ISTANBUL (JTA) – Imported Israeli TV has given Netflix several big hits in recent years, mostly focused on the plight of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. The latest breakout show about a Jewish community is very different.
“The Club” is a Turkish drama about a Sephardic family in 1950s Istanbul, and it both reshapes the portrayal of the roughly 15,000 Jews living in Turkey today and offers American audiences a window into a corner beneath. -explored the Jewish world.
The first episode of “The Club” (translated from “Kulüp”), which debuted on Netflix on November 5 and is available to US streaming platform subscribers, begins with a Sabbath prayer in Hebrew and ends with a Ladino song. It only delves deeper from there, weaving the intricacies of Jewish observance and the country’s ever-present struggle between acceptance of minorities and assimilation into its plot.
From the discussion of Shabbat rules to the tradition of kissing a mezuzah upon entering a room, to scenes shot in Turkish synagogues, many Turkish Jews have found the show a revelation – especially as the Jewish characters are generally relegated to stereotypes in Turkish. fabrications. Turkish is the main language of the series, but there is Ladino – the historic language of Sephardic Jewish community, a mix of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, and Aramaic alongside Turkish, Greek, Arabic, and Russian. ‘other languages ​​- in each episode.
“The Jews were just happy to see each other,” Eli Haligua, editor of the Turkish Jewish newspaper Avlaremoz, told the Jewish Telegraph Agency.
It’s not just Jews who watch it either, as the show has become popular across a large part of Turkish society.
While the series can be convoluted at times and its ultimate resolution disappointing, the true strength of the series lies in the world of Turkish minorities that it portrays. The names of his characters clearly show: there is Agop (Armenian); Yanni, Tasula and Niko (Greeks); and of course, Mathilde, Davit, RaÅŸel and Mordo (Sephardic Jews).
Much of “The Club” takes place in Istanbul’s Galata district, colloquially known as Kula, a site that evokes a strong sense of nostalgia for Turkish Jews. Today it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Istanbul, thanks to its eponymous tower, but at the time the show takes place, the neighborhood was home to a large and tight-knit Jewish community, where Ladino was as likely to be heard in its winding streets and alleys as Greek or Turkish.
To get the set right, the show’s producers brought in many prominent Ladino speakers from the Turkish Jewish community, including theater actor Izzet Bana, actress Forti Barokas and Karen Åžarhon, also an actress and editor-in-chief of the latest Ladino-printed magazine, El Ameneser. They and several other members of Istanbul’s Jewish community had small roles in the series.
“I saw five or seven people on the show that I know in person,†said Haligua. “So of course I felt a part of the story.”
Set in the 1950s, the plot follows Matilda (played by Gökçe Bahadir), a Sephardic Jewish woman who has just been released from prison, her daughter Raşel (pronounced Rashel, and played by Asude Kalebek) and the other employees of the box of titular night, Club Istanbul, where Mathilde finds herself working.
When the viewer first meets Matilda, she was locked up for a murder she committed as a teenager. The identity of the victim and his motive are initially unclear, but as one mystery is revealed another is introduced.
Jewish themes emerge throughout the drama. A conflict begins between Matilda and her main foil, the brutal Çelebi (pronounced Chelebi and played by Firat Taniş) when the latter forces her to work until the start of Shabbat during his first week at the club.
“Ah, that day when you don’t even touch a light switch,†Çelebi said smugly before turning them off, leaving Matilda to work in the dark as Shabbat approached.
Episodes later, Çelebi’s true story is revealed in the middle of a Purim party, and quickly followed by a skillfully delivered monologue by Bana, a Ladino theater veteran.
“You must know what Purim is, Mathilde,” said Haymi, Bana’s character. “It is the feast of contradictions, the revelation of what was hidden.”
Gökçe Bahadir as Matilda Aseo in “The Club”. (Mehmet Ali Gök / Netflix)
The six-part series is not director Zeynep Günay Tan’s first experience with a Jewish audience. One of his past projects, “The Bride of Istanbul”, became a smash hit in Israel, where Turkish soap operas have become increasingly popular in recent years.
