Collective Memory Between Jewish and Muslim Turks
This paper examines how Jewish and Muslim communities in Turkey have constructed a shared collective memory, drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by Jan Assmann, Paul Connerton, and Maurice Halbwachs. It traces the historical roots of Turkey's Sephardic Jewish community to the Spanish Inquisition of 1492, explores concepts including cultural memory, communicative memory, prescriptive forgetting, repressive erasure, and incorporating versus inscribing practices, and applies these frameworks to contemporary interfaith outreach initiatives in Istanbul. The paper argues that shared experiences of displacement and refuge have created a foundation for collective identity formation between two minority communities within Turkish society.
- Cultural Memory: Assmann's theory of cultural vs. communicative memory
- Prescriptive Forgetting: Connerton on state-sanctioned forgetting of past wrongs
- Repressive Erasure and the Jewish History of Turkey: Jewish expulsion from Spain and arrival in Turkey
- Incorporating Practice and Inscribing Practice: Connerton's two types of social memory practice
- Assignation of Meaning to Memory: Kansteiner's critique of collective memory methodology
- Jewish and Islamic Turks: Incorporating Practice and Inscribing Practice: Istanbul interfaith outreach between Jews and Muslims
- Analysis: Shared displacement as foundation for collective identity
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper systematically introduces abstract theoretical frameworks (Assmann's cultural memory, Connerton's forgetting typologies) before applying them to a concrete historical and contemporary case, giving the argument a clear scaffolding.
- The use of extended primary-source quotations — from Telushkin on the 1492 expulsion and from the Newsweek account of Istanbul's interfaith outreach — grounds theoretical claims in vivid historical and journalistic evidence.
- The concluding analysis ties together the paper's historical and theoretical threads by invoking the shared Abrahamic heritage of both communities, providing an intellectually resonant synthesis rather than a mechanical summary.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates how to build a theoretical literature review that functions as an analytical toolkit. Rather than merely summarizing Assmann, Connerton, and Halbwachs in isolation, the author uses each concept — cultural memory, prescriptive forgetting, repressive erasure, incorporating and inscribing practice — as a lens that progressively illuminates the Turkish Jewish-Muslim case. This technique shows readers how theoretical frameworks explain real-world phenomena rather than existing alongside them.
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized into seven numbered or titled sections. Sections I–V build the theoretical foundation, moving from cultural memory to forgetting typologies to social practice theories. Section VI applies these frameworks directly to contemporary interfaith events in Istanbul, incorporating extended quotations from journalism and interviews. The final Analysis section synthesizes the historical and theoretical material into a concise argument about shared identity formation. This framework-then-application structure is a reliable model for theory-driven essays in the humanities and social sciences.
Cultural Memory
Cultural memory is defined through a double delimitation that distinguishes it, first, from what Assmann calls "communicative or everyday memory," which in the narrower sense lacks cultural characteristics; and secondly, from science, which does not have the characteristics of memory as it relates to a collective self-image (Assmann, 2001, p. 125). Communicative memory is reported to include "those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications" — that is, what constitutes an oral historical account (Assmann, 2001, p. 125). Everyday communication, according to Assmann, "is characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization" (2001, p. 125). This generally occurs "between partners who can change roles" (Assmann, 2001, p. 125).
Occasions are stated to be those that "more or less predetermine such communications, for example train rides, waiting rooms or the common table," including the rules that regulate this exchange. Communication results in the individual composing a memory that is, first, socially mediated and, second, related to a group (Assmann, 2001, paraphrased). Oral history has greatly contributed to the understanding of the qualities of collective memory in their everyday form. Assmann states that once an individual removes themselves from the occasion of everyday communication and enters "into the area of objectivized culture," there is a resulting change in practically everything. Indeed, Assmann argues that this transition "is so fundamental that one must ask if the metaphor of memory can still be applied."
Assmann further states that communicative memory is characterized "by its proximity to the everyday," while cultural memory is characterized "by its distance from the everyday. Distance from the everyday (transcendence) marks its temporal horizon" (2001, p. 129). In other words, cultural memory contains a "fixed point" — its horizon does not change with the passing of time. "These fixed points are fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)" (Assmann, 2001, p. 129).
