To Call a Turk a Turk: Patronymic Nationalism in Turkey in the 1930s

TO CALL A TURK A TURK: PATRONYMIC NATIONALISM INTURKEY IN THE 1930S Emmanuel Szurek

Belin | Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 2013/2 - No 60-2pages 18-37

ISSN 0048-8003

This document is a translation of:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Emmanuel Szurek, « Appeler les Turcs par leur nom. Le nationalisme patronymique dans la Turquie des années1930 », Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2013/2 No 60-2, p. 18-37. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations

Available online at:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------http://www.cairn-int.info/journal-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporaine-2013-2-page-18.htm--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to cite this article:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Emmanuel Szurek "Appeler les Turcs par leur nom. Le nationalisme patronymique dans la Turquie des années 1930", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2013/2 No 60-2, p. 18-37. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Name Policies

To Call a Turk a Turk: Patronymic Nationalism in Turkey in the 1930s1

Emmanuel Szurek

I went to primary school in 1952. At school, I bore the number 97. Our teacher was called Hekimhanlı Resul Okur [Resul Hekimhan “Reader”].2 After so many years, delv-ing into my memory, some recollections come back to me. Like any pupil, I mistreated my exercise books and went through a great number of pencils. I was in a hurry to learn how to read, and the memory of that ABC, illustrated in color, has never left me. Neither have I forgotten the set phrases: . . . “The crow says caw. Look! Climb on this branch! The crow has brought some hazelnuts. The mouse has eaten seven of them. A cat has caught it. He said meow, and ate it.” And at the end: “My mother is a Turk, my father is a Turk! Son of a Turk, I am a Turk!” At home, I went to the top of the stairs and swung my legs forwards, like in Türkü, and sang “My mother is a Turk, my father is a Turk! Son of a Turk, I am a Turk!”3

Through their denotative and even more by their connotative charge, many Turkish patronyms are heavily laden with symbolism. To understand this, one must examine the discursive context in which the “Surname Law” of June 1934 was adopted. The Kemalist leaders imported into Turkey the European anthroponymic system and had the Anatolian population choose a surname from an onomastic stock selected according to etymological and semantic cri-teria. The sources used in this paper will be the official, normative documents which instituted anthroponymic reform, the public and didactic discourses which accompanied its enactment, and finally the family names available on

1. Translator’s note: All quotations from Turkish-language sources contained in this article have been back-translated from the French-language version of this article.

2. For the purposes of demonstration, the meaning of Turkish patronymic names will be given in brackets throughout this paper. In this instance, Okur [“The Reader”] is a surname common among schoolteachers and imams. A well-known example is Hafız Yaúar [Okur], who was one of those who Turkified the call to prayer in 1932 (which will be discussed below); Umut Azak, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 54. It would appear that the theologian (and opponent of the Kemalist regime) Said Nursi was likewise entered in the civil register under this patronym: http://www.sentezhaber.com/risale-i-nur/said-nursinin-resmi-soyadi-h70529.html.

3. “Anam Türk, Babam Türk! Türko÷lu Türk’üm ben!:” ølhan ølhan, Kızlar Da Okur [Girls Read, Too] (Istanbul: n.p., 2005), 36; Türkü (literally, “Turkery”), is the generic term used to refer to poetry and popular songs in the Turkish language, as well as the dances which accompany them.

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II REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

the Kemalist onomastic market, to the extent that they are a reflection of a linguistic (social) practice4.

It can be readily admitted that an internal and static study of a patronymic discourse does not allow any measurement of its social effectiveness, that is the degree of attachment of those being named (Turkish citizens) to the mean-ings put, in their name, into their names, by those allocating the names (the Kemalist leadership). To be very clear, that is outside the scope of the present contribution.5 There remains, however, within the framework of the present dossier, centered on diverse forms of onomastic resistance and resilience, a fundamental need to consider, and to grasp in exactly what way the reform of 1934 was part of an authoritarian program of social and political summon-ing. In its specifically linguistic dimension, the alteration of anthroponyms in Turkey represents a particularly stark case of symbolic conformity, and of the nationalization of cognition.6

THE NEOLOGICAL AMBITION OF SURNAME REFORM

The Turkist Paradigm

Turk, Turkish, Turkey – a nation, a language, and a state: what a commonplace trilogy of nationalist common sense. In linguistic terms, this is known as a paradigm: an ethnonym, a glossonym, and a toponym.7 In the context of the past 150 years, each of these labels is a kind of neologism.8 It is argued that the nationalist sense of the word Türk gained currency only at the very end of the nineteenth century.9 Until that time, while the term could occasionally be found as an ethnonym, Türk was frequently used in the language of elite city-dwelling Ottomans as a socionym to refer to the rural Turkish-speaking

4. The notion of onomastic market is derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “linguistic market,” Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell, 1991).

5. See the thesis of Meltem Turkoz, who, using oral inquiry, has been able to explore indigenous semantic adaptation, the registers of meaning through which individuals explain their own surname: “The Social Life of the State’s Fantasy: Memories and Documents on Turkey’s 1934 Surname Law” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004). The present contribution will be followed up with two studies based on archive sources. The second part will offer an external (or sociohistorical) perspective focused on the contribution of surname reform to the objectivization of the relations of power, race, and class in Kemalist society. The third part will consist of an analysis of “Kemalist onomaturgy,” that is, the benefits of differentiation, and the (re)naming games indulged in by the elites in the Turkey of the 1930s.

6. My thanks go to Nicolas Camélio, Daniel Fields, Monique Halpern, and Güneú Iúıksel.7. French-French-France, Pole-Polish-Poland, Romanian-Romanian-Romania etc. Salih Akin,

“Pour une typologie des processus redénominatifs,” in Noms et Re-noms: la dénomination des personnes, des populations, des langues et des territoires, ed. Salih Akin (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1999), 33-60.

8. On the understanding that a neologism is not necessarily a new word, but a word whose semantic content evolves to the point of referring to a different referent.

