Breadwinner Soldiers in the Ottoman Empire

with Mostafa Hussein hosted by Chris Gratien | Zionism, as a cultural and political movement of Hebrew revival, sought to forge a connection between the modern Jewish people and a deep past located in the geography of late Ottoman and British Palestine. As our guest in this episode, Mostafa Hussein, explores in a new book, this revival in turn birthed an intellectual project of intimate and often contradictory engagement with Arabo-Islamic culture, a process that he describes as Hebrew Orientalism. As we discuss, Jewish orientalists from diverse backgrounds between East and West developed an interest in a variety of medieval Arabic texts, drawing on history, geography, botany, literature, and linguistics to forge cultural exchange in service of Zionist aspirations. Whether these scholars imagined a future of conflict or coexistence in Palestine, their work illuminates how Arab cultural heritage was integral to the remaking of modern Jewish identity.    « Click for More »

with Kate Dannies hosted by Sam Dolbee and Can Gümüş | For the last century of its history, the Ottoman army fought war after war for the survival of the empire. In this episode, Kate Dannies explores another fight for survival: that of millions of Ottoman families, as sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers were drafted into the new imperial army. As Prof. Dannies argues in her new book, the transition to a modern army staffed by conscripts created a new social contract between state and society with the "breadwinner soldier" at the center. As the Ottoman Empire made growing demands on its citizens, they made growing demands on the government to exempt or pay soldiers with dependents. When the mobilization of the Balkan Wars and the First World War prompted the Ottoman government to conscript breadwinner soldiers at unprecedented levels, many rebelled against the terms of military service. In this conversation, we explore the social history of the Ottoman Empire's last wars through the lens of family life, charting a new history of what war meant for ordinary Ottoman citizens.          « Click for More »

with Ashley Dimmig hosted by Abbey Stockstill and Musa Kazım Azimli | The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit.    « Click for More »

with Mustafa Aksakal hosted by Chris Gratien and Sıla Önder | The First World War brought an end to six centuries of Ottoman imperial rule and in many ways, made the Middle East region as it is known today. In this episode recorded live at the University of Virginia Institute for the Arts and Humanities, we are joined by Mustafa Aksakal, author of two books about the Ottoman Empire's involvement in WWI. In his new book The War That Made the Middle East, Prof. Aksakal takes a fresh look at the fateful decisions of the empire's last days, as well as how the First World War transformed Ottoman society and politics with devastating consequences for the people who lived it and lasting implications for the future Middle East region.    « Click for More »

with A. Tunç Şen hosted by Maryam Patton | What did it mean to know the future in the early modern Ottoman Empire? And who had the authority to interpret the heavens? In this episode, A. Tunç Şen discusses his new book Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600. Şen takes us into the world of Ottoman court munajjims—astral experts whose work combined mathematical astronomy, astrological interpretation, and political counsel—and uncovers the roles they fulfilled within the Ottoman court bureaucracy. They advised rulers and officials not usually on whether something should happen, but on when, including the auspicious timing of military campaigns, building projects, ceremonies, and other acts of state. Their authority rested on technical skill, especially the ability to calculate planetary positions and the ascendant, as well as on a broader cosmological understanding of how the heavens shaped events on earth. Under Bayezid II, munajjims enjoyed unusual prestige and high salaries, reflecting the sultan’s own interest in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophical kingship. Under Süleyman, however, their standing declined, while other forms of esoteric expertise, such as geomancy and letterism, became more prominent. By following the salaries, writings, frustrations, and ambitions of Ottoman munajjims, Şen reconstructs a social history of scientific authority in the early modern Ottoman Empire.    « Click for More »

with Murat Yıldız hosted by Sam Dolbee | In the late Ottoman capital, imperial politics became a field of collaboration and competition between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, especially in the years following the 1908 constitutional revolution. And as our guest Murat Yıldız argues in a new book, the world of sports also emerged as an arena of political contestation, as gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, boxers, coaches, teachers, journalists, and fans pursued a civic project that blended athletics, aesthetics, morality, and community. Sport did not erase the communal boundaries that existed off the field, but it often transcended them, as middle and upper class men participated in a shared culture that equated the physical development of the body with the moral development of the person. In this conversation, we explore the Ottoman world of sports at the end of empire, as the growth of a multiethnic civil society facilitated to the proliferation of sports club and writing about athletics, gender, and the body in the Ottoman public press.          « Click for More »

Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state. This episode is part of our investigative series Deporting Ottoman Americans.    « Click for More »

with Mine Yıldırım hosted by Önder Eren Akgül | What does canine life reveal about the human worlds of modern Istanbul? In this special collaboration with Keyman Podcast at Northwestern University, we sit down with Mine Yıldırım, curator of the exhibition "Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul," to discuss the intersecting histories of cruelty and compassion towards animals in Turkey's largest city from the late Ottoman period to the present.    « Click for More »

with Ayşehan Jülide Etem hosted by Chris Gratien and Sıla Önder | During the Cold War period, Turkish cinema flourished, as American films entered local theaters, television sets, and the studios of Yeşilçam. Yet as Jülide Etem argues in her new book, Film Diplomacy, the cinematic story of Turkey-US relations begins not with entertaining Hollywood movies that circled the globe but rather educational film productions that simultaneously furthered the interests of American overseas power and Turkish domestic policy. In this episode, we explore how film became a ubiquitous technology and tool of the nation-state in Turkey through informational movies, educational material designed for the classroom, and place-based documentaries that performed the dual role of promoting tourism and cultivating knowledge of the country's different provinces among its citizens. As Etem explains, these ambivalent co-productions shaped an image of Turkey's inclusion in the international order, making film an arena in which visions of Turkey could be used to reify notions of American supremacy, as the Turkish national elite claimed their own place among the white Euro-American civilizations that became as models for values like development and progress in the modern world.    « Click for More »

with Jane Hathaway hosted by Maryam Patton | What can a single, discarded scrap of paper reveal about life in Ottoman-era Cairo? In this episode, Jane Hathaway discusses her open-access book Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah. A genizah is a storeroom or repository where Jewish communities preserved worn-out texts and papers, especially those containing the name of God. Long famous for its medieval Jewish materials, the Cairo Genizah also preserves a rich and still understudied corpus of later Arabic- and Ottoman Turkish-script documents. The conversation explores some of this archive’s unexpected Ottoman afterlife, from Sharia court summaries and commercial records to petition letters, Sufi poetry, and an ilm-i hal primer on Islamic practice. The book, which presents the documents fully transcribed and translated with a scholarly commentary, sheds light on Jewish merchants and bankers, Ottoman officials, port customs in Damietta and Alexandria, sugar supplies bound for Istanbul, and the dense networks linking Cairo to the wider empire, and much more. The conversation also invites us to reflect on archives themselves: how documents survive, how scholars decipher them, and how collaborative reading can open new windows onto Ottoman and Jewish history.    « Click for More »