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Immigrants viewed Ellis Island as a beacon of hope. It also served
as a gateway to a secular world. This was particularly true for
the 50,000 Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire coming to the United
States from 1900-21, according to CWRU historian John Grabowski.
"Religion was the dominant identity for millions of immigrants
who came from countries in which national identity was nascent
and subordinate to ethnic and religious identity," Grabowski said.
"This official transformation had its most significant impact
on immigrants from the Ottoman Empire."
Turks and others from the old Ottoman Empire were considered
subjects of their sultan and, beyond that, were identified as
Orthodox, Maronite, Armenian Catholic, Catholic, Muslim or people
of other faiths or ethnicities. Upon entering the U.S., they were
registered not by their religious identities but usually as immigrants
from Turkey in Asia or Turkey in Europe.
Nearly 95 percent of the Turkish Muslim immigrants-predominantly
male, from the peasant class and primarily from Anatolia or the
Balkan region of present-day Bulgaria and Albania-would eventually
return to their home country after working for a period of time
in the United States. The immigrants primarily worked and earned
money in such places as the leather factories of Massachusetts,
the railroad companies around Chicago, the steel mills of Gary,
the auto plants of Detroit or dye factories in Cleveland.
Grabowski said that the Turks clustered together in enclaves
nearby work and sometimes formed alliances or groups to provide
assistance or support to one another.
Two more waves of Turkish immigrants would arrive in the U.S.:
students and army officers in the 1950safter Turkey became a member
of NATO and larger numbers after 1965 when America's old restrictive
immigration laws changed.
"The stories of the early immigrants raise questions about religious
differences and the creation of the modern secular Turkish identity,"
Grabowski said. "Did their time in the U.S. and the way this country
identified them in secular terms move them away from a primarily
religious identity?"
Grabowski suspects that the earliest Turkish immigrants may have
partially developed a sense of national identity before they immigrated,
but the American experience helped cement that identity.
On a recent vacation to Turkey, Grabowski, CWRU Krieger-Mueller
Associate Professor in Applied History and director of research
at the Western Reserve Historical Society, raised these issues
during presentations of his paper, "A Question of Identity, Turkish
Immigrants in America-Then and Now" at the cultural studies conference
at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, and again at a special presentation
at Yeditepe University in Istanbul.
His talk at Yeditepe, which received national media coverage
in Turkey, presented early findings about the Turks during what
Grabowski calls "the golden age of immigration." Their early immigrant
experience is a topic that is little studied.
Besides the foundation work of Kemal Karpat from the University
of Wisconsin, a study by Frank Ahmed and an article by Talat Halman,
little research has been done on Turkish immigration. Grabowski
along with Karpat calls this a virgin field.
With the opening of 1930 Federal Census schedules in April, new
research opportunities exist to study various immigrant groups.
Grabowski also said among the Turkish immigrants was the first
large group of Muslims to venture to the United States and one
of the first non-Judeo Christian groups outside of the Chinese
and Japanese people.
Grabowski, with his wife Diane, first traveled to Turkey in 1990.
There he found a nation and people profoundly different from the
orientalist "terrible Turk" stereotypes he had been exposed to
in America and which their historical roots, in part, were in
early missionary accounts and newspaper stories that continually
portrayed the Turks in a negative manner.
The country and the Turkish culture have fascinated Grabowski
to a point where he finds his interest in Turkish history almost
becoming the central point of his more general research in immigration
and ethnicity.
He strengthened his ties with the country as a Fulbright Senior
Lecturer at Bilkent University in Ankara in 1996-97. He has since
made several return visits to research Turkish immigrant history
and to visit a wide circle of Turkish friends and academic colleagues.
During his presentations, Grabowski mentioned that he assumed
there were still some living relatives of those 50,000 early immigrants,
and the media reported his interest in them.
Grabowski's Turkish academic colleague, Sedat Isci, subsequently
received more than 130 calls, faxes and e-mails from descendents
of the immigrants. Grabowski and Isci plan to send a questionnaire
to these relatives of the immigrants and interview them for their
family's oral history.
"The tens of thousands who returned to Turkey may well have helped
provide a bulwark for the development and success of the modern
Turkish Republic for they had been changed by their experience,"
Grabowski said.
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