Prostitution in the Ottoman Empire

 

Prostitution, they claim, is the oldest profession in the world, but when it comes to Ottoman times very little is known - not just because little research has been done on it. While marriage, divorce, slavery and adultery are extensively regulated in Ottoman customary law and Muslim law, the sharia, prostitution is not. Moreover, researchers are inclined to complain that cases cited in Ottoman records are often not specific enough to determine whether a complaint of “immorality” actually involves prostitution.

 

 

One of the first times we hear about prostitutes is in the last years of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent reign (r. 1522-1566). The incident occurred one day in 1565, according to Refik Ahmet Sevengil’s “Istanbul Nasıl Eğleniyordu.” The locals in a district called Sultangir got together and went to the local kadı (judge) and complained about five women who were residents of the area. The five women whose names were Arap Fati, Narin, Giritli Nefise, Kamer -who was also known as Atlı Ases - and Balatlı Yumni. The complaint was that these women were openly engaged in prostitution. Of the five women, only Arap Fati refused to appear before the judge when summoned. It was decided that the houses of these women would be sold and the women expelled from the city.

When the imam (prayer leader) came to Arap Fati’s house, she cursed the imam, the kadı and sharia law and it was determined that she had let strangers (men who were not her father, husband or brother) into her house. Her anger arose over the fact that she had had the same situation occur to her in a different area of Istanbul and, as her husband was a Janissary and therefore out on one of the many military campaigns, she had turned to prostitution to survive. Needless to say, her house was sold and she was remanded to prison until her husband returned.

Crime and punishment

Prostitution wasn’t confined to one place at this time, but could be seen throughout Istanbul. Just two years after the anecdote cited above, Sultan Selim II (r. 1566 -1574) issued a decree calling for an investigation into prostitution and immorality in the city and the registration of all concerned and their punishment; prostitutes were to be imprisoned. Obviously, the call to stamp out prostitution was not very successful because it was too easy to bribe the related officials into looking the other way.

Marinos Sariyannis in “Prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul, Late Sixteenth – Early Eighteenth Century” comments that the law seems to have been rather vague leading many jurists in the 16th century to consider prostitution legal but pandering was a crime. The Ottomans preferred to exact fines from the women who were performing a kind of “adultery” and this seems to have suited the prostitutes as well because they had no hesitation in going to the kadı to demand that she be paid for her services. The author also cites the instance of the governor of Damascus in the 18th century who gave up on decrees and punishments and instead demanded a monthly payment from each prostitute. In 1703, Edirne was apparently filled with “adulterous women and the basest of men” and once again officials were commanded to go from neighborhood to neighborhood registering everybody.

In the 19th century, meyhanes (taverns) opened in many places throughout Istanbul, from Yenikapı to Hasköy and from Beyoğlu/Galata to Kadıköy. Usually the servants in these places were beautiful young boys, although the entertainment might be provided by women dancing and singing. By this time trafficking in women from the Balkans was well established in Istanbul, with gangs recruiting and circulating women through a number of destinations such as Izmir and Trieste. Foreigners were granted permission to work out of whore houses in certain areas while Muslim women were technically forbidden from engaging in prostitution. However, the latter were known to be operating in houses in Muslim districts such as Aksaray with the full knowledge of neighbors.

Various consulates took an interest in “rescuing” any woman who was underage if her family requested their aid. The consulate most frequently engaged in this activity was that of Austria. The Turkish police tended to not interfere in what was happening to foreigners and this message soon got through to the various traffickers who then acquired Turkish citizenship so that they would have the protection of Turkish law vis-à-vis the foreign consulates.

Young boys and prostitution

While westerners tend to think of prostitutes as female, Ottoman culture was such that a great deal of emphasis was placed on the beauty of young boys. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı reflect on this situation in their book, “The Age of Beloveds”: “In situations where public life is dominated by men [as it was among the Ottomans], where warfare is frequent and many men spend most of their time as warriors in the company of other men, and where men are educated and women are not, what people identified as masculine virtues – for example, strength, bravery, physical prowess, male beauty, artistic talent, eloquence – are highly valued. Being attracted to young men, loving young men, is an affirmation of those values and virtues, the very values and virtues that a man seeks in himself. One may also be attracted to women and enjoy relations with them, but the relationship must always be hugely unequal in regard both to distributions of power and to the sharing of cultural expectations.”