9. Ahmet Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyebilene.” Türk Ulusal Kimli÷inin Etno-Seküler Sınırları (1919-1938) [“How Happy is the One Who is Able to Say He is a Turk!” Ethno-Secular Boundaries of the Turkish National Identity (1919-1938)] (Istanbul: øletiúim, 2010), 66 and after.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK III

populations of Rumelia and Anatolia with strong connotations of class-based disdain.10 As Eric Hobsbawm points out, “[the notion of ethnicity and race] probably more commonly served to separate social strata than entire communities.”11 Secondly, the glossonym Türkçe, while found for centuries in the form Türkî, did not designate a stabilized entity – that is, it was not a codified, “grammatized” language that was subsequently labeled the official language of the Ottoman state – before the second half of the nineteenth century.12 As for the toponym Türkiyya (later, Türkiye), this too is an inven-tion of the late nineteenth century.13 Whereas Europeans took to calling Asia Minor Turchia during the time of the Third Crusade,14 the Ottomans referred to their country using phrases such as “The Sublime State,” and “The Well-Protected Domains.”15

Strictly speaking, it makes sense to add to the trilogy just discussed the name of a fourth accomplice – and to do so by putting forward our own neolo-gism: the word Turkology is indeed an “epistemonym;” the term emerged in various European languages in the last third of the nineteenth century (though its translation in Turkish in the form of Türkiyât scarcely occurred before the twentieth century.) This orientalist “discipline” consists of turning the Turkic peoples and languages – scattered, as is well known, across an immense ter-ritory stretching from the Balkans to northern Siberia – into a philological, archaeological, and ethnographic object. Initially, the epistemological elaboration of Turkology preceded the intellectual construction of Turkish nationalism. Later, the two became interdependent.16 Many scholars share the belief that the Turkologists played an important role in the intellectual crystallization of Turkism among the educated Turkish-speaking Muslims of the Ottoman Empire17. From the 1870s onwards, the latter “discovered” that the “Turks”

10. On this point, a translation of Türk might be something like “muddy asses” or “hicks.” For a nuanced (and decentered) analysis of the semantic content of Türk in the Ottoman world, see Benjamin Lellouch, “Qu’est-ce qu’un Turc? (Égypte, Syrie, XVIe siècle),” European Journal of Turkish Studies 16 (2013). On the notion of a socionym, see Jacques Bres, “Praxis, production de sens/d’identité, récit,” Langages 93 (1989): 23-44.

11. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 65.

12. Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1999), 12 and after. On the notion of “grammatization,” see Sylvain Auroux, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation (Liège: Mardaga, 1994).

13. Howard Eissenstat, “Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation: Racial Theory and the Beginnings of Nationalism in the Turkish Republic,” in Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2005), 239-256, 245.

14. Claude Cahen, The Formation of Turkey. The Seljukid Sultanate of Rum: Eleventh to Fourteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 76.

15. Güneú Iúiksel, “La Politique étrangère ottomane dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle: le cas du règne de Selîm II” (PhD diss., École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2012), 71-75.

16. Emmanuel Szurek, “Les Langues orientales, Jean Deny les Turks et la Turquie nouvelle. Une histoire croisée de la turcologie française (XIXe-XXe siècle),” in Turcs et Français. Une histoire culturelle 1860-1960, ed. Güneú Iúiksel and Emmanuel Szurek (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014).

17. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 339-342; David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 9 ff.;

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IV REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

were not mere uncouth country folk; they were also the descendants of a glori-ous civilization which had had its heyday several centuries before the arrival of Islam, and whose stomping ground had been the whole of central Asia.

This hijacking of the scientific discourse by the promoters of nationality is not at all surprising. As with many European national constructs, the gradual discovery of the rustic virtue of the little people in the countryside, their songs and dances, and their language by the bourgeois intellectuals of the big cities is to a large extent an indirect reflection of transnational scientific research.18 The fact is that by placing the categories Turk, Turkish, Turkey, and Turkology next to each other, a quite classic case of nominalist convergence is created. At the end of this convergence, each of the above terms provides a reference and a justification for the others: “Turkish,” the language of a nation called the “Turks,” is spoken in a country named “Turkey,” and qualifies as intel-lectual property of a discipline known as “Turcology.” However, it remains the case that in terms of the comparability of nationalist symbolic repertoires, the experience of the reform of personal names carried out in the Turkey of the 1930s goes beyond the textbook examples made familiar in the constructivist literature. This is explained by the strictly linguistic context in which it took place – that of a “revolution of the signifiers,”19 which equally affected com-mon nouns and proper nouns. In other words, we will see that from the rather long list of the Turkist paradigm – an ethnonym, a glossonym, a toponym, and an “epistemonym” – it is possible to construct, both etymologically and semantically, a large number of personal names.

The “Language Revolution”

At the end of the 1920s, Kemalist leaders launched a vast project to nationalize the tools for communicating and to reclassify the world. Initially cosmetic,20 the political manipulation of signifiers quickly moved towards real engineering, which made Kemalist language policies a unique case. The “Alphabet Revolu-tion” of 1928-30 represented the first act of Kemalist linguistic interventionism. Within eighteen months, Arabic characters disappeared from public spaces and from publishing; the script used by literate Ottomans was replaced by a

Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism. From Irredentism to Cooperation, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst & Company, 1995) 30; Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste (1931-1993) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997), 37-40; Halil ønalcık, “Hermenötik, Oryantalizm, Türkoloji” [Hermeneutics, Orientalism, Turcology], Do÷u Batı 20, 1 (2002), 13-39; Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 423. See also my “Gouverner par les mots. Une histoire linguistique de la Turquie nationaliste” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2013), 1, 383-410.

18. Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales. Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

19. In the words of Benoît Fliche, elsewhere in this dossier.20. In 1927, for instance, the Cadde-i Kebir was classically renamed “Independence Avenue”

[østiklal Caddesi]. The Turkification of Istanbul’s street names took a more systematic turn in 1934, at the same time as that of anthroponyms. østanbul, December 3, 1934.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK V

transcription derived from the Roman alphabet that the Kemalist intellectuals were quick to name the “Turkish alphabet.”21

Three years later, in July 1932, a Society for the Study of Turkish Lan-guage [Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti] was created. The task of this semipublic organization was to “purify” and “nationalize” the language,22 a process that entailed a huge proscription of words of Arabic or Persian origin, words that were considered “foreign,” “corrupted,” “invasive,” and not a true part of the “genius” of the Turkish “national” language. In fact, throughout the period 1932-1935 a multitude of words in daily use, but of Arab-Persian derivation, were formally excluded from the linguistic norm. To fill the gap, the Society for the Study of Turkish Language conducted a vast survey of dialect words across the whole of Anatolia, with the support of the combined services of the state. Additionally, it examined traditional writings in order to exhume disused Turkic words. These lexicographical campaigns provided the etymological raw materials (roots and affixes) from which the Kemalist linguists selected a replacement lexicon. The results of these efforts began to be published in 1934 in a “journal of the collection “ [Tarama Dergisi]. In the following year the first two officially “bilingual” lexicons rolled off the presses of the Government Printing Office, providing translations in both directions between old Turkish (called “Ottoman,” Osmanlıca), and new Turkish (baptized “pure Turkish,” Öz Türkçe).23 The operation was a “success.”24 In a few years, the “Language Revolution” led to the fixing in place of a radically different variety of what was still the language of the written press at the end of the 1920s.

The 1934 Reform as Language Policy

Before examining how the 1934 reform of surnames extended Kemalist linguistic purification, it must be pointed out that the quest for onomastic purity was not an invention of the 1930s. Since the time of the second constitutional monarchy, two major representatives of the Turkist movement had taken the initiative by Turkifying their own names: Mehmet Ziya, a Kurd from Diyarbekir (in

21. Birol Caymaz and Emmanuel Szurek, “La Révolution au pied de la lettre. L’invention de ‘l’alphabet turc,’” European Journal of Turkish Studies 6 (2007).

22. A sociological study of this organization can be found in Emmanuel Szurek, “Le Linguiste et le politique. La Türk Dil Kurumu et le champ du pouvoir dans la Turquie du parti unique,” in Ordon-ner et transiger. Modalités de gouvernement et d’administration en Turquie et dans l’Empire ottoman depuis les Tanzimat, ed. Marc Aymes, Benjamin Gourisse, and Élise Massicard (Paris: Karthala, in press).

23. Türk Dili Araútırma Kurumu, Osmanlıcadan Türkçeye Cep Kilavuzu [Ottoman-Turkish Pocket Guide] (Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935); Türk Dili Araútırma Kurumu, Türkçeden Osmanlıcaya Cep Kilavuzu [Turkish-Ottoman Pocket Guide] (Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935). Note that the glossonym Osmanlıca is traceable to the end of the nineteenth century, whereas Öz Türkçe makes its appearance on the linguistic market in the second half of the 1920s.

24. Lewis, Turkish Language Reform. From a linguistics perspective, this work is without a shadow of doubt the best study of the “Language Revolution” in Turkey. However, the article published close to the time by Jean Deny remains useful: “De la réforme actuelle de la langue turque,” En Terre d’Islam 10 (July-August 1935): 223-247.

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VI REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

eastern Anatolia), took the name Ziya Gökalp [“Blue Hero”];25 Moïz Kohen, a Jew from Serres (in Macedonia), rebaptized himself Tekinalp [“Unequalled Hero”].26 Rıza Nur can also claim to have anticipated the Kemalist govern-ment in matters of anthroponymic purification:

In 1919 [in fact 1920], as minister for public instruction in Ankara, I had sent out a list of pure Turkish names, and in a circular sent to schools, required that Persian and Arabic names should be renounced, and true Turkish names from the list adopted. This measure applied to teachers and pupils. Since then, pure Turkish names have become the rule.27

It is doubtful whether this initiative (if it took place) met with much suc-cess – particularly in the context of the Greco-Turkish conflict (1919-1922), during which the confessional register was widely exploited by the government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey to mobilize the Muslim population of Anatolia against the “invader.”

There is a notable difference indeed between the Islamist Turkism of the years of the war of independence, and the secularist Turkism promoted by the Kemalist bureaucrats and theologians of the 1930s. It should be recalled in this regard that in April 1928, the mention of Islam as the state religion was removed from the constitution, and that from May 1931, “secularism” [laiklik] figured among the “six arrows,” or six grand principles intended to inspire the conduct of the Republican People’s Party. Above all, the Turkification of the call to prayer [ezan] in 1932 brought about nothing less than the purging of the most sacred word in Islam: the name of Allah. The measure was extended to the whole of Turkey in February 1933, with the result that for seventeen years, until 1950, the Merciful was no longer invoked from the tops of Anatolia’s minarets by his Arabic name, but by the old Turkic-Mongol word Tanrı28 – in so far as the measure was obeyed.29 Linguistic purification and the Kemalist domestication of Islamic references, along with the “History Thesis” to be discussed below, provided the political, symbolic, and intellectual backdrop onto which the patronymic reform of 1934 came to be grafted.

The reform was underpinned by two normative texts: the first was the law passed by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey on June 21, 1934; the

25. J. Deny, “ Ziya Gök Alp,” Revue du Monde Musulman 61 (1925): 1-41; 6.26. Tekinalp was an ardent supporter of the assimilation of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey.

In 1928, he began, in his book Türkleútirme [Turkification], to call on the Jews in Turkey to follow his example in taking a Turkish name. Jacob M. Landau, Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot. 1883-1961 (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1984), 22, 308.

