November 9, 1938, is a significant date in both German and Turkish history. […] Turks in Berlin were eyewitnesses to violence against German Jews that day, and some of them were targeted by the mob because they “looked Jewish.”
Tarık Emiroğlu, a Turkish student of architecture in Berlin in 1938 and 1939, mentioned in a letter to his grandmother that during the pogrom “a ruckus almost started when Turks dispersed into the street after having gathered at the [Turkish Club of Berlin’s] clubhouse upon hearing of Atatürk’s death. Seeing a lot of dark-skinned people gathering, Germans mistook the Turks for Jews who were planning a counter action and raised an uproar, but the police intervened and resolved the issue.”¹
[…]
Dirik’s account of those years is filled with terrible anxiety about being mistaken for a Jew and uncomfortable interactions with German Jewish women, which he feared would land him in danger. One day in 1936 when Dirik and a couple of Turkish friends found themselves having lunch in Munich in the same restaurant as Adolf Hitler, he reports:
Suddenly looking annoyed, the Führer called his aide and said something pointing to us. The SS officer came over to our table and asked if we knew German. My friends pointed to me. Turning to me, he asked our nationality and what we were doing in the city. When I said we were Turks pursuing higher education, he gave the Hitler salute and left us, and told Hitler the information.
The man’s sullen look immediately changed and he looked straight at us, smiling. Since both of my friends are dark skinned and have slightly crooked noses, Hitler probably thought we were Jews; because in this country the Jewish type looks like this.⁹²
Another time, he speaks of “sweating in fear” at the opera that [the German Fascists] would mistake his “dark-skinned and black-haired” mother for a Jew,⁹³ which ruined his enjoyment of the performance. In 1940 learning that the “dark-skinned” young woman who was his date was Jewish, he was unable to enjoy a dance.
Just as Sedat Alp had spurned the chance to save his Jewish landlady by marrying her, Dirik left this young Jewish woman to her fate—and never seems to have wondered what happened to her when reflecting on that evening decades later.⁹⁴
Turkish men at that time expressed fear and loathing of Jewish women. Their autobiographical accounts stand in stark contrast to the romantic relations portrayed in novels explored in Turkish-German Studies, especially those of Sabahattin Ali, Zafer Şenocak, and Doğan Akhanlı.⁹⁵
In the autobiographical accounts, fear did not transform into sympathy for Jews, whether German or Turkish. What we read instead is Turks substituting “Turks” (Turkish Muslims) for (German) “Jews” as the victims of the [Third Reich]. Tarık Emiroğlu mentions that although Germans had a favorable opinion of Turks, “if there is one thing about Germans that irritates us, it is that whether we are walking on the street or sitting somewhere, they look at us strangely because we are dark skinned.”⁹⁶
His narrative of violence against Jews during the November 9 pogrom immediately switches to depicting Turks as potential victims. Since they wore “Turkish rosettes,” he says, no one had abused or attacked them as Jews so far, but on Kristallnacht in 1938 they were mistaken for Jews seeking revenge.⁹⁷ After they were identified as Turks, however, they were let go unmolested.
During his years in Berlin, Şefik Okday (1909–2002), who studied at the Technische Hochschule from 1930 to 1933 and then earned a degree in engineering in Dresden in 1937, got to know the “ugly side” of [European Fascism], which for him was when Germans attacked Turks, thinking they were Jews.⁹⁸
Okday, too, immediately switches from briefly depicting attacks on Jews to describing at length how Turks were the victims of [Eurofascist] violence. He was in Germany at the time of the [NSDAP’s] rise to power and was sympathetic to the new régime: “To be honest, I also initially had great enthusiasm for the new ideas. One commits an injustice today reproaching Germans by saying, ‘You were with them from the start.’”⁹⁹
However, he notes, “I was soon witness to incidents that foreshadowed a later pogrom directed toward Jewish citizens.”¹⁰⁰ Here he was most likely referring to November 9, 1938. In the very next sentence he starts out by describing Turks as victims of the [German Fascists], deploying Turkish (Muslim) stereotypes about Turkish Jews speaking Turkish poorly. “Two Turkish students,” he related, “because they had dark skin and spoke German poorly, were mistaken for Jews and bludgeoned so badly by SA men that the bruises on their faces remained visible for weeks.”
