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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Those of you who tuned into entitled opinions last week heard Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk speak to me at length about the Istanbul of his youth.
Not the re-varnished, museums-ized, digitally remastered Istanbul of the 21st century.
But the Istanbul of the 60s and 70s, when the city was still a provincial backwater,
dreary, wintry, despondent, full of melancholy.
In those days, the city's history was still present in its wooden, Ottoman houses,
its rickety fairy boats and battered bridges.
The city's past and even its present was still slowly dying before your eyes,
which meant that it was still alive in its own authentic way.
Nowadays, Pamuk's Istanbul is doing its best to become bright and colorful
and to smile like a toothpaste ad.
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I really wish they would let dying cities die.
Or at least not try to rehabilitate them to death.
It used to be that a city's past was allowed to sink slowly into obsolescence
to pursue its natural course of passing away without municipal authorities aggressively scrubbing down every facade
and repackaging all the bits and pieces like coated candy.
The three most beautiful cities in the world, Rome, Venice, and Istanbul,
used to share in common a poetic mood, a kind of charismatic gloom,
which came from the overbearing presence of the past in its posthumous,
super-annuated quality.
Now they share in common the false sheen of hyper-restoration.
James Joyce once said that visiting Rome is like seeing someone's grandmother's corpse on display.
Not anymore though, in the last decade, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage
has started plastinating that corpse, giving Rome a very un-Roman shine.
Historical cities do not fare very well under plastination.
Their natural element is decay,
but that is what the official custodians of cities like Rome, Venice, and Istanbul
are trying to wash away these days, whatever smacks of decay, decadence, or dilapidation.
Everything gets a face lift, or a new set of false teeth, and everyone is happy.
Everyone except the poets that is, who, like Pamuk, invariably draw their inspiration
from the dying presence of the past.
You've heard me say it before, and I'll say it again, the posthumineage
is waging a remorseless war against authenticity in all its manifestations,
as if the real were too much for us to bear.
I have with me in the studio the person who brought Oton Pamuk to Stanford
and who helped secure his guest appearance on entitled "Pinions."
His name is Aaron Rodrig, a historian of Ottoman and Jewish history,
who also chairs the History Department here at Sanford.
Like me, Aaron was born and raised in Turkey.
I was born in Izmir on the Aegean coast, and Aaron grew up in Istanbul.
In fact, he went to the same school as Oton Pamuk for a while,
though I gather they never met each other back then.
He's a great example of the multilingual and multicultural richness
of the Levant. He speaks and reads several languages, including French and Turkish.
I've invited him on the show today to speak to us a little bit about Oton Pamuk,
the modern Republic of Turkey, and above all, his area of expertise,
the Ottoman Empire. Aaron, welcome to the program.
It's a pleasure to be here.
To start with, do you agree with me that the historical spirit of cities
like Istanbul are getting smothered to death by overzealous restorers and repristinators?
I do agree with you.
Indeed, there is the whole museum industry and desperate attempt
to, in the appeal to tourists, to scrub things down and to sanitize them.
I would also add, however, that on top of that, there is the uncontrolled urbanization
that is also doing as much, if not equally, to cover up the historical elements.
The enormous, for example, in Istanbul, the enormous growth of the city,
when I was growing up there, 1.7 million now, about 12 million,
and the teaming masses and the wild, uncontrolled building next to what is historical,
and then on top of that, the layer of the historical, sanitized and turned into museums.
So there are multiple forces that are transforming these cities that, I think,
really do as much cover up as present to the observer of their essence.
It seems like the historical, the real and the historical, is under assault from both sides.
On the one hand, other careless neglect and irreverence and paving over it,
on the one hand, on the other, over custodianship and over restoration.
Yes, that is right.
And in fact, one of the most fascinating things about Istanbul, like Rome, like Venice,
was the extraordinary sedimentation of the past,
layer upon layer of centuries from going to Byzantium, to Ottoman, to modern,
to an aqueduct that goes nowhere to fallen city walls.
But right next to it, of course, now both the Gajecondo,
which is the Shantytowns, and also the Glee-Minsk skyscraper, all in this hodgepodge.
