Amy Singer
Department of Middle Eastern & African History
Tel Aviv University
First Prize - 2008 Competition
The Ottoman Legacy for Contemporary Turkish Culture, Institutions and Values The Persistence of Philanthropy
One of the most profound Ottoman legacies to contemporary Turkey is the central role of private philanthropy as a vehicle for shaping culture and society. Two principle legacies of Ottoman philanthropy exist in Turkey today. The first is cultural, apparent in the thriving practice of elite philanthropy; the second is physical, readily discovered in the urban fabric of most Turkish cities. It is the Ottoman philanthropic tradition and its impact on Turkey that claim our attention in the present study, particularly with respect to the city of Istanbul. Both continuities and changes are apparent from imperial to republican times: in the identity of the donors, the sources and locus of wealth, the importance of foundations, the motivations for giving, the choice of projects, the physical impact of donations, and the identity of the beneficiaries.
Yet today's dynamic culture of private charitable giving in Turkey is not solely the result of inherited Ottoman ideology and practices, just as Ottoman philanthropic practices were themselves the result of combined Muslim, Turco-Mongol, Byzantine, and Arab influences. For Turkey, the example of philanthropy in some European countries and the United States also had an impact beginning in the nineteenth century. Since 1923, however, the specific Turkish experience has transformed philanthropy in Turkey into practices that are at the same time identifiably local and emphatically global.
Gift giving, a universal of human societies, is the larger sociological framework within which the study of philanthropy offers insights for understanding human history more generally. According to sociologist Marcel Mauss, it is the continuous exchange of gifts between individuals that creates social order and stability, and charitable giving is a special case of gift exchanges. An investigation of philanthropy in any society reveals much about its organization, the loci of wealth and power, and the distribution of responsibility for social welfare and public services.
The evidence of large-scale elite philanthropy can hardly be missed in the Turkish landscape today, whether the projects are historical or contemporary. Some further aspects of this philanthropy endure, such as a common sense of elite obligation, the participation of men and women, and the engagement of philanthropy in the competition for status and influence. Today, the economic elite has replaced the sultans and pashas as premier benefactors, with personal or corporate donations even rivaling government sources of assistance.
The motivations for contemporary philanthropy echo the Muslim consciousness of Ottoman donors, although philanthropy no longer functions to ensure the political legitimacy of the ruling house. It does, however, serve to legitimize wealth, and notably so in the context of the early Turkish republic where profit-making was not necessarily well-regarded. Yet several Turkish donors specifically characterize their donations as using their wealth for the well-being of society, giving back to the society that made them wealthy. Philanthropy remains the means to contribute to a wider community, whether it is the community of Turkish citizens, of Muslims or another confessional group, of a town, a neighborhood, or a profession.
While the wealth of Turkey's philanthropists derives from sources rather different from those of their Ottoman predecessors, their projects reflect partial continuity. The focus remains on institutions of social welfare, like education and health. However, the contemporary vision of the purpose of education and health care is often of capacity building and social justice rather than only the preservation of a religious or legal tradition. Scholarships, dormitories, primary schools, and universities are designed according to a conscious program of social engagement alongside a curriculum intended to make Turkey and Turkish students competitive in science, technology and the arts. Education is a tool of individual empowerment and community formation, as well as of national economic development. At the same time, the creation of museums and the funding for performing arts - such as that provided by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts established by the Eczacıbaşı Foundation - signify changing visions of what is good and beneficial for society. As in Ottoman times, the beneficiaries are not limited to the materially poor and needy. Rather, private elite philanthropy contributes to many segments of society and in this reflects the manifold motivations for giving.
Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author.
© Amy Singer, 2008

Maureen Jackson
Washington University
Comparative Literature Department
Second Prize - 2008 Competiton
Crossing Musical Worlds: Jews Making Ottoman and Turkish Classical Music This paper investigates the multiethnic art world enabling Turkish Jewish religious music to parallel broader musical practices in the Ottoman empire and Turkey. It seeks to explain why Hebrew classical music continues to be performed in Istanbul, given the diminished size of the Jewish community in Turkey today. While research has been conducted on the musicological relationships between Hebrew religious music and Ottoman classical forms, scholars have paid less detailed attention to how, on a socio-historical level, such confluences developed. Focusing primarily on the Maftirim repertoire (Hebrew religious compositions that closely parallel Ottoman classical suite forms), this study is part of a larger dissertation project encompassing the late Ottoman and Republican eras as dynamic periods of musical and social change. Through several biographies of late Ottoman/early Republican Jewish composers in the framework of an "art world," it is possible to conceptualize a classical music world in Jewish and non-Jewish musicians met regularly in relatively inclusive spaces in the city, thus developing a common classical music practice across religious lines. The Mevlevi lodge and palace represented important spaces, owing to their centrality to classical music education, with longterm historical evidence of musical interchange between lodge and synagogue, and invitations for Jewish composers to teach or perform at the palace. Later, at the turn of the 20th century other musical venues developed, such as music stores and schools, as well as recording studios, where diverse musicians would meet. Specifically, it was Jewish composers who also held positions of authority in the synagogue (chief rabbi, head of a single congregation or prayer leader) who served as primary cultural carriers of classical music between synagogue and broader musical culture, owing to their status to circulate among certain places and people, and their role in transmitting the music in the synagogue.