In Ottoman society, women in the more affluent classes were confined to their homes except for those among the poor who had perforce to go outside to shop and obtain necessities for their families. So it is not surprising to find young boys/men in a variety of roles such as bath attendants or waiters in taverns. It did not take long for the owners to catch on that if the boys were attractive then more men were likely to frequent their establishments. Andrews and Kalpaklı cite the case of the poet Gazali who built a mosque complex in Beşiktaş and staffed it with beautiful young men. It proved to be so popular that other bathhouse owners lodged complaints against him and eventually it was torn down. The authorities it seems turned a blind eye to the practice and to the availability of these young boys, but only until it resulted in social outrage or rape. Punishment was not consistent and was administered on an ad hoc manner depending on the situation.

Fonte: Hurriyet Daily News

Mein Kampf: a new edition

Can we decontaminate Mein Kampf by ‘framing’ it in historical scholarship?

A page from the Munich edition. Hitler's text (centre right) is encircled by notes about changes between editions (far right) and notes correcting factual errors, filling historical gaps and tracing the origins of key ideas (left and bottom).

Long awaited, much debated, the new critical edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf has now appeared. The Bavarian state had used copyright legislation to ban any new German editions after 1945. That copyright expired in January 2016, raising concerns about the proliferation of inappropriate new editions. The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich decided to pre-empt this by launching its own, critical historical edition. As the editors explain, their aim was an exercise in ideological containment: they want to foreground ‘what we can counterpose to Hitler’s innumerable assertions, lies and expressions of intent’. The first print run of 4,000 copies sold out in a few days, with over 15,000 orders arriving before the book even hit the shelves.

Of course, the text had never really disappeared from view. Before 1945, 12.5 million copies of Mein Kampf were distributed in Germany, in over 1,000 editions. Millions of legacy copies survived and it was never illegal to trade them. There are also millions of translations, both old and new. Mein Kampf is widely read across the globe, regularly features on bestseller lists in India, where, perhaps most worryingly, it is also used in business schools as a manual for effective leadership techniques. The text is also freely downloadable on the internet. What is at stake is not, therefore, the availability of the text, but the political symbolism of printing a new German edition.

Can we decontaminate Mein Kampf by ‘framing’ it in historical scholarship? Commentators have been divided in their response. The Central Committee of Jews in Germany welcomed the edition as a pedagogic tool, while the World Jewish Congress and other commentators registered concerns. Raphael Gross, Director of the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, suggested that the monumentality of the new edition inadvertently replicates the pathos of Hitler’s own rhetoric and thus subverts any attempt at moral distancing. Two large-scale volumes, bound in elegant grey linen, nearly 1,948 pages and over 3,500 footnotes, do indeed make for a peculiar product. The new edition looks and feels like that of a canonical text of western civilisation. The layout of the notes, too, which literally encircle Hitler’s text on three sides, is reminiscent of critical editions of ‘great works’, even the Bible. 

And yet, there are good reasons for the edition’s peculiar appearance – and they go to the heart of political problem of how we should remember National Socialism. To frame this debate in terms of the prevention of hate speech is misleading. If we are looking for utterances that may inspire or serve the purposes of Neo-Nazis today, we will find them much more readily elsewhere. The infamous speeches of Joseph Goebbels, rousing the masses to enthusiasm around the idea of ‘total war’, Leni Riefenstahl’s great propaganda movie Triumph of the Will, or the antisemitic caricatures of Der Stürmer have never been outlawed, although they are much more likely to elicit visceral responses and polarise opinion. Such overt ‘propaganda’ Hitler mostly left to his henchmen. Mein Kampf is something altogether different. It is a long-winded, highly personal, idiosyncratic text. It only reveals a very partial picture of Nazi ideology and even less about what made the Nazi regime unique. Racist ideas are certainly sprinkled liberally throughout the book, but it contains no ‘blueprint’ for the Holocaust.