And then the modernized version of the old as the object of the gaze of the tourists.
So it is extraordinarily chaotic. The sediments are there, but they are also very much hidden as much as revealed.
You grew up in Istanbul during the same period, more or less as Oran Pamuk.
Yes, absolutely. Was it a very different city than?
It certainly was. And I think one of the greatest appeals for me of Oran Pamuk,
because I grew up in Istanbul in the 1960s and '70s also.
And one of the great appeals of reading Oran Pamuk was the instant recognition of what he was talking about,
or really not necessarily what he's talking about, but of the mood that melancholic mood that he projects,
the monochromatic city.
And a city very much in mourning in many ways,
unstated at the time of the loss of an empire of being, in fact,
the abode of felicity, the Darryl Saadet, and it was a very complex place.
It still is a very complex place. But I think that the mood that he absorbed,
and which he actually really, the mood that traverses almost all of his writing,
was one that I myself had in an odd sort of way had always felt.
Yes, and I have to say that there are Turks from Istanbul who are not particularly fond of that book.
They might be fond of his novels, but they say, "That's not the Istanbul that I grew up in.
It was a much more fun place. It was much more colorful. I don't know where all this melancholy is coming from.
And yet, I know also when I read Istanbul, I know exactly what that mood was,
and it corresponded to the pathos of that city for me as well."
Yeah, I mean, I perfect to understand when people say that,
because the Quiz Istanbul was multiple. It depends on one sensibility and one God.
That very same melancholic Istanbul was also, of course,
this temple of great conviviality of social relations,
of wonderful restaurants by the boss for us, of beautiful summers,
and a spectacular skyline, and in fact, a very dynamic population of diverse origins.
And yet, underneath it all, it was so clear.
I remember what Pamuk writes about in winter days when the street would get muddy,
and then everything under the rain.
There will be another part of the city that would come out and clear focus.
And I may have been developing already, maybe, perhaps a historian sensibility as a teenager in Istanbul,
but there was something about it that had always struck me.
Underneath that kind of what appears to be a Mediterranean-rudu viv,
there was also a sub-current of a certain sadness.
Can I ask about Pamuk now as a writer? You read him in Turkish.
You also are quite well-versed in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction,
so you know how to place him in context in a way that most Westerners don't know how to do.
His winning the Nobel Prize brought a lot of attention to him, but he was very well-known before that to be sure.
I know that you admire him a great deal as a writer.
Can you tell our listeners, what is it about his literature as such, which you find so remarkable?
I think for me, when I was very interested, he made this reference without my having read that particular story.
He is as close to a Christian approach to literature in Turkish as one can get.
That is, I think, it's not only the complexities of his novels and what he's writing about,
but it is really an extraordinary language and an extraordinary usage of the literary genre.
He's a kind of a master writer in many ways. He's a writer's writer.
I think that really is to me, really quite remarkable.
He's very much his rejection of a realistic approach.
The dwelling and the beautiful embroidery of language is what really struck me most in his writing.
I just think that it's really one of the most beautiful Turkish prose that exists.
In fact, some of those paragraphs are one whole sentence with clause after subordinate clause.
Of course, the American or the English translation breaks it up into separate sentences.
I asked him on this show, we heard last week, what is lost in translation?
He's rehearsed that answer on several occasions and he said, of course, this and that and the other.
I also asked him about his engagement with Turkish as a highly complex, stratified historical language.
We didn't dwell enough on that perhaps in the interview.
Maybe you would like to say something about how you see or hands or literary engagement with the various levels that which Turkish has evolved historically.
Yes, very complex linguistic situation in Turkey that really begins really from the Ottoman period and then goes up and through today.
Already in the Ottoman period there's a very high-class, high-court language, a kind of a Mandarin-class language made up of Turkish Arabic Persian, a very sophisticated but fairly artificial language of the court and the upper classes.
Then in reaction to that with the end of the empire and the rise of a nationalist project and the creation of the modern Turkish Republic, they began to develop not only
paradoxically a time of radical Westernization, not only did they begin to develop an attempt to purge this language of its eastern elements, i.e. Arabic and Persian and really go back to the people and get the linguistic richness of the people of Anatolia into daily speech.