27. Riza Nour, “Noms propres turcs,” Revue de Turcologie 5 (February 1935): 65-72; 65.28. Jean-Paul Roux, “Tängri. Essai sur le ciel-dieu des peuples altaïques,” Revue de l’Histoire des

Religions 149 (1956): 49-82, 197-230; 150 (1956): 27-54, 173-212.29. Azak, Islam, 57. Despite the proscription of the name of Allah, certain Turkish patronyms

attest to the survival of Muslim naming practices in the Kemalists’ onomastic inventory. Thus, Tanrı can at times translate Allah, as in the surname Tanrıkulu [“Slave of God,” that is, Abdallah]. I would like to express my thanks to Timour Muhidine for explaining to me the case of the president of the Turk-ish Hearths (and later, a diplomat), Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver: Hamdullah is an act of grace [“God be Praised”] – an expression which literally translates the patronym Tanrıöver: “One-Who-Praises-Heaven.” In other words, the surname Tanrıöver is a semantic calque of the theophoric name Hamdullah.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK VII

second was the Regulations on Family Names [Soy Adı Nizamnamesi], which was adopted by the cabinet on December 24, 1934, from which the following is a first extract:

Article 1. Each Turk shall bear a family name [soy adı] in addition to his personal name [öz adı]. Those who do not possess a family name are required to choose one and have it written in the records of the civil registry, as well as on their birth certificate, before July 2, 1936.30

The Ottoman onomastic mosaic was characterized by its heterogeneity. The fundamentally multiethnic, multiconfessional, and, more significantly here, multilingual nature of Ottoman society explains the juxtaposition of very different-sounding names. It also allowed the coexistence of different naming systems, that is, of distinct anthroponymic nomenclatures in the onomastic marketplace. Lastly, Ottoman names were characterized by their volatility: not only could an individual be driven to use different onomastic components according to the context – which in fact is not particularly unusual – but he or she might very often change name several times over the course of a social career.31 In other words, at a formal level, the adoption of a nomenclature calqued from the Western patronymic model represented simultaneously an exercise in homogenization, and an increase in onomastic rigidity: unlike the subjects of the Ottoman sultan, the citizens of the Republic of Turkey would all use the same kinds of name – and they would theoretically use the same name throughout the whole of their lifetime.32 This formal dimension of the surname reform is part of what linguists call status planning, in as much as it favors one naming system to the detriment of the others.

But the reform was equally a modification of the onomastic inventory – an exercise in corpus planning.33 Evidence of this is provided by three articles from the aforementioned Regulations:

Article 5. New family names will be chosen in the Turkish Language. . . .Article 7. It is forbidden to bear a name appearing to contain suffixes or words imply-

ing the idea of another nationality or borrowed from a language other than Turkish, such as -ian, -ov, -eff, -vich, -ich, -is, -dis, -poulos, -aki, -zade, -mahmoudou, -veled and -bin [Yan, Of, Ef, Viç, øç, øs, Dis, Pulos, Aki, Zade, Mahmudu, Veled ve Bin]. Those who bear such names may not use them. The suffix -o÷lu should be substituted in their place. . . .

Article 8. It is forbidden to use and, once again, to bear family names which indicate in a general manner other nationalities, such as The-Son-of-the-Albanian [Arnavut O÷lu] or The-Son-of-the-Kurd [Kürd O÷lu], or which express the idea of another nationality, such as The-Son-of-Hasan-the-Circassian [Çerkes Hasan O÷lu] or

30. Soy Adı Kanunu ve Nizamnamesi (Istanbul: Necmistikbal Matbaası, 1934), 5.31. According to a study of the different categories of names commonly used among the bureau-

cratic elites of the Ottoman Empire, in Olivier Bouquet, “Onomasticon Ottomanicum: identification administrative et désignation sociale dans l’État ottoman du XIXe siècle,” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée 127 (2010): 213-235.

32. This does not preclude a certain administrative flexibility regarding the process of changing surnames, as is demonstrated in the study by Élise Massicard in this dossier.

33. On these concepts, see Robert Leon Cooper, Language Planning and Social Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 99-121; 122-156.

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VIII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

The-Son-of-Ibrahim-the-Bosnian [Boúnok (sic) øbrahim O÷lu], or which are borrowed from other languages, such as Zoti or Grandi.34

Article 5, which restricts citizens to choosing their patronym from the Turkish language (that is, from “pure Turkish”) implies, by capillary action, that the purge of the lexical corpus is also a purge of the onomastic inventory. Furthermore, it supposes that, in the Turkey of the 1930s, any common noun was a potential proper noun,35 and that conversely, proper nouns often bore a clear meaning in official neo-Turkish. In regard to Article 7, interpretation is more complex than it seems: in practice, individuals with prohibited suffixes – at least the Orthodox Rums (“-is, -dis, -poulos, -aki”) and the Armenians (“-ian”) – would not be legally required to change name and would be able to conserve their “foreign”-sounding patronyms.36 Finally, Article 8 stipulates that both foreign names and the names of foreigners (“The Albanian,” “The Bosnian,” “The Kurd”) – in spite of formally being Turkish words – were to be banned under the new patronymic propriety.

In matters of naming, the Kemalist reformers were not just prohibition-ist; they were also very interventionist. In other words, they were not content to proscribe names which evoked “otherness”; to a large extent, they defined the onomastic potentialities of nationalist Turkey. It is no surprise to find that the same intellectuals working with the authorities, charged with “purging” Turkish vocabulary of its “foreign” components, were also involved in the establishment of an etymologically orthodox onomastic inventory. This is because the linguistic material exhumed, catalogued, selected, expurgated, indeed purely and simply invented by the Society for the Study of Turkish Language mentioned above, was not simply the thesaurus from which the neo-Turkish lexicon would become officially recognized; it was also an immense onomasticon from which fathers – heads of family – were soon encouraged to come and take a new patronym. Here the originality of the Kemalist linguistic order is revealed: in Turkey, perhaps more than elsewhere, linguistic praxis can be considered a political one, a manipulation of tools – alphabetical, lexi-cal, and onomastic ones – that have their origins (in the etymological as well as the pragmatic sense) in a form of state engineering37.

34. Soy Adı Kanunu, 6.35. With the proviso that Article 3 of the law of June 21, 1934, forbids (quite casually indeed)

“names which do not comply with public morality [umumî edeplere uygun olmıyan], as well as those which are disgusting [i÷renç] or ridiculous [gülünç];” Soy Adı Kanunu, 2.