What is distinctive about Mein Kampf is, rather, its personal tone, suggesting that it holds the key to Hitler the man. It is this quality that gives it its symbolic power and which still causes so much concern today. Hitler was unique in writing a major personal and ideological memoir before he came to power and then continuing to issue that same work throughout the lifespan of the Third Reich, with only minimal changes. As Hitler is now regarded as the very epitome of evil, his authorship suggests that Mein Kampf must also be the most evil book in the world.

But in spite of its autobiographical features, Mein Kampf is surprisingly unoriginal. Whole passages are plagiarised or adapted from earlier thinkers. The Munich edition makes this very clear. We learn about the vast array of sources Hitler drew on. Many of these works were present in the prison library at Landsberg, where Hitler was incarcerated in 1924, which he, ironically but not wholly inaccurately, referred to as ‘his personal university’. Footnotes compare Hitler’s prose to his models and many also reproduce excerpts of the correspondence that Hitler conducted with some of the writers he used. Not all of them were fellow Nazis, or even proto-Nazis. Hitler drew on mainstream conservative, occasionally liberal and, at times, even socialist works. To these he added numerous references to key texts of western thought, from Homer and the Bible to Francis Bacon and Ernst Jünger. Hitler incorporated such references into his personal voice. His description of his own political awakening, for example, which opens the book, is presented in terms of a conflict with his father. It was inspired, as the Munich editors uncover, by the autobiographical writings of Richard Wagner, which served Hitler as a role model for the construction of an authentic German genius’s coming-of-age. 

Even when Mein Kampf moves beyond the personal, it defines politics in the widest possible sense. It addresses, often at length, issues ranging from economics to architecture, from landscape aesthetics to history. There are certainly antisemitic rants, too, but what gives the text coherence, in so far as it has any, is a general mood music about a new style of politics of ‘intuition’ and ‘character’, rather than theory and logical deduction. Hitler’s skill was to synthesise and personalise and thus make these ideas and assumptions accessible. The ideological context on which Hitler drew was familiar to many at the time. This contributed to the book’s apparent ‘common sense’ appeal, which in turn helped to mask some of Hitler’s more outlandish conclusions as apparently self-explanatory. This also explains the ease with which Mein Kampf in turn was integrated into seemingly ‘respectable’ milieus at the time: the conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt, for example, organised a series of academic symposia at German universities, each of which took a particular line from Mein Kampf as its title. 

By uncovering the full extent of this relationship between the text and its context, the Munich edition provides an impressive documentation of how ordinary, in many respects, National Socialism was at the time – and how that very ordinariness lured so many people into supporting a regime that committed the most extraordinary crimes. In doing so, it steers a middle course between the moral imperative to emphasize the essential otherness of Hitler’s thought and the need to document the process whereby superficially respectable assumptions about ‘national greatness’ and the dangers of multiculturalism can evolve, quite rapidly, into a programme of war, mass murder and genocide. 

Maiken Umbach is Professor of Modern History at Nottingham University.@MaikenUmbach

Fonte: History Today

The First Female Anglo-Saxonist

In the 18th century, when women in scholarship were not encouraged and medieval languages were little-studied even by men, Elizabeth Elstob become a pioneer in Anglo-Saxon studies, her work even finding its way into the hands of Thomas Jefferson.

Engraving from a self-portrait, published in two of her works.

In May 1756, an elderly governess died in the household of the Duke and Duchess of Portland, and was quickly and quietly buried in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Westminster. Elizabeth Elstob left behind no family and few mourners, just some rooms full of ‘books and dirtiness’, as one visitor described them. Yet Elizabeth was a pioneer of medieval studies in England; in her youth, she became the first person to publish a grammar of Old English written in modern English, and would have accomplished much more if not for the restrictions which 18th-century society placed on women’s scholarship.

Born in 1683 to a merchant family in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth was orphaned at an early age. The stern uncle who raised her at Canterbury – Charles Elstob, a prebendary canon of the cathedral there – largely disdained female education, believing that ‘one tongue is enough for a woman’, but Elizabeth still learned Latin and French as a child. Later, through her Oxford-educated clergyman brother, William, the teenage Elizabeth gained an introduction to a small but enthusiastic circle of scholars who worked on Anglo-Saxon history and culture.

