Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how Turkish Jews seek an inconspicuous presence through register switch for passing as part of Sunni-Muslim majority. I identify notions of class and race in performances of the salient (Sunni-Turkish) personhood and their aesthetic aspects to analyze ideologies of markedness.

Paper Abstract:

Jews in Turkey are regularly categorized as foreigners in everyday life despite their status as full citizens and their historical presence in the region for over 500 years. As a religiously marked minority who historically experienced violence and discrimination in Turkish context, most Jews downplay their religious identity in public sphere, erasing public markers of Jewishness to appear “less Jewish” then they are. Apart from erasure, some occasionally perform affiliation to majoritarian Turkishness through performing a figure of Muslim-Turkish personhood regarded as ethnoreligiously unmarked in the national context. This paper examines instances of register switch of my Turkish Jewish interlocutors towards performing similitude to and membership in the Turkish-Muslim majority. To analyze broader ideas around ethnoreligious markedness and unmarkedness in contemporary Turkish context, I study the citational practices through which my interlocutors index a rather unmarked or inconspicuous presence with particular focus on intentionality, embodiment, and performance. I point to crystallizations of a figure of personhood, and an aesthetic register that has classed and racialized undertones. Such codeswitch and roleplay, I argue, are neither simple acts of mockery or dismissal, nor result of conscious decisions at times; but (1) they provide protective passing in potentially anti-Semitic environments; and (2) they serve as to mark what has historically and socially been regarded as national “standard” or unmarked. By looking into the embodied aspects of these enactments, I discuss the unconscious, mechanical, and habitus-al workings of what my interlocutor calls “invisibility tactics.”