36. Detailed analysis of the objective of Article 7, of its interpretation on the part of the Kemalist administration, and of its application would require consideration well beyond the scope of the present article. A later version of the regulations does show a modification of Article 7, which was reformulated as follows: “It is forbidden to use the name [isim] of a foreign race or nation as a surname [soy adı],” Soy Adı Nizamnamsi [sic] (Istanbul: Cihan Kitabhanesi, 1935), 3. This important modification – which implied that the Surname Law was not as assimilationist as it would have seemed first, especially in so far as non-Muslims were concerned – has gone utterly unexplored.

37. Emmanuel Szurek, “Gouverner par les mots.”

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK IX

THE SEMANTIC AMBITION OF SURNAME REFORM

Onomastic Amnesia

Far from being seen as a new standard borrowed from the West, the adoption of a patronymic system was portrayed as a rehabilitation of ancestral customs and heritage in Kemalist discourse. In this line of argument, the reform was simply a return to origins after a long period of onomastic amnesia, and the Anatolian peasantry once again shouldered its load in the role of repository of eternal Turkishness. The prevailing belief, the argument runs, is that the Turks did not have family names.

But one hastens to say it: it is not the case that we have no family names! Everyone has a family name in the country. It is only the Istanbulites, those who have moved in to Istanbul, all those fine educated types [okumuúlar] who do not know what a family name is. Since the Tanzimat, there has been a fashion [here] of bearing two names, copying the Franks. That fashion reached our intellectuals [entellektüel], and they all invented them-selves a false name.38

We hear the same from Rıza Nur:

It is widely believed that the Turks do not have surnames. That is incorrect. The ancient Turks had them, and in the countryside and cities of Anatolia, they still have them. Only the people who live in Istanbul forgot theirs, and Turkey’s intellectuals, following that example, neglected theirs.39

And again from the journalist Enver Behnan, the author of a little book published in 1935 that proposes a list of names to his fellow citizens, which is preceded by a brief historical account, of which the following is an extract:

Today’s names are, for the most part, Arab, Persian, Jewish, or Assyrian [asurice] names. In the Ottoman period, Turkish names survived in small numbers among our country folk. A Turk [that is a Turkoman, as opposed to a city-dwelling Ottoman] would be known by his family name. To the rest of us, it was lost; once again, it was in the bosom of the people that family names reposed.40

In the climate of cultural neo-pan-Turkism which suffused Kemalist nationalism at the beginning of the 1930s,41 the Turkic peoples of central Asia were likewise able to support the cause of the surname. As Besim Atalay recalls:

The Yakuts have preserved, to the present day, the ancient Turkish traditions in their naming system. Three months after the birth of the child they give him his first name, which is a makeshift name [i÷reti]. As for the second name, it is awarded to him when the child can flex his bow and fire an arrow.42

38. N. H. Sinano÷lu, “Soyadı dolayında bir iki düúünce,” Milliyet, January 12, 1933.39. Nour, “Noms propres turcs.”40. Enver Behnan, Türk Soyadı, (n.p.: Tarık, 1935), 4.41. Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 185.42. Besim Atalay, Türk Büyükleri veya Türk Adları, [Turkish Glories, or Turkish Names] 2nd ed.,

(Istanbul: Devlet Basım Evi, 1935), 6 and after.

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X REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

Similarly, the epic tradition was called upon for reinforcement:

According to [the Russian Turkologist] Titov, [among the ancient Turks] if a child grew up without demonstrating his bravery he could not be given his name. He would go about nameless. It was only after he had shown heroism in the face of the enemy that the father would organize a ceremony [dü÷ün] and would give a name to his son.

However it remains to be explained why the Turks, who lived peaceably and waged war sometimes in their central Asian dystopia, with their onomastic tradition and heritage, ended up “losing their name:”

Study of the subject reveals that in the past the Turks had purely Turkish names. They began to borrow names and titles from the Chinese; but that did not go on very long. After their Islamization, they removed their ancestral names and adopted Arab and Persian ones. After three or four centuries, with the help of religion, these names were in general usage, and in the modern era, only a very few Turkish names remained among the Anatolian country people.43

Besim Bey gives more or less the same explanation, his message perhaps slightly more tinged with Arabophobia:

Like all nations, the Turkish nation used names that it created a very long time ago and that had been drawn from its own language. But then one day in Turania, Turkdom was shaken. The Arabs thrust into Turkish lands in many places, and where they were unable to enter, it was their culture which came in. The Arabs destroyed the life of the nation in Iran as well as in Turania, they killed the learned, eradicated the thinkers, swept all trace of an earlier existence from the face of the earth. [The Turks began to “Arabize” themselves.] It was at this time that Arab names began to appear among the Turks. First of all it was the religious leaders, the hodjas, who took Arab names; then it was the sovereigns, the chiefs. Little by little, these names spread through the whole nation.44

The Characterology of the Turk in Battle

In 1934, the interior minister ùükrü Kaya [“Rock”] created a depositary of Turkish surnames that were etymologically certified by the authorities, on which officials in the civil registry offices were invited to draw in order to attribute a name to the male citizens and the members of their family.

The thesaurus in question was taken from a work by Besim Atalay [“Attila”], an eminent member of the Society for the Study of Turkish Language. He was a senior civil servant from the education department who made a name for himself as an onomastics specialist. From 1917-1918, he published a series of lists of names in the journal Türk Yurdu, the organ of the Turkish Hearths, the main nationalist association at the end of the Ottoman Empire. These lists were combined in 1923 in a first booklet of 112 pages, produced on the presses of the Ministry of Public Instruction, comprising some six hundred names. This work was republished ten years later, in a considerably enlarged form, on the presses of the National Printing Office [Devlet Basım Evi]. Presented

43. Nour, “ Noms propres turcs.”44. Nour, “ Noms propres turcs,” 1.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK XI

as a “command” from the Ministry of Public Education, it assumed a very different meaning in the context of the surname law.45

It had now become a compendium of some 5,500 potential patronyms, an inventory benefitting considerably from the lexicographical surveys that had been carried out under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Turkish Language following the launch of the “Language Revolution” in 1932. The author arranged the names collected in three categories, as follows:

The names in the first part are the names of persons who have lived in history. The meaning of these names will be presented, as well as those who have borne them.