Elizabeth was clearly entranced by early medieval England, although the Middle Ages were generally considered barbarous and unworthy of study in an age which was under the sway of Neo-Classicism and the faraway splendours of ancient Greece and Rome. Few men studied medieval history or literature, and even fewer women had the opportunity to learn the languages necessary to access medieval primary sources. However, when Elizabeth moved to London to live as her brother’s housekeeper in 1702, she gained a degree of relative freedom and was able to apply herself to learning Old English. She claimed that her childhood in the north of England and a familiarity with its dialects and accents made it easier for her to grasp the language quickly. 

Her brother William had many academic contacts – he was one of the founding members of what would become the Society of Antiquaries of London – and this fact, coupled with sheer force of personality, gave Elizabeth access to scholarly circles which would otherwise have been closed to her. Brother and sister enthusiastically encouraged one another in their endeavours, and even taught Old English to their nine-year-old serving boy so that he could help to transcribe manuscripts. In 1708, Elizabeth made her first foray into publishing with an anonymous translation of French scholar Madeleine de Scudéry’s Essay on Glory. That same year, she also produced a transcript of the Latin Athanasian Creed and its Old English glosses from the tenth-century Salisbury Psalter; this work was included in the publication of another scholar, William Wotton, who clearly thought highly of her abilities. He was not alone in his assessment of her; the pioneering linguist and theologian, George Hickes, wrote in a letter that Elizabeth was ‘a credit to our country’ and also praised her ‘incredible industry’. 

In 1709, Elizabeth produced her first major work: an edition of Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham’s tenth-century An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St Gregory. This text, on the life of the pope who had sent Christian missionaries to England in 597, had been preached as a sermon in Anglo-Saxon churches. Elizabeth wanted the volume to be ‘as beautiful as possible’, no matter the cost, and the finished book contained a number of engravings, as well as an eight-page dedication to Queen Anne and a 60-page preface. 

Frontispiece for Elstob's An Anglo-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of Saint Gregory (1709).

In that preface, Elizabeth argued passionately for two things: for the Church of England as the true heir of the Anglo-Saxon church, a pure and primitive institution which had not been warped by the church at Rome, and for the importance of women’s education. ‘If Women may be said to have Souls,’ she wrote, ‘and if good Learning be one of the Soul’s greatest Improvements; we must retort the Question. Where is the Fault in Women seeking after Learning?’ Elizabeth Elstob saw no fault at all, and some people clearly agreed with her. Two hundred and sixty eight subscribers supported the publication of the English-Saxon Homily, including aristocrats, antiquarians, clergymen and 116 women.

Elizabeth’s second major work was The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715), the first such grammar not to be written in Latin. She prefaced this book with an ‘Apology for the Study of Northern Antiquities,’ in which she bluntly dismissed those such as Jonathan Swift who found the ancient Germanic languages harsh and grating. Elizabeth did not see in them ‘any Hardness, but such as was necessary to afford Strength, like the Bones in a human Body, which yield it Firmness and Support’. Her ancestors, she concluded, ‘spoke as they fought, like Men’. 

Despite her masculine characterisation of Anglo-Saxon, Elizabeth explicitly stated that she wrote in contemporary language so that other Englishwomen could engage with her work. However, she also found an overseas audience. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and a keen linguist, owned a copy of the Rudiments of Grammar. Jefferson used it to help him understand terms which he encountered in his legal studies, annotated it with his thoughts on spelling and pronunciation, and wrote that ‘the English student generally, and particularly the student of law’ would benefit from the study of Anglo-Saxon. 

In both the Rudiments of Grammar and in her other writings, Elizabeth Elstob was a firm champion of the idea that the English language and its history was a fundamental component of England’s national identity. She clearly saw her scholarship as part of a dialogue not just about England’s past, but Britain’s future. Elizabeth thought that the medieval could be a mediator – that Whig and Tory partisan fighting could be resolved by appealing to a common patriotism centred on a shared past. The social circle of Oxford antiquarians within which she and her brother moved contained conservative High Church Tories like themselves, but also Whigs and even Jacobites. No doubt this gave rise to heated debates that must have made Elizabeth long for peace.