But also a conscious attempt to create new words, to replace the old ones, a lot of neologisms, a whole institute devoted to this, so that from generation to generation through the school network, the Turkish that was being taught and spoken and utilized, began to evolve with old words juxtaposed to new ones, meaning the same thing.
And of course inevitable in the age of Westernization especially open up initially towards France, now increasingly to English, massive incursion also of European words and kind of paradox, one hand going towards aspiring towards purity, on the other hand, inevitably with the opening up to more of the Western influences, the importation of other words.
So Turkish is a very complicated language of, again like Istanbul, of sediments, it's sedimented, it's stratified, and one usage of words very frequently refers to one social class, to one's ideology, to one's overall place in that society.
And what is remarkable in Pamuk is that, he said in his interview, he tries to use the kind of common denominator, the language of the street as it were, but I think there is more to it than that, because in many of the novels depending on what he's talking about, it's full of neons and illusions by the usage of the old words with the new words, the neologism, the next to the word that it replaced.
As a point out, his historical novels and trying to project a mood do a remarkable job in sort of resurrecting the Ottoman past in terms of also the sort of the linguistic references.
So I'm not sure how much of that can really ever come through in English, or any other translation, because it's something else.
I mean, I think he had to go and of course, like old translation, the end product is never the same as what is being translated, and this phenomena is true in other languages too, but the richness, once one reads him in English and then returns to the Turkish, it is really quite a remarkable richness.
So in that case, he might be also a kind of James Joyce as well as a post where to try to find the dialect of the tribe, and all when Joyce tries to rewrite the history of English in one of those chapters of Ulysses, are there any writers on the scene in Turkish fiction now that come close to what he has accomplished in your view?
I personally do not believe so. There are very major writers, of course. I mean, there's some, yes, Shah Kemal and a lot of other writers, but they write in a very different language.
I think what is unique about him is really the extraordinary language, and a lot of the themes that he works on, of course, that many tribe works on different themes, but I really find him really quite remarkably unique.
Aaron, I want to take advantage of you being here as a historian of the Ottoman Empire, but also in the modern Republic of Turkey to talk a little bit about moving backwards.
So the stereotype of the Ottoman Empire, or what we know most about the Ottoman Empire in the West, is its decay and the sick man of Europe, empires always seem to be associated more with decadence rather than their moment of the long centuries of stability that characterize most successful empires.
We do have a sense of the long, slow, sort of death of this thing, and through this death was born the modern Republic of Turkey through the, I don't know if you would call it a revolution that
Atatut Kemal Atatut brought about, but Atatut did create a nation state very much on the Western model, not only politically, but also trying to give a new sense of national identity to a people or at the geographical region which was highly multicultural
multilingual linguistics where you had obviously you had the Turks but you had Greeks, Armenians and Jews, and so forth.
And of course with the coming of Ataturk you had an attempt to say this is now Turkey, there's a new Turkishness to the political entity.
And this was a very big sort of transformation was it not?
Yes, I think this is an incredibly fascinating topic.
First I should address the issue about the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the opposite right.
The image in the West really that begins to obtain throughout the 19th century as the sick man of Europe,
then a whole historiography that gets written about the decline, why the decline.
Of course now there's a lot of work being done in history that shows that yes we can talk over certain type of decline in terms of a relative to, for example, industrializing Europe,
which has having a new kind of economic and technological might.
But the Empire was also flourishing in very many different directions.
There's a lot of revision that is now on the ground by historians going on and that we can talk certainly of loss of territory.
We can talk of warfare that is becoming a problem.
But the story is much less linear downwardly linear as it was projected as it was projected for many, many decades.
That being said, it is true that the Ottoman Empire faced remarkable challenges and was slowly eroded by, through a variety of factors meddling by Western powers and Russia.
They're encouraged by their encouragement of separatist nation states in the Balkans and a kind of fragmentation of the Empire.
And a desperate attempt by the Ottoman ruling elite to hold this at bay with a great question that occupied the Ottoman elite for almost over a century.