Since the Arab Spring ten years ago, Turkey’s film and television industry has replaced that of Egypt as the largest and most influential in the Muslim world. But even though Turkey has a large Jewish population, unlike Egypt, the change has not resulted in meaningful representation.
“Until today, we had only heard the names of these people on Turkish television: the textile merchant Nedim, the pawnshop Salomon, the agent of Mossad Moshe, the businessman. Jewish Mison, etc. Istanbul-born Jew Gabi Behiri wrote on Twitter in Turkish last week. “In other words, a uniform and generalized Jew was shown to people living in Turkey, using all known anti-Semitic tropes.”
In contrast, “The Club” portrays its Jewish characters, rich and poor, in a largely sympathetic light.
“One of the main things that people were really happy about was that the Jewish characters weren’t presented as bad guys or some kind of usurer,†said Haligua. “It was one of the first times that all minorities and non-Muslims were portrayed, not as villains or enemies, but in fact as victims of the policy of Turkification,” or the practice of forced assimilation that characterized a large part of the Turks. the story.
“It was kind of a big step,” he added. “And not only for the Jewish people, but also for the Armenian people and the Greek people. “
The show tackles another taboo in Turkish history: the timeline places the show in the aftermath of the infamous Fortune Tax of the 1940s and the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955.
The Wealth Tax, or Varlik Vergisi, was a policy of the Turkish Republic instituted in 1942. Its stated purpose was to fund a standing army in case Turkey was invaded by the Nazis or the Soviet Union. In reality, the goal turned out to be a transfer of wealth from the non-Muslim minorities, which were important in Turkey’s merchant classes, to the Muslim majority.
So while Muslims were taxed at a rate of less than 5% on the value of their real estate, Jews and Greeks saw rates well above 100%. The Armenians were the hardest hit with rates over 200%. For many, it exceeded their wealth, and those who could not pay within 15 days were sent to labor camps near the town of AÅŸkale in eastern Turkey. At least a thousand people worked hard on it, and dozens eventually worked to the death.
The law destroyed the financial well-being and security of many minority communities in Turkey, accelerating the exodus of Turkish Jews.
Almost half of Turkey’s Jewish population left the country between 1948 and 1951, following the establishment of the State of Israel. The Istanbul pogrom of 1955, which primarily targeted the Greek population but also affected Jews and Armenians, also prompted thousands more to emigrate.
The pogrom was instigated by the government of then Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and his ruling Democratic Party. During September 6-7, 1955, thousands of rioters who had been trucked into town were frantic over false reports that Greek nationalists had bombed Turkish consulates in Greece and the father’s childhood home. founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal. Atatürk, in Thessaloniki. For nine hours, they attacked Greek neighborhoods – which were often side by side with Jewish and Armenian neighborhoods – killing more than a dozen people and damaging thousands of properties, including 73 churches, two monasteries and a synagogue.
Menderes would be ousted from power in 1960 by a military coup.
In “The Club”, the viewer quickly learns that the wealth tax is what destroyed Matilda’s once happy family, sending her brother and father to AÅŸkale to work to death.
This story is known to most Turkish Jews, but not outside the community, as the subject has been almost untouchable in Turkish public discourse for almost eight decades.
“People had no idea what the wealth tax was,†Betsy Penso, another Istanbul-born Jew and writer for Avlaremoz who currently lives in Israel. “We try to explain this to our friends and even they fail to understand it because it is never taught in schools.”
Thanks to “The Club†and its popularity in Turkey, that could change. Avlaremoz has written frequently on the tax and its impact, including a special series of articles on it this spring. Since the show’s release, Penso said the site has seen a flood of new readers.
“We’ve been talking about wealth tax for at least five years now, but we could only reach people who were really already interested,†Penso said. “Now people who had no idea or who weren’t interested are doing their own research. “