Elizabeth planned to follow the Rudiments of Grammar with another, incredibly ambitious endeavour – an edition of all of Ælfric’s so-called Catholic Homilies, a key collection of Old English sermons and saints’ lives. She laid the groundwork for this with an early 18th-century attempt at crowdfunding, publishing a pamphlet with the lengthy and pointed title, Some testimonies of learned men, in favour of the intended edition of the Saxon homilies, concerning the learning of the author of those homilies; and the advantages to be hoped for from an edition of them (1713). Elizabeth also went in person in 1714 to petition Robert Harley, earl of Oxford and Queen Anne’s Lord High Treasurer, for some funding to support her work, and was successful. 

However, her plans to publish the Homilies had to be abandoned when her brother, who had never enjoyed good health, died in 1715. William’s death left Elizabeth without a home and with the mountain of debts that the siblings had incurred in financing their expensive publications. She tried to start a girls’ school in Chelsea, but that failed within six months of its opening. In 1718, she fled London and her creditors, leaving behind her books and a partial manuscript of the Homilies (now preserved at the British Library). Elizabeth ended up in Evesham in rural Worcestershire where she lived for many years, and ran a small dame school under the assumed name of Frances Smith. Her whereabouts were apparently unknown to anyone in the scholarly community until 1735.

Even when she had been found by friends and secured a position that lifted her out of penury towards the end of her life, Elizabeth did not return to scholarship. She found a measure of contentment in teaching the duke and duchess of Portland’s children – including William Cavendish Bentinck, a future prime minister – yet her experiences had clearly left her bitter. In her last years, Elizabeth wrote in a letter that ‘this is not an Age to hope for any encouragement to Learning of any kind’. 

It is certainly true that the 18th century did not look favourably on women scholars, let alone one of intellectual confidence and modest means. If Elizabeth had not had a brother who shared her interests, introduced her to other scholars and was willing to support her financially, she would never have learned Anglo-Saxon, let alone gained the access to Oxford or Cambridge university libraries which was necessary for her research. Elizabeth Elstob’s pioneering work still provides encouragement for the female medievalists who follow in her footsteps, but we can only imagine what she might have accomplished if her intellectual activities had not been so thoroughly frustrated when she was just coming into her prime.

Yvonne Seale is a PhD student in medieval history at the University of Iowa in the United States. Twitter: @yvonneseale

Fonte: History Today

How Dadaism revolutionized art 100 years ago

A century ago, international artists and writers met in Zurich to form a new movement, Dadaism. Their anti-art was a response to an ever-present issue: the madness of war.

It all started in a night club

The Dada artistic revolution was launched a century ago. Neutral Switzerland was a haven for European artists during World War I: That's where Dadaists met on February 5, 1916, at the Cabaret Voltaire, a night club in Zurich founded by singer Emmy Hennings and aspiring poet Hugo Ball (1886-1927). Wearing a Cubist costume, Ball recited his famous nonsense poem: "Jolifanto bambla ô falli bam…"

Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco met on February 5, 1916 in Zurich with the ambitious plan of instigating nothing less than an artistic revolution. Their Cabaret Voltaire, which they founded that evening, was a combination of a pub, theater, gallery, and club.

Throughout that year, they organized unpredictable events combining chaotic performances, recitations and music.

A filmed performance provides some insight on the anarchic style which ruled at the Cabaret Voltaire: Hugo Ball, the German artist and pioneer of sound poems, stands on the stage wearing a costume which makes him look like a space chef and recites a nonsensical poem: "Blago bung, basso fataka. Schampa wulla wussa…"

The birth of Dada

Where Dada started: the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich

For the unitiated, it probably felt like a madhouse - and yet it was the beginning of a whole new art movement - or rather, as they called it, anti-art.

Their cabaret was named after the author of French Enlightenment, Voltaire, who also specialized in attacking the establishment and is most famous for his philosophical satire, "Candide, or Optimism."

Dada, the anarchist's answer to the First World War

Two years into World War I, appalled by the bloody conflict, artists from Cologne, Berlin, New York, Paris, Moscow or Budapest all gathered in neutral Zurich. It was the most international artistic movement yet. Its individualist members all united under a common desire to provide an artistic reaction to the absurdity of war.