How can we save this state?
And a series of reforms in the whole course of the 19th century, which are reforms really of defensive Westernization that begins well before attitude.
So in many ways, what happens with the collapse of the Empire at the end of World War I, and the resulting nationalist uprising was both a rupture because in the sense of the end of an empire.
And it was also a deep continuity with the past of reforming and creating something new.
And paradoxically, as indeed the growing might of Europe erodes and ultimately destroys the empire, the project that then becomes paramount is in fact to become like Europe.
And hence the rebellion, the first successful really in many ways nationalist rebellion headed by Mustafa Kemal at the Turk.
Also at the end of the day had as its goal the creation of a modern nation state in some ways, I like to talk to my students that the resulting modern Turkish nation state is in some ways almost the purest, almost a controlled type of the kind of ideal typical
nation state initially modeled on the French Jacobin model highly centralized.
And its primary project was in fact to take Westernization to its logical conclusion, but also the creation of a nation.
Because this is one case where in fact its undoubtedly the case that it's from top down a completely complex group of peoples are then going to be turned into a nation.
Turkish nations speaking Turkish and the extraordinary transformations of the collapse of the empire and the rise of Turkey meant that a lot of the non Muslim populations in what is now in the Turkish public were either destroyed or expelled and or diminished in small in numbers through emigration.
And we're talking about the Armenians the Greeks in its mirror.
Yes and basically exchange of populations with Greece and also migration after migration.
A lot of events that go on in the course of World War One was total chaos in many ways with attrition and a great loss of population on all sides, but also essentially massive ethnic cleansing on all sides.
And the kind of really ending of the old Levant which was this very complex mosaic of peoples that were in that whole eastern Mediterranean, a Balkan area where cities, especially port cities, were made up of extraordinary dizzying number of religions, cultures,
ethnicities, all living, sometimes not harmoniously but certainly in a form of coexistence.
Well I know I grew up in one myself, this mirror was a port city and it had I think at the end of the 19th century it had more non Turks, a majority of non Turks in its population than Turks.
And then after 1922 when the Turks descended on that city and expelled a large segment of the Greek population of course the Turks numerically became a majority, still a very much of a mosaic of different peoples when I grew up there were, the 11 times are still healthy, but nothing like it used to be before that, right?
Yes, but I think we need to also situate this in the Arab-Sirab, but we need to situate this in a lot much larger context of what's happening at the end of the empire because the Muslim populations of the Balkans, of Crimea, of the North, of the Black Sea, of the Caucasus, large numbers of them are also being expelled by the new states that are coming up by Russia and they're all flocking into what is now the Turkish empire.
In some ways what sociologists have referred to as the great unmixing of populations is taking place in a much larger context of this part of the world of southeastern Europe and the Balkans.
The tail end of this we've seen in Bosnia and Albanian Kosovo and all of those things that are taking place, there's massive demographic change populations being moved, exchanged, deported.
The new Turkish Republic that rise out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, it rise out of this trauma of the collapse of the empire, it's a very profoundly traumatized place which loses an empire.
And then a very outward looking and open-ended new modernizing project through the Republic, but through a rather intransigent nationalism because indeed the population, even the Muslim population of modern Turkey was made up of multiple distinctive groups and a sense of a Turkish identity had to be created there.
And Ataturk was particularly hostile if that's not too harsh a term towards Islam, or at least he didn't want to have allowed religion to have anything to do with the state, and therefore he made a number of reforms and instituted new laws which would radically curtail the power of Islam to influence politics on the one hand.
But even personal appearance, you know, getting away the Birka and all that.
And still today would you say that Turkey is still fractured along this fault line between the chemists who are fiercely allied with the notion of a secular Republic that looks westward.
And then now the research, at aistic resurgence of Islamic nostalgia, if nothing else, where they feel like part of the trauma that you were referring to was this forced rupture, almost overnight rupture with a long traditional past.
Yes, absolutely. I think the the the catalyst regime that came into place in Andaturk was diagnosed a religion and a certain kind of what it it accused to be backward looking obstulantist Islam as the root cause of decline, the root cause of not being able to modernize and therefore.