The names in the second part have been drawn from the Tarama Dergisi [Journal of the Collection] published by the Turkish Language Society: these [are words which] may become names.

The names in the third part are a selection drawn from the work published seven years ago by the Ministry of the Interior under the title Köylerimiz [Our Villages]; because numerous village names derive from the names of persons.46

The book was therefore a manual in which citizens could choose their surname according to any association they might care to find with a (sup-posedly Turkish) “great figure” from history – for this reason the work was entitled Great Turkish Figures, or the Names of the Turks – or with a particular Turkic word, the meaning of which might stir some feeling of affinity in them, or again with one or other Anatolian toponym. Besim Bey himself had set his sights on “Attila” [Atalay], to which a brief paragraph is dedicated in the first of the three lists, under the double entry, “Atilâ-Atalay:”

Great chief of the Hunnic Turks [Hün Türkleri]. Although in 432 he began by sharing power with his brother Beleda-Balta [“Axe”], it was not long before he did away with him. After definitively putting the nation in harness, he set forth on his mount, and bestrode the Caucasus, Upper Persia, and Anatolia, from Konya to Antalya. Finding these lands too small for him, he drove on toward Europe, passing through the country of the Kipchaks, and made the whole of Europe tremble. Princes, kings, and popes from all of Europe threw themselves at the feet of this illustrious Turk.

Then in 453, when he had just married in the town of Tokay, where he lived with a girl called Yıldıku – that is to say, Yıldız [“Star”] – he met his end. He was a person of great bravery, a being of profound integrity, kindly, judicious. He was quick to forgive the man who confessed his wrongs, even if he was his enemy. He showed the greatest compassion for his nation, as for all the nations under his sway. He lived simply, knew no form of immo-rality; his women themselves took care of knitting and sewing his fighting equipment.47

45. For the whole of this paragraph, S. Sakao÷lu, Türk Ad Bilimi. Giriú [Turkish Onomastics: An Introduction] (Ankara: TDK, 2001), 34-46. While this work by Besim Atalay was the only one carry-ing a semiofficial status, it must be noted that ten booklets appeared around the time of the June 1934 law, all proposing lists of etymologically correct Turkish names. A list is provided in Sakao÷lu, Türk Ad Bilimi, 51 and after.

46. Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 3.47. Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 23. We note in passing that the choice of the name Attila as a surname

has evidently not been considered contrary to Article 6 of the law of June 21, which forbids the names of “famous people from history” (see the text of the law in the introduction of the present issue.) In fact, the article was aimed less at prohibiting the reuse of surnames drawn from the ancient “Turkish Glories,” if indeed that is what they were, than at avoiding the pretention to nobility to which some citizens of humble origins might fall prey after the “appropriation” of a “great name” which was not

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XII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

This pro Attila case also appears in the work of Reúit Saffet. A graduate of the École libre des sciences politiques in Paris in 1904, and a member of parlia-ment from 1927 to 1934, Reúit Saffet was first and foremost a distinguished diplomat and statesman, close to the center of power, president of the Touring and Automobile Club of Turkey, and a great promoter of his country’s image around the world.48 He too was concerned with rehabilitating the name (and the historical renown) of the national glories for which Europeans showed so little respect. He went to Budapest in the fall of 1934 to deliver a lecture in French entitled “Contribution to a Sincere History of Attila,” explicitly a response to the latest book by Charles Seignobos:49

Read the Histoire sincère de la Nation Française [Sincere History of the French Nation], by one of the greatest French historians, Charles Seignobos; you will find in there, for example, on page 93, this astonishing sentence: “The third kind of invader was a yellow-skinned people who came from Asia, the Hungarians; they were horsemen armed with a bow. . . . They had the appearance of ferocious monsters; they left no other trace behind than their name, given to ogres, supernatural beings who eat children.” Such assertions, of which the least one can say is that they are puerile, are to be found in a serious history, one said to be “sincere,” for good measure; what might you not find in those histories which are less so, and which continue to be taught to the current generation of young people? . . . The history of Attila, a history which is fifteen centuries long, has never, until now, been subjected to the kind of critique which is the foundation of all art, and all science.

Through the correction of this history, releasing the truth from the cloak of religious fundamentalism, and the political limitations imposed upon it, I propose to return to our shared truths, to our shared glories, to the original civilization common to the Turks and the Magyars, to address the subject “to several degrees of depth,” to use Gratry’s expression.50

As his name suggests, Reúit Saffet Atabinen [“He-Who-Rides-A-Horse”] conducted a crusade in defense of national honor. This militaristic, epic, moralizing tone is found in a whole characterological onomastic inventory. Hence we encounter legions of people in Turkey with the surnames Korkmaz [“Fearless”], Yılmaz [“Intrepid”], E÷ilmez [“Unbending”], and Kırılmaz [“Unbreakable”]. Then there are the many Yi÷its [“Brave”], Kahramans [“Lionhearted”], and others using Alp [“Hero”]. There are innumerable surnames containing the root er [“Man,” in a sense unambiguously alluding to the martial manliness which thrives on the battlefield, with a bow and a horse]; the name of the current (“Islamist”) prime minister, Erdo÷an, means

“theirs” – not just anybody can be a Karaosman or a Daniúmend. Thus, behind the egalitarianist imaginary of republican onomastic law, mechanisms survived to ensure the protection of the symbolic capital associated with the social authority of the “great families;” examples of these appear below.

48. Ahmet Altintaú and ùahin Kurnaz, “Reúit Saffet Atabinen (1884-1965) ve Türk turizmine katkıları,” Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Co÷rafya Fakültesi Tarih Bölümü Tarih Araútırmaları Dergisi 26, no. 42 (2007): 9-36.

49. Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincère de la nation française: essai d’une histoire de l’évolution du peuple français (Paris: Rieder, 1933).