According to some accounts, the name for the anarchist movement "Dada" was found by coincidence in a French-German dictionary and means "hobbyhorse." Adding to the absurdity of the name - and making it even more suitable for the group - it also happened to be the brand of a Swiss product against hair loss.

From then on, a urinal could be called art: Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"

After the war, Dadaism moved on from Zurich to major cultural centers in the world.

Tristan Tzara was the main promotor of the movement in Paris, joined by André Breton. Kurt Schwitters created his own interpretation of Dada in Hanover, naming it Merz. Berlin Dadaists attacked the Church and the State.

Marcel Duchamp changed forever the meaning of art with his "readymades." Hans Richter transposed the new esthetics in his experimental films.

Under André Breton's leadership, the Parisian Dada movement split and transitioned on to Surrealism. The movement faded away.

In 2016, a century later, numerous museums are celebrating Dadaism, most particularly in Zurich and also at the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, Germany.

Fonte: Deutsche Welle

Historic deal: France and the Netherlands buy two Rembrandts together

A couple painted by Rembrandt in 1634 will stay united thanks to a historic deal between France and the Netherlands. The record joint acquisition is an innovative concept for national museums.

The deal was sealed on Monday (01.02.2016) by French Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin and her Dutch colleague, Jet Bussemaker. The two large portraits by the Dutch master were bought from the influential Rothschild family in France for the sum of 160 million euros ($174 million).

The two countries splashed out 80 million euros each - an unseen sum for public art acquisitions.

The rare paintings feature a wealthy Dutch couple, Marten Soolmans and his future wife Oopjen Coppit, on the eve of their marriage.

It took several years for the agreement to be reached, but this first joint acquisition will allow the pair to stay united, as the portraits will alternately be shown together at the world famous Louvre museum in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Through a private sale, the rare paintings could have ended up separated.

Over the past 150 years, these valuable portraits were only shown once publicly, during an exhibition organized in 1956. The French culture minister said in a statement that the two works will be unveiled at the Louvre "in the coming weeks," before being sent off to the Netherlands for restoration.

Fonte: Deutsche Welle

Filme sobre rebelião de escravos vence principais prêmios em Sundance

Cena do filme "The Birth of a Nation"

Em meio a protestos pela falta de diversidade e a exclusão de histórias sobre personagens negros noOscar deste ano, um filme sobre uma rebelião extremista de escravos nos Estados Unidos foi o grande vencedor do festival de cinema de Sundance, neste sábado (30).

"The Birth of a Nation", escrito, dirigido e protagonizado por Nate Parker, ganhou os prêmios do júri e do público.

O longa acompanha a trajetória de Nat Turner, um escravo e pregador alfabetizado e cortês que organiza uma revolta no sul dos EUA, no período anterior à guerra civil norte-americana. Os proprietários rurais e as forças armadas retaliam com severidade o movimento.

No festival, o filme bateu recorde ao ter seus direitos vendidos à Fox Searchlight pelo inédito valor de US$ 17,5 milhões.

"Obrigada, Sundance, por criar uma plataforma para que possamos crescer, apesar do que o resto de Hollywood está fazendo", disse Parker ao receber os prêmios no palco do Basin Recreation Field House, em Park City.

Chris Pizzello - 25.jan.2016/Associated Press 

O diretor Nate Parker durante estreia do filme no festival de Sundance

Entre os demais ganhadores, "Sonita" (Alemanha, Irã e Suíça), sobre uma refugiada afegã de 18 anos que vive ilegalmente em Teerã e sonha se tornar uma estrela pop, ganhou o prêmio do júri destinado a documentários.

Daniel Scheinert e Daniel Kwan ("Swiss Army Man") venceram o prêmio de direção, enquanto os atores Craig Robinson e Melanie Lynskey foram reconhecidos pelos trabalhos em "Morris From America" e "The Intervention", respectivamente.

A estatueta da categoria Next, voltada a produções que usam linguagem inovadora para contar histórias, foi para "First Girl I Loved", de Karem Sanga, sobre uma adolescente de 17 anos que mantém uma paixão pela garota mais popular de seu colégio.

Fonte: Folha de São Paulo