Unparallel anywhere else in the Muslim world. There is a complete and utter disestablishment of Islam, a separation of what in the West we would call church and state, but a complete evacuation from the political sphere of Islam.
In fact, an actual, I would say, almost clamping down on manifestation of any type of Islam that would have any political element.
And in some ways actually as historians we realize why that was that what that happened because unless this had not been done by force from above, it is quite clear that the biggest resistance to the
the traumaless project in the first two decades of the Republic would have come from more traditionalist Muslim segments of the population. So this is a very strong, secularizing push from above and you're absolutely the caliphate.
Most of the Kemal ends the caliphate, the last caliph is is is is expelled in 1924 and changes the alphabet from the Arabic script to the Latin script in bands the FES and you're right, I mean it's all symbolic by the banning of the FES and the frowning and in fact very frequently sort of banning of headscarves and and and veils and all those kinds of things on.
All are really I mean may appear from the outside as sometimes superficial or outward, but I think they have deep symbolic coded meaning and and the banning of the FES was really about this kind of exchanging of civilizations in terms of the in the mindset of of editor.
Now that did not of course mean that large segments of the population did not remain as devout Muslims, but they were indeed very much under control and and checked for a long periods of time and and we would say that indeed the Kemalist project to some extent succeeded more than any equivalent modernizing project in in the Muslim world did it did create a secular Turkish.
Middle class, which is a substantial numbers, I mean that has substantial numbers and and and and so there is indeed a very big constituency behind the secular agenda still, but now we're living in the backlash period of of the Islamic.
And back clash of what has remained of of Islam and of course is it's a fluorescence and growing yeah my reading of snow.
Is Pamuk's taking these two sides of the issue and putting them into drama, but I'd like to move on if you don't mind Aaron about I had a we did a show a year or so ago about.
Robert was the Austrian writer in which with my guests of Gumbrick I said that the Austro Hungarian Empire was my favorite empire, but I you know a close second is really the out of an empire.
For I guess a number of reasons probably personal nostalgia having grown up in Turkey knowing, but also the more I learn about the empire and the way it worked and the kinds of concepts that that.
That allowed for its machinery it's bureaucratic machinery to operate.
The more admiring I am of it somehow and I would like to ask you since you're a historian of the Ottoman Empire.
What are the specific virtues of that environment we can talk about its faults in a minute, but what do you see as the great virtues of that empire that enabled it to be such a successful and long lasting one.
I think we're all living in some ways in and certainly people from certain parts of the world and they're kind of imperial nostalgia.
There is of course a projection on on the past let me this is of trope that we have in many cultures that it was better in the past and the imperial project does appear to be.
Compared to what replaced it the empires appear to be indeed more stable structures than the very free violent and rickety nation states.
Well the nation states yes they're rickety but they're also nation states.
Many of the most of them tried to homogenize their populations and their cultures in the name of the nation in the name of a unitary state whereas my impression is that in the Ottoman Empire or also Hungarian Empire there was not this imperative that difference and you've written about this very eloquently that difference was not tolerated because that's a condescending term but difference was accepted as a reality and one did not attempt to reduce difference to same.
It didn't mean that discrimination was not part of the equation but there was a greater latitude for difference and multi ethnicity, multiculturalism.
Yes I think before the creation of the modern nation state and before the modern period itself when it became normative as a way of organizing politics and society.
The imperial structures were completely different in terms of their aims.
I think you as you mentioned there is not the notion somehow that allegiance to the state has to go through becoming part of one dominant group or being absorbed into that dominant group.
I think it is the Ottoman Empire did not try to abolish difference. It organized it hierarchically very frequently.
I mean we should have no illusions that this coexistence was based on equality but coexistence was based on each group having a particular place in society without any kind of real fundamental attempt to homogenize to level.
For example culturally transformed.
I think the fundamental divide in the Ottoman Empire was of course between the Muslim ruling group and the non-Muslim populations but there were lots of other divides as well because another big divide was between the ruling or
the Muslim and the Muslim and the Muslim and the Muslim and the Muslim as well as the non-Muslims.
