Conversion and Jewish Histories of the Ottoman Empire

with Marc Baer

hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan

| In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk to Marc Baer about how he first became interested in Ottoman history and explore the main themes and the questions underpinning the research in his five books. In this conversation, we place special focus on the books Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe and The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Our discussion centers on approaches to the subject of conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the dönme community born out of the transformations of the 17th century.

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In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk to Marc Baer about how he first became interested in Ottoman history and explore the main themes and the questions underpinning the research in his five books. In this conversation, we place special focus on the books Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe and The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Our discussion centers on approaches to the subject of conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the dönme community born out of the transformations of the 17th century.

Contributor Bios

	Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include religious conversion, gender and sexuality, and interreligious relations and state violence in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Turkey, and Germany.
	Zeinab Azarbadegan is the post-doctoral fellow at the Vienna School of International Studies. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. Her research focuses on imperial knowledge production about the space of Ottoman Iraq by the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the British in the late nineteenth century.

Credits

Episode No. 503
Release Date: 18 June 2021
Audio editing by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: Special thanks to Monsieur Doumani for permission to use the composition "The System/Το σύστημαν", Isaac Algazi - Avinou Malkenou, Isaac Algazi - Ana Ke Av Zedoni 

Images and bibliography courtesy of Marc Baer

Further Listening

	Cengiz Şişman	308 3/27/17	Sabbatai Sevi and the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes
	Nathalie Clayer	268 9/9/16	Religious Pluralism in the Late Ottoman Balkans
	Elyse Semerdjian	266 9/4/16	Gendered Politics of Conversion in Early Modern Aleppo
	Deporting Ottoman Americans	411 5/2/19	Turkino
	Akram Khater	229 3/8/16	Gender, Politics, and Passion in the Christian Middle East

Images

Oil on canvas painting depicting Sultan Mehmed IV (1657) commissioned by Swedish Ambassador Claes Brorsson Rålamb (1622-1698), held by Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, published in The Sultan's Procession: The Swedish Embassy to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1657-1658 and the Rålamb paintings edited by Karin Ådahl (Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2006).

Select Bibliography

Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford University Press, 2010)

Marc David Baer, ‘An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic’, Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 523-555.

Marc David Baer, ‘History and Religious Conversion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford University Press, 2014), 25-47.

Rıfat N. Bali, A Scapegoat For All Seasons: The Dönmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey, translated from the Turkish by Paul Bessemer (The Isis Press, 2008).

Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Brill, 2006).

Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 1990).

Halil Inalcik, ‘Foundations of Ottoman Jewish Cooperation’, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. Avigdor Levy (Syracuse University Press, 2002), 3-14.

Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984).

Paweł Maciejko, ed., Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity (Brandeis University Press, 2017).

Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816, translated from the Hebrew by Deborah Greniman (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011).

Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626-76, translated from the Hebrew by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Bollingen Series, no. 93 (Princeton University Press, 1973).

The Quincentennial Foundation Museum of Turkish Jews (Jewish Museum of Turkey)

Avlaremoz (launched recently by young Turkish Jews)