50. This is indeed a reference to the philosopher Joseph Gratry. He also quotes Doctor Max Nordau, and the writer André Gide. The text of the speech was published in the French-language daily Stamboul, on October 4, 1934.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK XIII

“Born Soldier.” The Turkish national temperament takes its various declina-tions on the marching grounds, or just next to them, in surnames belonging to the many Mr. or Mrs. “Tireless” [Yorulmaz], “Hard Worker” [Çalıúkan], “Of Integrity” [Dürüst], “Right” [Do÷ru], “Trustworthy” [Güvenli], or, simply, “Strong” [Güçlü]. The French expression “fort comme un Turc” would appear to be more than wordplay, for these are clearly the key values persistently attributed to the Turks in Turkist discourse. Consider, for example, this patriotic song from the 1930s:

How happy I am to have been born a Turk!Turk, that means courage, it means rectitudeMy name has shone throughout HistoryI was born a Turk, I was born free – victory is mine!51

This warrior imaginary is inseparable from the return of the Turk-ish nation to its original central Asian and pre-Islamic purity, following a template that historians of nationalism have shown to be signally trite,52 but whose anthroponymic updating in the Turkish case still draws the attention of the linguists.53 Many surnames adopted or imposed in Turkey in the 1930s convey a whole shamanistic imaginary, composed from animal, mineral, and cosmic elements. There are countless Turks called ùükrü “Rock” [Kaya], Mevlut “Grey Iron” [Bozdemir], Ali “Steel” [Çelik], ùekip “Bronze” [Tunç], Zeynep “Earth” [Toprak], Ayúe “Sea” [Deniz], Cemil “Sky” [Gök], øbrahim “Morning-Has-Broken” [Gündo÷du], Ceyhan “Cloud” [Bulut], Metin “Star” [Yıldız], Mesut “Lightning” [Yıldırım], Abdullah “Moon” [Ay], and Adnan “Mountain” [Da÷]; not to mention the numerous Turks called Mr. “Universe” [Evren]. Turkish telephone directories are also veritable bestiaries, where Turks called “Tiger” [Kaplan], and other great felines [Arslan], fight it out with people called “Wolf” [Kurt], “Eagle” [Kartal], and “Falcon” [ùahin]. Not many farm animals are to be found, in contrast, apart from some who use the name “Bull” [Bo÷a] or “Cock” [Horoz]. Unsurprisingly, there is nobody called “Veal,” “Cow,” or “Pig.”54 However this is not the whole story – in many Turkish surnames there is a darker streak which deals in matters of blood and race.

51. “Ne mutlu Türk yaratıldım/Türk demek cesaret, do÷ruluk demek/Tarihe ün saldı adım/Türk do÷dum, hür do÷dum zafer bana gerek;” quoted in Yıldız, “Ne Mutlu,” 179.

52. Thiesse, La Création, 23.53. Derya Duman, “A Characterization of Turkish Personal Name Inventory,” International

Journal of the Sociology of Language 165 (2004): 155-177.54. Besim Atalay mocks those “ridiculous” [gülünç] names found “among the French,” such as

“Berger [Shepherd], Pierre [Stone], Bouillon [Stew], Bœuf (Monsieur Le Bœuf) [Beef]” [“Fransızlarda, Berger, Pierre, Bouillon, Bœuf (Monsieur Le Bœuf) gibi ki çoban, taú, etsuyu, öküz demektir”]. Atalay, Türk Büyükleri, 8. Nicole Lapierre points out that among the requests for name changes submitted to the French Council of State, those “involving the surname Canard [Duck], Vache [Cow], Veau [Veal] . . . were admitted, but [that] the same was not the case for Bœuf [Beef], Taureau [Bull], Chèvre [Goat], Rossignol [Nightingale], or Léopard [Leopard]:” Nicole Lapierre, Changer de nom (Paris: Stock, 1995), 110.

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XIV REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

“The Land of the Turkish Race”

The reform of 1934 was not the first initiative toward imposing change on the nature of surnames in Turkey. In March 1929, the Turkish government had already set up a ministerial commission charged with preparing a first draft bill on the matter. At that time, it was all about “family names” [aile ismi].55 But the law of 1934 preferred the notion of soy adı, or “soy name.” What is a soy? The (current) dictionary of the Turkish Language Institute gives it as an equivalent to the Arabic (or Ottoman) sülale, or English lineage. Therefore, the soy adı would appear to be a lineage name. There are plenty of examples indeed where the offspring of the Anatolian nobility made their new surnames a blaze of their illustrious genealogy.56 The case of the writer Yakup Kadri, of the house of Karaosman, is well known – in the civil registry he became Yakup Kadri Karaosmano÷lu [“Son-of-Karaosman”].57 That of the Turkologist Mecdut Mansuro÷lu [“The-Son-of-the-Victorious”] is less well known. Born into the Mansurizâde family, he had only to drop the Persian descent suffix, -zâde, and replace it with the Turkish equivalent, -o÷lu, for his ancestral lakab [earlier family lineage name] to be recognized by the law and to become a soy adı.58 A third example is that of the historian øsmail Hâmi Bey, who took the name Daniúmend by virtue of his allegedly “being of the Turkoman family of Danischmend of Anatolia,” a dynasty which reigned over Asia Minor in the middle of the twelfth century.59

But the word soy is equally freighted with a racialist sense, which is found in soydaú (for which a possible translation is “brother-in-race,” alongside “member of the same lineage”); and again, in soykırım [“genocide”]. It is clear that raciological thinking was omnipresent in the intellectual and political context of Kemalist Turkey. From the beginning of the 1930s, the “History Thesis” [Tarih Tezi] was an official state truth. This thesis was elaborated at the highest levels of the state by a range of approved intellectuals and officials, among them Sadri Maksudi, Reúit Galip, ùemseddin Günaltay, and Afet ønan. Spurred on and encouraged by the president of the republic himself, it represented a kind of origin myth, which attributes to the Turks a central role in world history. Summarizing briefly: in the beginning, a time long ago, there was a great body of water in the heartlands of central Asia, called the Great Turkish Sea. This sea was the cradle of brilliant civilizations. When,

55. Baúbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arúivi [Archives of the Prime Minister] (Ankara), 30..18.1.2/002.018.38.56. That is, of their “lakab [ancestral name] of lineage.” Bouquet, “Onomasticon Ottomanicum:

identification,” 220.57. We observe that in the same family, some would take the unmodified lakab, such as Suat

Karaosman, a “close relative” of Yakup Kadri, who mentions him in Politikada 45 Yıl (Ankara: Bilgi Yay, 1968), 179. See also the death notice of Kâni Karaosman, Milliyet, August 8, 1959, 2.