I think what makes one perhaps what has encouraged nostalgia for empire not only in the Ottoman case but elsewhere was this kind of a lesser fair attitude that once one knew one's place in that society and that place could be enormous.
I think the freedom and commerce and doing certain kind of things running communities running their own affairs according to their own religion their own cultural precepts as long as one paid extra taxes.
The phenomenon of being left alone was really the norm except of course periods and again we should not create two saccharine of you in some ways at periods of great crisis and instability that would of course be violence that be issues and conflict but it's completely different kind of arrangement than the nation state that replaces it.
So it is in some ways the recognition of difference and it's being left alone as difference in return for status in congruence social infiority in certain kind of ways.
I think is a huge huge the different paradigm to what replaced it afterwards which is with its relentless, relentless demand for one nation, one country, one language, one culture.
How about language I take it that in the Ottoman period these different groups were not only free to practice their own religions and organize themselves according to their own precepts but there were also they were speaking their own languages to be sure but also they had their own separate courts and were had the freedom to.
In many cases adjudicate themselves according to their own laws how did that work that's a very strange notion in from the point of view of the nation state judiciary.
Yes I think I think there's a student in many pre modern societies and all in the Ottoman Empire but the whole system is is organized on the basis for example this applies for the non Muslims that there is considerable relative autonomy given to the community.
And and acceptance of the religious law and the religious system of those communities so there's kind of almost what we would now call devolved onto the communal level what now would be in the purview of the state.
And this has been called actually at different periods of time especially in the middle ed system where a millet is each tree initially three recognized millets the Greeks the Armenians and the Jews.
And their own system of law in their own religious courts that actually goes with this recognition of difference in this in this particular case that does not mean however for example that if there was litigation between a Muslim and non Muslim that could be tried in I mean Islam was superior.
So one would still have to go to the Muslim court of law and in the out at the end of the day that actually completely dominated but I think this is profoundly alien to the nation state model where the state has the monopoly not only violence to use labor but also of the juridical system.
And this is a fragmented juridical system and in some ways I think for in the pre modern period where communication is difficult where transportation is difficult where an empire spans huge areas it was actually a fairly ingenious way of locally solving as much as possible because you couldn't really create the same kind of state bureaucratic structure.
And so the nation state in the more modern period could so yes and languages were certainly very different in terms of each different group speaking but that I want however to also perhaps identify another angle to this which is that while each group had its language religious tradition it's.
It's culture it does not mean of course that they were living in her medically sealed separate right there was a lot of commerce between them.
And in fact I want to ask you an minute about the place of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire because there's another kind of popular notion that the the toleration of the Jews was much greater and more benign in the Ottoman.
Middle East rather than than in the West but first if you don't mind I'd like to read you something that I got from just a one of these kind of low life online things about autumn the Ottoman history.
And the whether these statements are true or false in your view or if they need new one's but it's this idea of the that in Ottoman political theory the function of this Sultan was to guarantee justice that was his primary function.
That all authority hinges on the rulers personal commitment to justice.
And that in this tradition ada le or justice is the protection of the helpless from the capacity of corrupt and predatory government.
In this sense justice involves protecting the lowest members of society the peasantry from unfair taxation corrupt majesty and inequitable courts.
And that was a primary task of the Sultan he personally protected his people from the excesses of government such as predatory taxation and the corruption of local officials.
For the Ottomans the ruler could only guarantee this justice if he had absolute power.
For if he was not an absolute ruler this meant that he would be dependent on others and so subject to corruption.
Finally absolute authority then was at the service of building a just government and laws rather than elevating the rule or above the law as Europeans have interpreted the Sultanate.
We're just starting.
How about justice.
I think the section of what you read about the importance of justice is part of the theory of Ottoman rule and the Sultan.
And I think that is absolutely correct that is to say that justice is in some ways the result that of the Sultan and the Sultan is supposed to be the upholder of justice.
And justice could manifest itself in various different domains and indeed the Sultan himself is subject unlike the notion of the Sultan as the Oriental.
