Jewish Museum

Today Rachel and I had planned to go to church, do homework downtown, and see whirling dervishes.  Simple enough, no?  Well, the day soon took a disturbing yet fascinating turn, when, after the highest, most confusing non-Catholic mass I have ever attended, I decided to introduce myself to a woman who obviously had remembered me from the last two times I had been there.  Be careful introducing yourself to people, even Episcopalians, in Turkey.  You get invited places.  

Seems this woman, Judith, had met a tour guide at an ARIT function (ARIT are the same people who sponsor my language program), and he had agreed to show her a Jewish museum.  Besides being a consultant, Judith, originally from Brazil, also works restoring old buildings that are damaged either by lack of attention or active vandalization.  Right now, she's apparently working on a synagogue, and the tour guide she met said she absolutely needed to see this museum.  

Our tour guide was not just any tour guide.  He was Mehmet Dervış, whose company, Tachda Tours, once hosted Bill Clinton.  Mehmet Bey generously gave us this tour for free and was quite entertaining throughout.  He was very open about his own experiences as a Muslim man in Turkey, for instance circumcision without painkillers at age 8.  (Those boys we saw in Eyüp get painkillers now, thankfully.)  He also talked about questions people on tours often ask him.  Like what he thinks about Osama Bin Laden.  A lot of the problems of the world, he said, had a lot to do with that kind of ignorance.

The museum was Zulfaris Sinagogu, and its purpose was to show how welcoming and accepting Turkey is and always has been of its Jewish population.  The history isn't quite as rosy as the museum paints it, but Turkey was a heckuva lot nicer than pretty much any other country, so I'll give them that.  But it became very clear that this museum was about far more than Jews.

After 10 minutes of me telling myself to stop being such a conspiracy theorist, Mehmet Bey said, "if everyone hated the Jews but us, and we were so welcoming to them, what makes you think that the Turks one day just woke up and decided to kill all the Armenians?  I'm not saying nothing horrible happened in the East, but there certainly was no genocide."  In fact, the word "genocide" is not in the museum at all, even in the section on European Jews escaping to Istanbul during WWII.  Mehmet Bey seemed proud of this, boasting that this museum was the only Jewish one the world that didn't mention the Holocaust as anything more than fact.  

Continuing in this vein, Mehmet Bey told us that European minorities in Turkey had often been used by greater European powers to disrupt the government.  The Jews though, "since no one else liked them," were always loyal.  

The problem now, Judith and Mehmet Bey both agreed, was not so much the Armenians in Istanbul, but Armenia and the diaspora.  "I'm sorry, honey," Judith said to me, "but Nancy Pelosi's one of the worst."  ("You're damn right she is," I wanted to say.)

Judith had just returned from Kars, where she had visited Ani on an archeology tour.  According to her, the Armenians have been mining right on the border to damage the ruins and then blame Turkey for not taking care of their once prosperous capital.  I looked this up a little bit, and according to Armenian sources there is no damage inflicted by the mining.  I have no idea if that's true, if it's a lie for economic purposes, or if it really is as childish as Judith says.  This is something to look out for (but of course not talk about) when Josef and I go to Kars at the end of the month.

Feeling the need to remind myself that there are level-headed people discussing this issue (remarkable, when you remember what the issue is), I bought a copy of AGOS, the newspaper, formerly run by Hrant Dink, for the Armenian community in Istanbul.  I am only further convinced that, like Taner Akçam said in his lecture at Chicago a couple years ago, there's a lot of discussion that needs to go on before even touching on what the Diaspora wants.  

An interesting side note: Michelle has been studying with Taner Akçam at Minnesota, but he's leaving this year, unfortunately.  She got into a fight with her Turkish teacher there over the Armenian issue, which is why she took Summer Quarter Turkish at Chicago and had Esra as her TA.  

But yes, a greater emphasis on discussing and listening on both sides might do some good.  For instance, Rachel and I discovered today through discussion and listening that not everyone from South Dakota is an ignorant pawn of some giant corporation, and not everyone from California is a tree-hugger who doesn't know a darn thing about forestry (although, come to think of it, that does describe me pretty well).  It's a start.

Oh!  And then we saw dervishes!  They whirled.