A GROUNDBREAKING Netflix series set among Turkey’s Jews has been an unexpected hit in the country, challenging taboos and enthralling audiences with its glimpse into a long-overlooked community.

The global success of Turkish television series – often with government-pleasing narratives – has made the country a small-screen superpower.

But The Club and its sumptuous recreation of 1950s Istanbul is a first – not least because some of the dialogue is in Ladino, the language of Istanbul’s Jews which derives from medieval Spanish.

While minorities once flourished in the cosmopolitan capital of the Ottoman Empire, they suffered persecution as it fell and discrimination ever since.

Jews have generally kept their heads down to protect themselves, sticking to the Turkish Jewish custom of “kayades”, meaning “silence” in Ladino.

But The Club – set around a nightclub in Istanbul’s historic European quarter – puts an end to that silence.

Pogrom against minorities

The attacks and persecution that drove many Jews, Greeks and Armenians to leave Turkey in the 20th century are dealt with – including a crippling 1942 tax on non-Muslims and pogrom against Greeks in 1955, which also unleashed violence against all the other minorities.

“Silence has neither protected us from anti-Semitism nor prevented migration to other countries,” said Nesi Altaras, editor of Avlaremoz online magazine run by young Turkish Jews.

“We need to talk, including on political issues that previous generations wanted to avoid.”

Less than 15,000 Jews remain in Turkey, down from 200,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.

The majority are Sephardic, whose ancestors fled to the Ottoman Empire after they were expelled from Spain in 1492.

In a rare case of life imitating art, The Club became Netflix’s number one show in Turkey just as the country tried to repair ties with Israel.

While both have been historically close, relations have badly soured over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and remarks by the Turkish president criticised as anti-Semitic.

Turkish pro-government dailies regularly publish stories seen to be anti-Semitic up until recently.

But Israeli President Isaac Herzog made a landmark visit to Turkey earlier this month, where he held talks with his opposite number, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Herzog even visited the Istanbul district in which The Club is set.

Fierce debate

The show – particularly the scenes of the pogroms on Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue in September 1955, when mobs lynched minorities and ransacked their shops – has sparked a fierce debate about the need to confront history in Turkish media and online.

“No other TV show featured the anti-Semitic incidents of this period in such a remarkable way,” said Silvyo Ovadya, president of the Jewish Museum of Turkey.

“We do not teach this part of history in schools in Turkey. Many Turks have learnt it thanks to the series.”

“The series invites us to question the official narrative and ask ourselves, ‘What happened to the Jews of Turkey?’,” said Pinar Kilavuz, a researcher on Sephardic Jews at Paris-Sorbonne University.

Altaras said he believes the series has influenced domestic Turkish politics.

“It is no coincidence that the leader of the main opposition party has just included ‘healing the wounds of the past’ in his campaign, referring to the attacks against minorities.” – AFP, March 19, 2022.