The despot invented in Venice by the way in the early modern period as a kind of an image and then propagated by enlightenment.
So the thought as a kind of a pose to a new kind of ideas developing the West.
I think that there were indeed a lot of constraints on the Sultan in terms of what the Sultan could or could not do.
So the notion of absolute power in the hands of the Sultan I think is needs to be nuanced dramatically.
But as you read more and we enter into the notion of how the Sultan because he had to defend the peasants had to become absolute, that part of it is.
I is not something that I would subscribe to.
I think that in abstract there was the theory but the reality in the Ottoman Empire was that Sultan was almost always a very distant figure.
Now in later centuries after the 16th century increasing the secluded figure in the palace with lots of local governors and local forces in real control of the areas.
I like to think of the Ottoman Empire again in continuation of our notion of difference and another angle of it is that it's a patchwork.
There is no one system that obtains anywhere. If you go to Wallachian Moldavia which is now Romania where it pays only tribute but it's rather autonomous.
And then you go to an area near Istanbul which is very centralized and then you go to what would now be like northern Iraq which is largely tribal.
Where if you go to further away into Arab lands where local notables have a lot of control it's all very complex and messy system. It's not really what they all have to pay taxes.
They all have to pay taxes.
But in fact one of the great problems of the Ottoman Empire and of the Sultan and of the center was its gradual loss of being able to collect the taxes because the taxes would be diverted on route from where they were supposed to be coming from.
And two many local forces that actually siphoned off the taxes. So the whole attempt for many centuries of the center was really to regain control of taxation system through reasserting centralization which only gradually begins to take place in the course of 19th century.
And the Ottoman Empire was in the press of becoming bankrupt. So it's a very complex, very gated system and I don't think it can be reduced to the figure of the Sultan and just one theme, a dalet or a dalet.
Obviously not, but I was intrigued if true that there was this suspicion that government could be the enemy of the people rather than the benefactor.
And at least in theory the government had its own self-policing mechanisms and therefore this big heavy bureaucracy that we associate with the late empire Ottoman Empire was not one of just tax collection or imposition of central authority but also was part of a system where people would spy on the executives and the magistrates and try to eliminate corruption from within the system especially.
When it came to excessive illegal taxation.
Yes, and I think it's usually paid a plate out in the excessive taxation being part of a peripheralizing or centripetal kind of a force pushing away.
It was really the excessive taxation would be done by people who actually managed to gain control from themselves in the localis.
So the whole, there is a desperate attempt to control what is happening in the periphery and indeed the self-policing would take place by those of course are not happy with what is happening in the periphery vis-a-vis the center.
So there's always this kind of tug of war and there's this tension between the center and the periphery.
Aaron, what about the place of the Jews in the Ottoman context? You worked a lot on that.
Yes, this happens to be my major area of research.
Now, I think very broadly speaking it would be true to say that until let's say the granting of equal rights of Jews in the time of the French Revolution onwards in Europe, the place of Jews in the Ottoman Empire was in fact better than in Europe.
There was a long tradition of recognizing the people of the book, Christians and the Jews as the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and also from a lot of other places.
Muslim lands on the whole were quite open to them and in comparison, I think this is very important in comparison to what obtained in Europe, let's say 11th century onwards especially from the Crusades onwards, there's a long period of oppression and persecution and violence and expulsions against the Jews, certainly the Ottoman Empire and indeed all Arab lands and Muslim lands were
much much more open and what we would now call tolerant. That is why in fact the demographic shifts begin to take place from the 16th century onwards where Jews are moving on mass to the Ottoman Empire.
And the Jews in fact, being also relatively small in number compared to the local indigenous Christian populations and also not being privy to the warfare that was going on between
Ottoman and Christian powers were never really at the receiving end as far as the Ottoman Muslim rulers are concerned or the Muslim population of any kind of particular repression.
In fact, it would be fair to say that on the whole for many, many centuries the Jews were in a more kind of symbiotic relationship with the Turkish rulers who granted them protection.
Now that does not mean however, and I think this is important because the word tolerance can
have multiple meanings, tolerance can mean, of course, tolerance can mean lack of persecution,
tolerance can also mean being tolerated, it's a very complicated term.
