"Oriental Ornaments and Curiosities": The Bazaar Identity of Ottoman Jews in America

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, before the 1908 revolution, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War led thousands of Jews from Ottoman lands to seek refuge in the Americas, individual Ottoman Jewish merchants began arriving in the United States in search of economic opportunity. Many had an occupational affinity to deal in things Oriental. As vendors of Oriental carpets, Turkish tobacco, Turkish coffee or as owners of Ottoman-style restaurants, these different merchants sold their identity as well as their wares to an untried American public. Donning fezzes and turbans and even bearing swords for the camera at times, they both conformed to and helped shape the (sometimes still inchoate) image Americans had of an ideal “Turkish” type. Although the “Turk” Americans envisioned hailed from a land of minarets and mosques, neither these Ottoman Jewish merchants nor the Americans they encountered voiced opposition to the prospect that a Jew from the East could embody the traditions of the Islamic Orient. If this worked on the American side of the equation it was partly because little agreement had been reached as to what made a Near Eastern Oriental authentic. Often, it sufficed for Americans desirous of capturing the essence of the East to encounter someone professing to be an Oriental. Ottoman Jews—who had already begun self-consciously positioning themselves as Orientals (in Turkish style) in writing as well as through dress, interior design, and occupational choices well before their journey across the Atlantic—thus found a perfect audience in America. Following the translation of these Ottoman Jewish merchants’ self-orientalizing impulses into American idioms, this talk seeks to highlight the nexus between imported imperial allegiances, performative identity, Orientalism, religion, and race-making in turn-of-the-century America.