Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style, and the Performance of Heritage

Abstract

WHEN, IN THE EARLY 1890S, OTTOMAN JEWS began to appear in Chicago in anticipation of the 1893 World’s Fair, many American observers were perplexed at first. In one author’s words, the “looks and garb” of these foreign visitors to the Windy City led him “to believe them Mohammedan.”1 Others decided that they were Turks, such as the editors of The Chicago Times Portfolio of the Midway Types, who labeled Robert Levy—an Ottoman Jewish merchant who managed the empire’s exhibit at the fair and who was photographed wearing the attire of an Ottoman Muslim religious scholar—a “typical Turk,” or “Rosa”—a Jewish woman from Ottoman Salonica—a “Turkish dancer.” (See Figures 1–2.) Fairgoers’ disorientation was not helped by the fact that these Eastern Jews used the newly constructed mosque built on the Midway—where Muslim employees of the Ottoman exhibit regularly prayed—as the site of their Yom Kippur services.2 Once they discovered that the people dressed as Muslims or Turks were Jews, however, certain visitors expressed their disappointment. One chronicler of the fair explained that visitors in the know had begun to grumble that the “Turkish village” erected on the Midway Plaisance did not really “represent Turkey,” and that it was “purely a speculative enterprise of some Oriental Jews.”3 Equally vexing for those who sought an unadulterated glimpse of Eastern life in Chicago, many of the performers in the Midway’s Turkish Village were caught changing into Western-style suits and dresses between their Oriental acts. During the same period, Sultan Abdulhamid II and various Ottoman officials