In 1909, the US Circuit Court in Cincinnati set out to decide ‘whether a Turkish citizen shall be naturalised as a white person’. The New York Times covered the case without noting that the plaintiff who brought the case was a Turk. The Times asked: ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’ and answered both yes and no. ‘The original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race,’ the Times reported, and they ‘are a cruel and massacring people … But they are also Europeans, as much “white” people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks.’ The question of whether the world considered the Turkish people white, and the uncertain responses to it, helped to propel Turkey’s modernisation efforts, and also shaped the state’s support for particular narratives of national identity and, for decades, their dissemination in education. [...]
The Ottoman empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany. Defeat led to the collapse of the empire, and the emergence of the Turkish republic. By the 1930s, Turkish reformers began emphasising the need for deep cultural transformation. In Europe and the US, the image of the ‘terrible Turk’ carried real popular power. Chester Tobin, an American who coached the Turkish Olympic track team in 1924, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The European cliché of the “Terrible Turk” had been sharply imprinted in the minds of Americans by the close of the First World War. It was cast in human baseness.’ The ‘Terrible Turk’ imagery was a legacy of the Ottoman government’s handling of non-Muslim minority populations and their nationalist claims. It also derived from brutal ethnic conflict between Muslim Turks and non-Muslim populations during the tumultuous years of First World War. [...]
Other prominent Turkish scholars of eugenics also tried to popularise the cause. Newspapers published articles with eugenics-inspired headlines such as ‘Should the Mad, the Feeble-Minded, and the Sick Be Sterilised?’ While Turkish eugenicists were trying to establish the whiteness and Europeanness of their civilisation, Hitler was fantasising about a superior race that availed itself of what he saw as Islamic immorality and ruthlessness. In his memoirs, Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, noted that Hitler expressed admiration for the ruthlessness of Muslim Turks. Hitler wished Turks had conquered Europe and converted the continent to Islam. He imagined a superior race of ‘Islamised Germans’ who could circumvent the moral limits of Christianity. So race science could lead its believers to an array of conclusions about preferred or desirable political outcomes.[...]
This last claim was an interesting twist on the peculiarly racist one-drop rule in the US, whereby anyone with any black ‘blood’ is black. In the Turkish model, racial mixture did not debase the ‘superior’ race. Instead, it raised and assimilated ‘inferior’ races. Turkish people learned that the cradle of Western whiteness and civilisation was to be found in Asia. The American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) visited Turkey in 1924 to prepare a report on education, and quipped: ‘It is paradoxical that it should be necessary for a nation to go into Asia in order to make sure that it is to be Europeanised.’
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