Okday himself and his female companion were once cursed as “dirty Jews” because they did not show the necessary reverence to a passing torchlight procession. When, shortly after Hitler had become Reich’s chancellor, the Turkish cultural attaché Cevat Bey was severely maltreated “because he had dark skin and an aquiline nose,” it was the last straw for the Turkish ambassador, Kemaleddin Sami Pasha, a decorated World War I general, who donned his military dress uniform and medals, including the highest German World War I honors, and rushed to the Reich Chancellery.
Sami Pasha was “the only ambassador admitted to see Hitler at any time without an appointment,” Okday boasts, because Hitler had great respect for such war heroes.” According to accounts that circulated among Turkish students, their ambassador had “marched up the steps of the Reich Chancellery, shoved the bewildered SA guards out of the way,” and demanded “that dark-skinned Turks be left alone,” and that “SA men, before they bludgeoned a Jew, first examine [his] identification to make sure that they were not mistakenly laying their hands on a Turkish student.”¹⁰¹
Far from insisting that Turkish Jews not be harmed, the ambassador (and the students) assumed that “Turk” equated with Muslim, and expressed no opposition to the persecution of Jews.
In his autobiography, Müstecib Ülküsal, a fascist based in Berlin from 1941 to 1942 working with the [European Fascists] promoting the [capture] of Soviet Crimea, describes the “comic” experience of an Azeri named Hilal Münşi.¹⁰²
After the [German Fascists] came to power, Münşi told him, “they began to take Jews from their homes and the streets and send them to camps. Even though I do not belong to the Semitic race, I probably look sufficiently like a Jew that they seized me on the street and took me to the police station with the aim of deporting me to a camp. I tried to explain as best as I could that I was not a Jew but an Azeri Turk. They then demanded to see my organ, which had the mark of Jewishness. I tried to explain that Muslims also had this mark, which had passed from Judaism to Islam. But they did not believe it. They incarcerated me for several days. I gave them the names of some respected Germans I knew, and owing to their testifying on my account, I escaped from this difficult misfortune and dangerous situation.” Ülküsal comments: “Hilal really does look like a Jew. And he is clever.”
[…]
In a […] 1941 cable from the Turkish ambassador to Berlin, Hüsrev Gerede, to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara reporting the Holocaust as it unfolded speaks of the annihilation of “nearly one million” Jews before proceeding to note another such tragic case of mistaken identity: “According to information obtained from some Azeri Turks, 500 Turks denounced by the Russians as ‘members of the Jewish race’ have been murdered on the front by Germans.”¹⁰⁵
(Emphasis added. It is unclear if by ‘Russians’ Hüsrev Gerede was referring to the Kremlin, why the Kremlin would denounce these particular Turks as ‘Jewish’ if so, or if by ‘Russians’ he was referring to somebody else, perhaps even the White Russians.)
Those of us who have heard about the infamous report of a Sikh being the first victim of Islamomisia after September 11, 2001, or are otherwise familiar with how discriminations (e.g. cissexism) sometimes impact unintended targets, should recognize this phenomenon immediately. It is not restricted to antisemitism, though antisemitism is probably where it is most apparent given the notoriously variable criteria for Jewhood: it is a matter of historical record that Muslims have been victims of both antisemitism and anti-Judaism before.
Antisemitism would be disgusting even if it never affected gentiles, since no innocents should have to suffer, but it is unfortunate that not all of the gentile victims thereof had changes of heart after experiencing its consequences first-hand. This is because the victims of misfires do not always take it as an opportunity to reconsider their misconceptions of the intended targets, and the benefits of oppression still seem to outweigh the disadvantages. When somebody in Florida shot a settler whom he mistook for a Palestinian, the victim dismissed the shooter as a Palestinian himself, which suggests that he still saw privileges to gain from colonizing the rest of Palestine.
Forcing oppressors to suffer the direct consequences of their discrimination can sometimes push them in the right direction, but the surest way to disarm their oppression is to demonstrate how the disadvantages would outweigh the benefits. Presently, we are witnessing settlers in occupied Palestine experiencing a mere fraction of the misery that they inflicted on Palestinians, but it is specifically how living in the occupation is becoming too dangerous that many settlers are fleeing it.