Religious difference, nationhood and citizenship in Turkey: public reactions to an interreligious marriage in 1962

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between religious difference, nationhood and secular citizenship in Turkey. Turkey is the only country in the Middle East which applies a non-religious and unified law to matters related to the family. The legislation of a secular civil law in 1926 has made interreligious marriages legally possible, removing institutional barriers to religious mixing in the private and intimate sphere of family. At the same time, religious difference remained central to the definition of who is included in, and excluded from, the nation. Against the backdrop of these seemingly competing understandings of religious difference, this article explores the arguments that ordinary citizens made in favor of or opposed to the second marriage in 1962 of Ülkü Adatape, the spiritual daughter of Atatürk, to Yeshua Bensusen, a Jewish citizen of Turkey. Drawing on the notes and proceedings of the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922/23, parliamentary depositories and newspaper reviews, it demonstrates that a paradox stemming from an ethnoreligious formation of Turkish nationhood, which has denied non-Muslim citizens recognition as full members of the nation, and the secular understanding of the private realm, which has in principle made religious difference inconsequential to the governance of family, simultaneously produced resistance to and justification for interreligious marriages. If the first decades of the republic laid the foundations of this paradox, the period between the transition into electoral democracy in 1946 and the military coup in 1960 intensified it making the link between ethnicity and religion stronger.