If we combine evidence from these Jewish biographies with the extensive documentation of broader patterns of Ottoman music-making, it is clear that such multiethnic musical meetings and activities were not random, but rather that Jews and other minorities were integrally involved in a broader classical music culture. In addition to cohesive socio-economic patterns, such as palace patronage and division of musical labor, master-pupil relationships were particularly significant to this world, because the task of orally transmitting complex pieces established uniquely intensive reciprocal relations between master and pupil. Through numerous examples of long-term teaching relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians, we can see that Ottoman and Turkish chains of master-pupils were essentially multireligious. In the Republican period, given the cultural distancing from things Ottoman, as well as important European-leaning and secularizing social and legal reforms, what happened to this Ottoman music world? In addition, given the gradual out-migration of Turkish Jews over the course of the 20th century, what happened to its Hebrew forms? Diverse changes in the Republic did adversely affect the music and musicians, such as closure of Sufi lodges, debates about an appropriate national music, and increasing contention between European ('alafranga') and Turkish ('alaturka') cultural forms, with state funds shifting from Turkish to European music education programs. However, in the two or three decades before 1923, the recording industry and gazinos (nightclubs) had become so well-established that they partially offset these impacts by providing alternative spaces and patrons for Turkish classical music in all its forms. Moreover, numerous minorities were involved in these commercial enterprises, as agents for European or American record companies based in Istanbul, or as owners of gazinos. Since the commercial sphere was responding to tastes on the street, not those of reforming minority, the 1920s witnessed a rise rather than fall in popular Turkish classical and Hebrew religious music-making in the new Republic. It is in the 1930s that there are increasing pressures on both Ottoman classical music and on minority musicians such as Jews. On the one hand, Jewish composer-leaders began to leave Turkey, and on the other, the state began more seriously to develop European-style music conservatories through hiring European artists. The life-story of Isak Algazi, a prominent Jewish composer and prayer leader who was supportive of the Republic, is helpful in tracing artistic and economic reasons for such Turkish-Jewish departures through his experiences of exclusion (from civil service and record contracts) in a time of civil employment discrimination and changing Republican musical tastes. Concomitantly, in the early 1930s the state began to develop European-style conservatories by hiring German and Austrian artists, who were often Jewish and fleeing Nazi Germany, to establish music curricula and to teach in Turkey. Paul Hindemith represents the most famous example (his wife was Jewish), while others helped to establish Turkish opera, ballet and symphony in the following decade. Commonly discussed in separate scholarship, these two episodes in juxtaposition reflect how movements of Jewish artists, whether Turkish or European, participated in bearing important musical changes in the Turkish Republic by developing 'alafranga' over 'alaturka' cultural forms.
In the end, for Jewish classical musicians remaining in Turkey who did not circulate in the commercial music industry and official service, it is in civil society realm that they continued to participate in classical music making. One of the spaces of interaction with non-Jewish musicians is the ev toplantiları (home sessions), which, as musical gatherings with Ottoman precedence, took on significance in the Republic as places where classical artists sought to sustain traditional classical music against commercialization and lack of state educational funding. Given the evidence, these regular weekly or monthly meetings at homes of patrons represented diverse gatherings where traditionalist classical musicians learned and performed music, as well as engaging in intellectual, and sometimes religious, discussion.
In this way, through friendships and meeting places such as home gatherings, Jewish classical musicians networked with others musicians in ways not unlike their late Ottoman counterparts. At the same time they circulated in a more contested and divided music world than in the past: the dichotomy and hierarchy between 'alafranga' and 'alaturka' music had disadvantaged Ottoman classical music for a period of time, and an arguably trifurcated music world (official, commercial and civic spheres) had developed to include or exclude certain kinds of music and musicians. In a context of the attenuation of both a musical genre and the minority Jewish population of Turkey, it is the civic sphere of classical music, its friendships and meeting-places, that has helped to sustain Hebrew classical music-making into the 21st century. Thus, one of the dimensions of Ottoman classical music-making that implicitly motivated nationalizing music reforms - its multiethnic character - was not entirely suppressed, but sustained itself despite musical change and minority losses in the Turkish Republic.
Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author.
© Maureen Jackson, 2008
This paper is based in part on research conducted in Istanbul through a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for International Dissertation Research, 2005-06. In Istanbul I am grateful to many people, including Rav Leon Adoni, Cem Behar, Bensi Elmas, Lina Filiba, Mehmet Güntekin, David Sevi, Karen Gerson Şarhon, and Abdurrahman Nevzat Tırışkan. I am also indebted to the scholarship of a number of researchers, including Cem Behar, Aaron Kohen, John Morgan O'Connell, Edwin Seroussi, and Cemal Ünlü. I thank those who commented on versions of this work, especially Münir Beken, Reşat Kasaba, Sarah Stein, and the Turkish Studies Group at the University of Washington. Please do not cite or reproduce this paper without permission of the author.
Olivier Bouquet
Washington University
Comparative Literature Department
Second Prize - 2008 Competiton
Crossing Musical Worlds: Jews Making Ottoman and Turkish Classical Music This paper investigates the multiethnic art world enabling Turkish Jewish religious music to parallel broader musical practices in the Ottoman empire and Turkey. It seeks to explain why Hebrew classical music continues to be performed in Istanbul, given the diminished size of the Jewish community in Turkey today. While research has been conducted on the musicological relationships between Hebrew religious music and Ottoman classical forms, scholars have paid less detailed attention to how, on a socio-historical level, such confluences developed. Focusing primarily on the Maftirim repertoire (Hebrew religious compositions that closely parallel Ottoman classical suite forms), this study is part of a larger dissertation project encompassing the late Ottoman and Republican eras as dynamic periods of musical and social change. Through several biographies of late Ottoman/early Republican Jewish composers in the framework of an "art world," it is possible to conceptualize a classical music world in Jewish and non-Jewish musicians met regularly in relatively inclusive spaces in the city, thus developing a common classical music practice across religious lines. The Mevlevi lodge and palace represented important spaces, owing to their centrality to classical music education, with longterm historical evidence of musical interchange between lodge and synagogue, and invitations for Jewish composers to teach or perform at the palace. Later, at the turn of the 20th century other musical venues developed, such as music stores and schools, as well as recording studios, where diverse musicians would meet. Specifically, it was Jewish composers who also held positions of authority in the synagogue (chief rabbi, head of a single congregation or prayer leader) who served as primary cultural carriers of classical music between synagogue and broader musical culture, owing to their status to circulate among certain places and people, and their role in transmitting the music in the synagogue.
If we combine evidence from these Jewish biographies with the extensive documentation of broader patterns of Ottoman music-making, it is clear that such multiethnic musical meetings and activities were not random, but rather that Jews and other minorities were integrally involved in a broader classical music culture. In addition to cohesive socio-economic patterns, such as palace patronage and division of musical labor, master-pupil relationships were particularly significant to this world, because the task of orally transmitting complex pieces established uniquely intensive reciprocal relations between master and pupil. Through numerous examples of long-term teaching relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians, we can see that Ottoman and Turkish chains of master-pupils were essentially multireligious.
In the Republican period, given the cultural distancing from things Ottoman, as well as important European-leaning and secularizing social and legal reforms, what happened to this Ottoman music world? In addition, given the gradual out-migration of Turkish Jews over the course of the 20th century, what happened to its Hebrew forms? Diverse changes in the Republic did adversely affect the music and musicians, such as closure of Sufi lodges, debates about an appropriate national music, and increasing contention between European ('alafranga') and Turkish ('alaturka') cultural forms, with state funds shifting from Turkish to European music education programs. However, in the two or three decades before 1923, the recording industry and gazinos (nightclubs) had become so well-established that they partially offset these impacts by providing alternative spaces and patrons for Turkish classical music in all its forms. Moreover, numerous minorities were involved in these commercial enterprises, as agents for European or American record companies based in Istanbul, or as owners of gazinos. Since the commercial sphere was responding to tastes on the street, not those of reforming minority, the 1920s witnessed a rise rather than fall in popular Turkish classical and Hebrew religious music-making in the new Republic.
