Kulüp (The Club)
Turkey’s Television Series Including Ladino with a Jewish Protagonist
Reviewed by Dr. Gökhan Çınkara1 and Oğul Tuna2
Numerous Turkish television series have spread over the globe in the last decade. However, a new period drama, Kulüp (The Club), came with controversy. Focusing on individual and societal relations in one of the most prominent nightclubs of Istanbul, Grand Rue de Péra (or Cadde-i Kebir3 in Ottoman Turkish,), the series has led to a serious debate confronting the discriminatory policies against non-Muslim minorities in the 1940s and 1950s. It has also allowed international viewers to meet the once multicultural and multicolor life in Istanbul.
This is not the entire picture, however. With Kulüp, Turkey’s Jewish community is introduced for the first time to the larger society and displayed on the screen with its long-forgotten or ignored traditions, customs, and language. Many in Turkey, even some Turkish Jews, have expressed their joy after hearing Ladino in a Turkish television production. Moreover, Kulüp is the first Turkish series with a Jewish protagonist, Matilda Aseo. However, controversies and debates about the series erupted because of its timeline. The first scene of the first episode starts with a murder, Matilda’s revenge for her family after Varlık Vergisi (Wealth Tax). The whole series finishes with the allegoric murders of Turkey’s non-Muslim, especially Greek, minorities during the Istanbul pogrom of 1955. Kulüp, nevertheless, is not the first occasion to face off the infamous Wealth Tax of 1942 or the Istanbul pogrom. Yılmaz Karakoyunlu’s Mrs. Salkım’s Diamonds4 was developed into a film drama in 1999, and more recently, the adaptation of another Karakoyunlu work, Pains of Autumn,5 was released in 2009. None of the previous movies or series gave the Jewish community in Turkey such a significant role.
Thus, it is necessary to mention many important aspects of Kulüp. Firstly, the production provided an opportunity to refresh or update the general and prevailing historical narrative in the country. While during the imperial period, the political sphere was limited within a family, the Sublime Porte dealt with the social divisions primarily through religious compartmentalization, the so-called millet system. The Ottoman Empire was the land of Muslims and the rest, non-Muslims.
Ottoman Jews were a part of the other party. The relationship between the ruling Muslims and the Jews, however, was different than that between the former and the Christian minorities. The Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire did not have solid connections with other Jews in other areas for a long period of time. Therefore, the idea of Jewishness was not perceived as a threat by the Ottomans. In addition, the Ottoman elites benefitted from the technical knowledge of the Jews which they saw as an opportunity.
The propagation and popularization of nationalism in Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century had an effect upon the Ottoman Jewish communities. Egalitarian ideas for every nation and emerging self-determination augmented the peril of partition for the multiethnic empires. Thus, the increasing legitimacy of Zionism and its transformation into a realistic political project attracted the attention of Ottoman elites to this ideology, and consequently to the Jews in the Empire. With the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a new kind of citizenship recognized all of the different ethnicities and religious groups living in the nation, including the Jews.
The establishment of Constitution-based citizenship has faced challenges at intervals while managing the hardened and stratified social relationships between the ethnic and religious communities that Turkey inherited in the post-imperial period. The construction of a national identity and the establishment of a modern bureaucracy were simultaneous processes. The state apparatus, therefore, could have restrained the influence of civil dynamics over Turkish modernization. In addition, Turkey has confronted many geopolitical challenges; the ethnic communities within the country have been treated as agents of different political actors in the region. Due to these reasons, Turkey’s relationship with its minorities, in general, and with the Jews in particular was heavily determined by two macro-processes in the modern era: nation-building and geopolitical balancing.
Kulüp actually presents a dramatic narrative of the reflections of micro-experiences of modern Turkey, which was in the midst of a macro-transformation. Modernization and nation-building ultimately lead to a standardization that comes with the state power. This situation lead to the adaptation, or, probably and unfortunately, elimination of the local and traditional in favor of the majority culture. In the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many successor states moved in this direction. Turkey, on the other hand, as a social structure that did not allow for a large-scale transformation, advanced under the guidance of a top-down bureaucracy.
The historic disasters of the Wealth Tax and the Istanbul pogrom resulted in the monolithicization of Turkish society. The Jewish community was primarily affected by the former, the aim of which was to finance the national defense budget during the Second World War. In turn, the tax generated a transfer of capital from the non-Muslim minorities to the Muslim bourgeoisie. The latter is largely accepted as the strongest coup to Istanbul’s carnivalesque and multiethnic structure.
Kulüp, seen as a carnival or a tragedy, demonstrates a long-forgotten lifestyle in the country. Matilda struggles to rebuild her life under the thumb of a bullying Muslim boss, who turns out to be a lover of hers from all eternity. Simultaneously, the presence of Selim Songür, who is reminiscent of Turkey’s “Sun of Art,” Zeki Müren,6 brings the question and existence of sexual minorities into the historical context.
Despite outstanding performances from the leading and supporting actresses and actors, the series’ narrative does not represent much novelty. Some characters like Kürşat, the state official behind the Istanbul pogrom, are portrayed as pure evil without any in-depth description of his character. On the other hand, with the dynamics between Tasula, the non-Muslim woman, and Bahtiyar, the naive Anatolian Muslim, the story-telling chooses to refer to the romance cliché dominantly used since the Tanzimat era. With Kulüp, however, a new era for the portrayal of minorities on Turkish television has started. The viewer frequently sees the emphasis on the difficulty of being present, represented, and gaining agency in the public sphere. Moreover, the interest in the Ladino language and the complex relationship established between the Jews and the general Turkish society will likely bring about new questions and conversations. In the end, the existence of exclusive, rather than inclusive, practices have a direct connection with the modernization process and elite-led transformation in Turkey. Kulüp, as a manifestation of modernity, interrogates the limits of these processes and the efficiency of their results.
1 Dr. Gökhan Çınkara, assistant professor at Necmettin Erbakan University, focuses on Comparative Politics and Israeli Studies. He was a visiting researcher at Brandeis University in 2018 and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2016-17. Dr. Çınkara received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Ankara University.
2 Oğul Tuna is a Ph.D. student at the History Department of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). His research interests compass Connected History, transnational history in the Caucasus and the Middle East. His Master’s degree on International Relations is from the Institut d’études politiques de Lille.
3 Cadde-i Kebir is the most iconic avenue in Turkey; it had been the symbol of Ottoman Empire’s Western façade since the fifteenth century and the long Westernization process since the mid-nineteenth century.
4 Yılmaz Karakoyunlu, Salkım Hanım’ın Taneleri (Istanbul: Simavi Yayınları, 1990).
5 Yılmaz Karakoyunlu, Güz Sancısı (Istanbul: Simavi Yayınları, 1992).
6 “Sanat Güneşi” Müren was one of the most prominent figures of Turkish classical music in the twentieth century; his feminine-style performance and clothes starting in the 1950s made an impact on public opinion of questions of gender in the country.