Turkinos beyond the Empire: Ottoman Jews in America, 1893 to 1924

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, as many as sixty thousand Jews from the Ottoman Empire and its successor states migrated to the United States, mostly settling in New York. While they outnumbered the twenty-five thousand Ottoman Muslims who arrived during the same period, they constituted a small minority compared to the more than two million primarily Yiddish-speaking Jews who came to America. While frequently marginalized within Jewish historiography, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino)-speaking Sephardic Jews from the Eastern Mediterranean have received some scholarly attention in recent years. Building on this scholarship, and by reference to sources from both sides of the Atlantic, including archives and newspapers from New York, Salonica and Istanbul written in Judeo-Spanish, French, Turkish and English, this article provides the first exploration of the ‘‘Ottoman’’ component of Jewish migration from the Eastern Mediterranean. Set within a transnational framework, this articles focuses on linkages created and retained by Ottoman-born Jews in the ‘‘old wold’’ and in diasporic offshoots in the ‘‘new.’’ How did Jews from the Ottoman Empire, who referred to themselves as Turkinos, conceptualize their relationship with their empire of origin? How did their experiences with other Jews in America or with other migrants from the Ottoman Empire, such as Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, or Armenians, shape their understandings of being Ottoman? How did the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire impact the ways in which Ottoman-born Jews in America understood their sense of community and their connections to their land of birth?

A transnationalmilletin the Jewish state: A Judeo‐Spanish diaspora between Israel and Turkey, 1948–1958

“…At the time, some 300,000 Ottoman Empire citizens migrated to the United States (Karpat, 1985, p. 196). Of these, only 25,000 were Muslim (Naar, 2015, p. 175). The final days of the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s and 1920s witnessed the emergence of a different form of migration—an ethno‐religious population exchange that effectively repatriated ethno‐religious groups to their ethno‐national homelands.…”

“…3 3 Among migrants from the Ottoman Empire to the United States during the years 1893–1924, the term Turkinos was used to refer to all Ladino‐speaking migrants (Naar, 2015, pp. 178–181).…”

Repositioning Ethnicity and Transnationalism: Community Resilience Strategies among the Non-Migratory Segment of Turkish Jewry

“…76). Jews, however, who have been strongly influenced by the momentous modern migration waves of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emigrated from the Ottoman Empire gradually and slowly, largely to the United States [19] and Latin America, [20] in a manner typical of the global migration trends in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amid rising political tensions between Muslims and Jews in the aftermath of European colonialism, the almost one million Jews across Asia and Africa-most in Muslim-majority countries-began to emigrate on scales previously unseen in their modern histories, with the State of Israel as their primary destination.…”

Nation and Migration in Late-Ottoman Spheres of (Legal) Belonging: A Comparative Look at Laws on Nationality

“…That having been said, the Ottoman population on the move included those from other regions and religions, as well. From the end of the 19th century until the 1924 Immigration Restriction act was passed, for example, approximately 60,000 Ottoman Jews and 25,000 thousand Muslims had made their way to the USA (Naar 2015, 174–175) where there were already 150,000 Syrians by 1915 (Gualtieri 2001, 29). Nor was migration unidirectional.…”