It is in the 1930s that there are increasing pressures on both Ottoman classical music and on minority musicians such as Jews. On the one hand, Jewish composer-leaders began to leave Turkey, and on the other, the state began more seriously to develop European-style music conservatories through hiring European artists. The life-story of Isak Algazi, a prominent Jewish composer and prayer leader who was supportive of the Republic, is helpful in tracing artistic and economic reasons for such Turkish-Jewish departures through his experiences of exclusion (from civil service and record contracts) in a time of civil employment discrimination and changing Republican musical tastes. Concomitantly, in the early 1930s the state began to develop European-style conservatories by hiring German and Austrian artists, who were often Jewish and fleeing Nazi Germany, to establish music curricula and to teach in Turkey. Paul Hindemith represents the most famous example (his wife was Jewish), while others helped to establish Turkish opera, ballet and symphony in the following decade. Commonly discussed in separate scholarship, these two episodes in juxtaposition reflect how movements of Jewish artists, whether Turkish or European, participated in bearing important musical changes in the Turkish Republic by developing 'alafranga' over 'alaturka' cultural forms.
In the end, for Jewish classical musicians remaining in Turkey who did not circulate in the commercial music industry and official service, it is in civil society realm that they continued to participate in classical music making. One of the spaces of interaction with non-Jewish musicians is the ev toplantiları (home sessions), which, as musical gatherings with Ottoman precedence, took on significance in the Republic as places where classical artists sought to sustain traditional classical music against commercialization and lack of state educational funding. Given the evidence, these regular weekly or monthly meetings at homes of patrons represented diverse gatherings where traditionalist classical musicians learned and performed music, as well as engaging in intellectual, and sometimes religious, discussion. In this way, through friendships and meeting places such as home gatherings, Jewish classical musicians networked with others musicians in ways not unlike their late Ottoman counterparts. At the same time they circulated in a more contested and divided music world than in the past: the dichotomy and hierarchy between 'alafranga' and 'alaturka' music had disadvantaged Ottoman classical music for a period of time, and an arguably trifurcated music world (official, commercial and civic spheres) had developed to include or exclude certain kinds of music and musicians. In a context of the attenuation of both a musical genre and the minority Jewish population of Turkey, it is the civic sphere of classical music, its friendships and meeting-places, that has helped to sustain Hebrew classical music-making into the 21st century. Thus, one of the dimensions of Ottoman classical music-making that implicitly motivated nationalizing music reforms - its multiethnic character - was not entirely suppressed, but sustained itself despite musical change and minority losses in the Turkish Republic.
Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author.
© Maureen Jackson, 2008
This paper is based in part on research conducted in Istanbul through a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for International Dissertation Research, 2005-06. In Istanbul I am grateful to many people, including Rav Leon Adoni, Cem Behar, Bensi Elmas, Lina Filiba, Mehmet Güntekin, David Sevi, Karen Gerson Şarhon, and Abdurrahman Nevzat Tırışkan. I am also indebted to the scholarship of a number of researchers, including Cem Behar, Aaron Kohen, John Morgan O'Connell, Edwin Seroussi, and Cemal Ünlü. I thank those who commented on versions of this work, especially Münir Beken, Reşat Kasaba, Sarah Stein, and the Turkish Studies Group at the University of Washington. Please do not cite or reproduce this paper without permission of the author.
Zoe Griffith
American University
CASA Fellow
Honorable Mention - 2008 Competition
Calligraphy and the Art of Statecraft in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkish Republic Statecraft and nationalism have been widely examined in the context of both the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish Republic. The overemphasis of the role of the state and major political figures in the intentional molding of Turkish cultural, political, and social life, however, has tended to obscure the important role played by those outside of the dominant circles of power in shaping what we might call a Turkish "national identity."
This paper hopes to suggest one alternative lens through which to view changes in state institutions and identity construction during an extended period of dramatic change in Turkey. From the final decades of Ottoman rule and through the 20th century, Islamic calligraphy has contributed and been subject to some of the major state policies that have dramatically influenced Ottoman and Turkish society. At the same time, however, calligraphy and calligraphers have always retained an important distance from state control. It is this distance that has permitted Islamic calligraphy to flourish in Turkey even in times of deep state crisis. It also allows us to explore the interactions of the state with non-state actors in the delicate process of negotiating a national identity.
Islamic calligraphy enjoyed unique prestige under the Ottomans, and is also widely recognized as having reached new heights of achievement under their patronage. However, that the art continued to flourish and innovate even during the empire's final decades is noteworthy for showcasing the degree to which calligraphy existed independently from the state. The master-apprentice system by which calligraphy is traditionally taught has preserved the art in a non-institutional context that was less subject to major upheavals in state institutions.