These are referred to as "figures of memory." Assmann states that in the "flow of everyday communications such as festivals, rites, epics, poems, images, etc., form 'islands of time' — islands of completely different temporality suspended from time" (2001, p. 129). Cultural memory involves such "islands of time," which are expansive in nature, extending into "memory spaces of retrospective contemplativeness" (Assmann, 2001, p. 129). Assmann identifies the following key characteristics of cultural memory:
(1) The concretion of identity, or the relation to the group. Cultural memory preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity.
(2) Its capacity to reconstruct. No memory can preserve the past. What remains is only that which society in each era can reconstruct within its contemporary frame of reference.
(3) Formation. The objectivation or crystallization of communicated memory and collectively shared knowledge is a prerequisite of its transmission in the culturally institutionalized heritage of a society.
(4) Organization. This means: (a) the institutional buttressing of communication through the formalization of the communicative situation in ceremony; and (b) the specialization of the bearers of cultural memory.
(5) Obligation. The relation to a normative self-image of the group engenders a clear system of values and differentiations in importance, which structures the cultural supply of knowledge and its symbols.
(6) Reflexivity. Cultural memory is reflective in three ways: (a) it is practice-reflexive in that it interprets common practice through proverbs, maxims, and ethno-theories; (b) it is self-reflexive in that it draws on itself to explain, distinguish, reinterpret, criticize, censure, control, surpass, and receive hypoleptically; and (c) it is reflexive of its own image insofar as it reflects the self-image of the group through a preoccupation with its own social system (Assmann, 2001, pp. 130–132).
Prescriptive Forgetting
The work of Connerton (2008), entitled "Seven Types of Forgetting," states that "prescriptive forgetting is precipitated by an act of state, but differs from erasure because it is believed to be in the interest of all parties to the previous dispute and because it can therefore be acknowledged publicly" (p. 61). A prototype was provided by the Ancient Greeks, who were "acutely aware of the dangers intrinsic to remembering past wrongs because they well knew the endless chains of vendetta revenge to which this so often led. And since the memory of past misdeeds threatened to sow division in the whole community and could lead to civil war, they saw that not only those who were directly threatened by motives of revenge but those who wanted to live peacefully together in the polis had a stake in not remembering" (Connerton, 2008, p. 61).
Repressive Erasure and the Jewish History of Turkey
Repressive erasure, states Connerton, is a form of forgetting "in its most brutal form, in the history of totalitarian regimes, where 'the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting'" (Milan Kundera, cited in Connerton, 2008, p. 60). History has largely forgotten how many Jews now live in Turkey, or the Jewish history contained within that country's borders. Many Jews fled from Spain to Turkey during the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. In fact, Christopher Columbus's diary tells of how, in the same month that he was given the order to "undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies," their Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella "issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories" (Telushkin, 1991, p. 1).
Reports state that this expulsion "was so cataclysmic an event that ever since, the date 1492 has been almost as important in Jewish history as in American history. On July 30 of that year, the entire Jewish community, some 200,000 people, were expelled from Spain" (Telushkin, 1991, p. 1).
Tens of thousands of refugees lost their lives attempting to reach safety. As Telushkin recounts: "In some instances, Spanish ship captains charged Jewish passengers exorbitant sums, then dumped them overboard in the middle of the ocean. In the last days before the expulsion, rumors spread throughout Spain that the fleeing refugees had swallowed gold and diamonds, and many Jews were knifed to death by brigands hoping to find treasures in their stomachs" (1991, p. 1). The expulsion was described as a "pet project of the Spanish Inquisition, headed by Father Tomás de Torquemada" (Telushkin, 1991, p. 1). It was Torquemada's belief that "as long as the Jews remained in Spain, they would influence the tens of thousands of recent Jewish converts to Christianity to continue practicing Judaism" (Telushkin, 1991, p. 1). The king and queen concluded that the Jews "were expendable," and the expulsion decree was issued, giving Jews four months to convert to Christianity or leave. The Spanish Jews who settled in Turkey and other countries — including North Africa and Italy — are known as the Sephardim, as Sefarad is the Hebrew name for Spain. During World War I, approximately 2.9 million Muslims were either killed or forced to migrate to Turkey (Telushkin, 1991, paraphrased).
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