La comunità ebraica di Istanbul sospesa tra nostalgia neo-ottomana e memoria repubblicana

Memory studies that since the 1980s have spread in Turkey in relation to the Ottoman Empire have generated a wave of nostalgia for the Ottoman governance and society. At the same time, a political culture has spread which, inspired by reflective nostalgia, places the past, present and future in close relationship since, as Esra Özyürek states, “nostalgia is far from being just an imagination of the past. Rather it is a powerful and versatile means of relating and transforming the present ” (Özyürek, 2007:177). Considering that the Ottoman Empire is also considered by many historians to be the golden age of Ottoman / Turkish Judaism, it is legitimate to ask whether contemporary Turkish Jews share this neo-Ottoman nostalgia or whether they look with regret at the early years of the Republic when the state secularism seemed to offer them a real integration into the new republican Turkey. In order to find an answer to this question, several members of the Turkish Jewish community have been interviewed employing semi-structured and autobiographical interviews. Thus, through their testimonies, it has been possible to verify how the dramatic changes that have occurred in Turkey in the last hundred years have influenced the perception of being a “Turkish Jew” in the present. In fact, as Alessandro Portelli states, oral history is "a perfect tool for studying how the past is read, interpreted and lived in the present"(Portelli, 1979).