Also noteworthy is the survival of calligraphy and its continued appreciation and relevance in the modern Turkish Republic. Calligraphy and calligraphers had to contend with the concerted efforts of the Republican regime to distance Turkey from its Ottoman-Islamic past, of which Islamic calligraphy was a powerful visual reminder. Even more foreboding for the fate of calligraphy was the ban in 1928 of the use of the Arabic script for writing the Turkish language. That Islamic calligraphy continues to be practiced and recognized in modern Turkey, then, clearly runs counter to the declared intentions and attempts of the early Republican state to engineer a new state identity for the Turkish people. This continuity signals a resistance on the part of certain segments of society to the denial of this important cultural achievement on the grounds of its association with Islam and the Ottoman state. As such, it becomes clear that modern Turkish history could not be divorced from the history of the 600-year-old empire that preceded it, even when the state made doing so a top priority.
Many factors played a role in calligraphy's continued relevance in modern Turkey. Some of them were incidental, such as the impossibility of removing monumental calligraphy from iconic Ottoman buildings. Some, however, were more intentional, as we have seen, since the 1930s, repeated calls for the recognition of the Ottoman Turkish contribution to the art of Islamic calligraphy. Moreover, the strength of the master-apprentice system in passing down the calligraphic tradition has served to carry the art through periods in which no major sources of patronage were available, such as the early republican era. New sources of support, such as collectors, museums, and catalogues of Ottoman calligraphy have emerged in recent decades and aim to remind an ever-growing audience of this long-standing and vibrant tradition. The combined result of these many factors contributes to a more complete and coherent identity for modern Turkey than one that would have erased the Ottoman period from the Turkish memory.
Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author.
© Zoe Griffith, 2008
Denise R. Gill
University of California
Santa Barbara's Ethnomusicology and Women's Studies Department
Honorable Mention - 2008 Competition
Performing Meşk, (re)Articulating History:
Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices
Without love, no mastership can be attained
In contemporary Turkey, individuals deploy proverbial expressions (atasözü), such as the one above, in everyday contexts to illuminate or explain specific feelings and worldviews. Throughout my fieldwork, this one particular proverb was consistently given to me by my teachers, consultants and friends. Yet I heard this proverb couched in a variety of different contexts-from everyday speech acts meant to celebrate, to use in music lessons as a pedagogical tool, to being published as the title a book by Cem Behar (2003 [1998]). More obscure was my stumbling upon conflicting understandings of the proverb when I asked my teachers, consultants, and friends to explain what "Aşk olmayınca, meşk olmaz" actually meant. After looking over my field notes from formal interviews, archival research, field conversations, and comfortable discussions in between lessons, at gatherings and rehearsals, at formal parties with fasıl entertainment, and at the içki masası (drinking table), I realized that the polysemy of this proverb illuminates the very struggles that Turkish classical musicians engage with in their everyday life, in dealing with (dis)continuous senses of historical consciousness. What does the language and understanding(s) of this proverb disclose about Ottoman legacies in contemporary Turkish identity practices? What histories and memories does this proverb perform?
This essay focuses on one word: meşk. In Ottoman contexts, meşk referred to the prescribed unfolding of transmission over a long period of time between a master (usta) and an apprentice (çırak). In contemporary Turkey, multiple conflicting definitions and understandings of meşk coexist as performances and narrations of history and memory. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Istanbul during 2004 and 2005, I examine interpretations of meşk as performances directly engaged with musicians' historical situatedness. The existence of conflicting understandings of meşk within the distinctive discursive realms of the master-apprentice system, state-sponsored places, and consumer circuits indicates competing discourses that illuminate the workings of different hegemonic power structures.
Practices and products of Turkish classical music have undergone extreme and often violent changes, from the cultural policies of the nation-state, to the various institutions that maintain and (re)create specific hegemonic ideologies. In all of these performative statements of meşk, individuals are doing more than simply articulating practices of musical transmission or worldviews-they are in the world through their understandings of meşk. Performances of meşk work to place individuals in a tradition in which their past, present, and future are all fused together in their understanding and social identity. In a way, the maintenance and recreation of meşk shows what is most poetically true about the struggle of the historical composition of being: the memory of the past does not lead smoothly into the present.
Meşk thus sheds light on how history is narrated in formal and informal (institutional) discourses and performed as identity. I argue that utterances, definitions, appropriations, and articulations of meşk are performances directly engaged with the constant (re)creation of history. Individuals live history through performative utterances of meşk. In this essay, I therefore unpack identity practices (how individuals position themselves through interpretations of meşk), performances (how individuals perceive and narrate themselves as belonging to history), and engagement with the work of art (Turkish classical music and practices of transmitting the same) to come to an enlarged understanding of the historical composition(s) of being in contemporary Turkey.
Please do not cite or reproduce without permission of the author.
© Denise R. Gill, 2008