Description
Book Synopsis1. This bold work takes on many of the myths of Ottoman tolerance of Jews.
2. It links ties between Muslims and Jews in Turkey to denial of the Armenian genocide.
3. It presents meaningful information about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, reflection on the Jewish experience in Turkey, and ignorance of inconvenient historical facts.
Trade ReviewSultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks is a tour de force that is written with a backdrop of 500 years of Jewish history, spanning from when the Ottoman Empire embraced Jewish refugees fleeing Spain in 1492 all the way until today. In between those years, there were days of honey and days of onions, and as Baer shows, it was often only the sweetness we heard about, with the bitterness buried deep within the souls who suffered it, covered up by an 'utopian narrative of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish history.'
-- Louis Fishman * Turkish Studies *
In this disturbing and thought-provoking book, Marc David Baer, a Jewish American and a long-time academic scholar of Turkish Studies, bursts the bubble that the Turks throughout history were "God's rod" for the Jews, who smote the antisemitic Christians, welcomed Jews from the Spanish Inquisition and saved them from the Holocaust.
* Times Literary Supplement TLS *
Table of ContentsContents<\>
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Friend and Enemy
1. Sultans as Saviors
2. The Empire of Tolerant Turks
3. Grateful Jews and Anti-Semitic Armenians and Greeks
4. Turkish Jews as Turkish Lobbyists
5. "Five Hundred Years of Friendship"
6. Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism
7. The Emergence of Critical Turkish Jewish Voices
8. Living in Peace and Harmony, or in Fear?
Conclusion: New Friends and Enemies
Epilogue
