanbul particularly during Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. This paper seeks to shed light on how Ottoman authorities responded to the crisis of overpopulation, poverty, and the anticipation of a severe winter in Istanbul during 1877-78. Through investigating official Ottoman documents from the Prime Ministry State Archives (Ba?bakanl?k Devlet Ar?ivleri), this paper argues that the Ottoman authorities in the General Administrative Commission for Migrants (?dare-i Umumiye-i Muhacirin Komisyonu), the Grand Vizierate, and the Ministry of Finance established policies to decrease the number of incoming refugees to Istanbul and to relocate those who had already settled in the city. Although Ottoman policy-makers attempted to alleviate the refugee crisis in Istanbul by providing services and extending privileged status to refugees, they ultimately resorted to measures of forced conscription and resettlement to remove the refugee presence from the city. As a microhistory, this paper offers a critical look at the changing strategies Ottoman officials adopted to manage the major refugee crisis of 1877-78. Moreover, it suggests that cities targeted for the resettlement of refugees gained enormous importance in terms of the future goals to restructure the demographics of the Ottoman State.

During the Armenian Genocide, women and girls married Muslim men in order to ensure their survival. When these women were later given the opportunity to leave and rejoin the Armenian community, some chose to stay behind. In many instances, culturally defined notions of shame prevented women from leaving their Muslim husbands. Those who had married Muslim men had transgressed notions about women’s honor and purity, and therefore, these women would face rejection if they attempted to return to the Armenian community. They recognized that their children would be viewed as “bastards” (Macklin, 2004) by members of their community. Using Armenian Genocide survivor testimonies, this paper will interrogate the dilemmas faced by two women who were given the opportunity to leave and rejoin the Armenian community. Both women had children fathered by Turkish men. One woman made the decision to leave her Turkish “husband,” take her children, and return to her family. She reclaimed her agency and her right to re-define her destiny and that of her children. She chose to build a life for herself in her own community. The other woman chose to remain with her Turkish “husband.” She believed that the possibility of rejoining her community and living her life in the culture in which she was born and raised was foreclosed. Since she had become a Muslim wife, her purity and honor had been tarnished. She had internalized patriarchal notions of shame, and believed that she was dishonorable for having married a Turk.

At the end of the WWII in 1945, where my research begins, homegrown Turkish anti-Semites were few in number and almost all hailed from the westernizing elite. By 1980, however, my research shows that a major, both qualitative and quantitative, change had taken place: a) Anti-Semitism had now become a staple of Islamist and, to a lesser extent, nationalist political discourse, b) the number of anti-Semites had grown by leaps and bounds, c) anti-Semitism ceased to be only an elite discourse, but was now very common—to the point of being the new “normal”—at the radical right-wing grassroots. How can we explain this sea change? What accounts for the sudden growth of anti-Semitism in Turkey after 1945? This was also an unexpected development in the sense that, first, Turkey was supposedly heir to a tradition of peaceful relations with the Jews, and, second, Turkey was not home to a visible Jewish middle class, who could be blamed for all kinds of problems. Yet, this paper highlights four discursive areas where anti-Semitism was very “handy and useful” for radical right-wing ideologues. First, they could portray and condemn the Kemalist republic as a Jewish plot by turning the spotlights on the presence of the Ottoman chief rabbi at the Lausanne negotiations in 1922. Second, the conspiracy theory on Lausanne was used to beat ?smet ?nönü, who was the Turkish chief negotiator at Lausanne and, later, the chairman of the Republican People’s Party until 1972. Third, anti-Semitism served to bind all right-wing fractions against the “Red Peril” by representing the Russian Revolution and socialism elsewhere as another Jewish plot. Finally, Islamists also put anti-Semitism to use after 1965 to denounce their arch-rivals, Turkish nationalists, claiming that nationalism was imported to Turkey by Turkish Jews. All in all, the case of Turkey is an excellent example of the modularity of anti-Semitism: Born under very different conditions in 19th century Europe, anti-Semitism was transplanted to and spread in Turkey after 1945 to cater to local right-wing interests