And my saying that Jews had a better experience on the whole really throughout its history
under the Ottoman Empire than in the West does not mean, of course, that this was based on
the premise of equality.
No, obviously.
But that was not the demand by Jews anywhere at that time, so the situation was indeed
better.
Coming up in Izmir, Izmir was still in the 60s and 70s and still is less today than then,
but nevertheless, a number of European families, so-called leaven times, which encompassed
the British, Austrians, Dutch, Italians, Greeks, obviously the French, big time, and it was
Izmir had been known for centuries for being the so-called infidel city as the Turks.
But and it is stamped to the presence of these various European leaven times.
Another unwritten story, I mean historians know about it, but it's a very rich, multicultural
phenomenon that I don't think enough justice has been done to it.
I know that you were very interested in this.
You were good.
I think there is really a whole history to be, I mean, it's being done slowly, but it's
very complicated.
There's a whole history of the port cities of the Gien and Eastern Mediterranean.
I mean, it's not only Izmir and Istanbul, but also Solonica, Alexandria.
These are major anthropo port cities.
They are teaming with different people's coming from different cultures.
This is very, very vibrant places.
Izmir really emerges as a major, major city in the course of the 17th century.
Solonica in the 19th century as undergoes an incredible boom.
They have long established families that mercantile families come primarily initially from
Italy, but also from a lot of other groups.
There are these kind of expatriates, but really no longer expatriate, native populations that
are really not whose origins come from elsewhere.
I think there is another world there.
I think the world of the Levant, which I'd like to call, which is now gone.
As a result of this unmixeding that we started to talk about, I think that that world
of the Levant of these port cities was really the world of this kind of extraordinary hybridity
of multiple groups.
Each knowing their place and each keeping their separate sort of identities, some extent,
but engaged in a kind of a very porous relationship in terms of culture and commerce and
music and food ways with the surrounding culture and kind of mixing on a day-to-day basis,
kind of a, in some ways, sort of antithesis of what the nation-state brought.
I'm not talking necessarily of the Turkish nation-day, I'm talking about the very paradigm
of the nation-state thought, which rendered in fact that leaven time, reality, rendered
it, and this really started in the West, in fact, in terms of the project, but rendered
it almost unnatural, categorized as unnatural, as not truly authentic to the country.
And I think that we historians and actually in fact even observers of today have lost
sight.
In some ways, they have been in these groups and that reality of those port cities of what
I would call the kind of leaven time matrix of culture and commerce and politics and trade
and a whole leaven time life is kind of being, in some ways, erased by historiographies
until very recently, which in fact erased them from history as basically foreigners who
living there and who replaced them, even when writing about empires under a nationalist
narrative, which then de-naturalized them from the place which they had occupied.
And I think that going and excavating that richness of those intermingled cultures of Muslims,
Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Italians, Serbs, Austrians, all of Dutch, English, all
of those who were there in this world.
I think it's really one of the great challenges for historians because we then in some ways
have to, as historians, you want to really create, rewrite the history of those regions.
We almost have to unmake in our minds the very standard narratives of history by which we've
been socialized into becoming historians and really undo a lot of that and we should also
not forget that history as an enterprise is the creation of the nation state.
And therefore history emerges in Germany as a vistenschaft, as a discipline hands in hand
with the state first and then eventually with German nationalism and in many ways the very
nature of history writing is only recently emancipating itself and moving away from this
kind of what underneath all is a nationalist narrative.
So I think one of the great challenges especially for those writing on the Ottoman Empire
is how to go back and understand and figure out multiplicity, diversity, difference, coexistence,
the Levontine reality that I'm talking about.
And not to say that it is necessarily was a better mode but it was also part of a very complex
reality without us understanding that I think we will be missing a whole part of understanding
what used to be the Levontine.
Well I'm going to try to do it in a novel form one day and you're going to do it I hope
in more historic graphical term and they'll come together.
I hope so too.
It's been a pleasure Aaron, have you on and thank you again.
It's great pleasure.
Listeners, to tune in next week.
Thank you.
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