58. The case is quite similar to that of Köprülüzâde Mehmed Fuad, except it provides a fairly exceptional example of an Arab anthroponym surviving the onomastic purge. On Köprülu, see the article by Olivier Bouquet in this dossier.

59. Les Annales de la Turquie 7-8-9 (August-October 1936): 43.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK XV

for climatic reasons, it suddenly dried up, several millennia before our era, the proto-Turks were forced to disperse.60 Wherever they went, the representatives of this “brachycephalic alpine race” brought enlightenment to humanity in the form of articulated language, the cultivation of wheat, a mastery of animal husbandry, the invention of the wheel, and many other beneficial discover-ies. Everywhere the Turks developed refined civilizations: the civilization of the Nile, and the Sumerian, Chinese, Indian, Hittite, Etruscan, Lydian, and Phrygian civilizations, too.61 The following is an example of what can be found in junior high school textbooks published in the year of the surname reform:

The Turks went to China at least seven thousand years before Christ, and the works they left behind there show that they laid down a civilization greatly superior to that of the Chinese. . . . [Another group of migrants crossed the Himalaya.] There was no indig-enous civilization there, it was still prehistory, it was full of groups of men with black skin, resembling troops of monkeys. The Turks pushed on to the south, and founded a brilliant civilization.62

This historiographical narrative, with its linguistic63 and anthropological64 dimensions, was written within a broad movement in 1930s Turkey towards the ethnicization of categories of thought and of political action. On the same day as the vote on the Surname Law, a Settlement Law [øskân Kanunu] was published in the official (state) journal; the aim of this law was to sedentarize the nomad populations of eastern Turkey in the name of “national security” imperatives. In this text, use is made of a formal distinction – involving the use of the word soy – between individuals of “Turkish race” [Türk soylu], and those “linked to Turkish culture” [Türk kültürüne ba÷lı], in this case meaning, essentially, the Kurds.65 If, as Ahmet Yıldız believes, Kemalism never took the form of state racism, “it does, nevertheless, have a strong racial or ethnic tinge throughout; and this has been reflected in objective as well as subjective

60. It is worth noting that this origin story is a “photographic negative” of the Atlantis myth.61. Büúra Ersanli, øktidar ve Tarih: Türkiye’de “Resmi Tarih” Tezinin Oluúumu (1929-1937) [Politi-

cal Power and History: the Formation of the Official History Thesis in Turkey] (Istanbul: Afa Yay, 1992); Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps.

62. Translated and published in Ersanli, øktidar ve Tarih, 63.63. ølker Aytürk, “Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism

in Atatürk’s Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2004): 1-25; Emmanuel Szurek, “Connaissez-vous la théorie de la langue-soleil? Une histoire européenne du fantasme scientifique dans la Turquie des années 1930,” in Les langues de la négociation, ed. Déjanirah Couto and Stéphane Pequignot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, in press).

64. See for example the anthropometric survey of Mustafa Kemal’s adoptive daughter: Afet ønan, L’Anatolie, le pays de la “race” turque. Recherches sur les caractères anthropologiques des populations de la Turquie (enquête sur 64000 individus) (Geneva: Georg et Cie, 1941). On Kemalist anthropology, see Nazan Maksudyan, Türklü÷ü Ölçmek: Bilimkurgusal Antropoloji ve Türk Milliyetçili÷inin Irkçı Cephesi, 1925-1939 [Measuring Turkishness: Anthropological Science Fiction and the Racist Element within Turkish Nationalism] (Istanbul: Metis, 2005); Murat Ergin, “‘Is the Turk a White Man?’“ Towards a Theoretical Framework for Race in the Making of Turkishness,” Middle Eastern Studies 44, no. 6 (November 2008): 827-850.

65. “øskân Kanunu,” Resmi Gazete 2733 (June 21 1934): 4008. A third category refers to indi-viduals with no link to Turkish culture,” which means anarchists, spies, “nomadic Roma,” as well as people expelled from Turkey (art. 4).

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XVI REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

cultural signs.”66 And behind it is the obsessive desire to sort and separate the pure and the impure, the healthy and the corrupted, which pervades the whole Kemalist national imaginary; it appears not only in the purification of the onomastic corpus, but also in the semantic values of a great number of patronyms.

In the fall of 1934, for example, the parliamentarian Saffet Bey (a name which in Arabic already means “purity”) received the name Arıkan [“Pure Blood”] from Mustafa Kemal in person – a man with no fear of pleonasm. “Purity of Pure-Blood” is perhaps an onomastic hapax, but “Pure Blood” [Özkan] and “Strong Blood” [Pekkan], in contrast, are rather common names in Turkey. This is without mentioning those whose name refers specifically to race [soy], such as that of the personal secretary of the president of the repub-lic, Hasan “Race White” [Soyak]. Many Turks are called Mr. “White Race” [Aksoy], or Mrs. “High Race” [Ulusoy]. Nothing actually prohibits combining the two, which gives us people called “Race Blood” [Soykan] and “Blood Race” [Kansoy]. Eric Hobsbawm remarked that “there is an evident analogy between the insistence of racists on the importance of racial purity and the horrors of miscegenation, and the insistence of so many – one is tempted to say of most – forms of linguistic nationalism on the need to purify the national language from foreign elements.”67 The Kemalist bureaucrat-intellectuals certainly provide support for this notion; they just pushed the obsession a little further, taking it to the point – in the real as well as the figurative sense – of inscribing the signature of their fantasies on their fellow citizens’ identity papers.

THE NOMINAL AND THE NATIONAL

On November 24, 1934, five months after the adoption of the Soyadı Kanunu, the Turkish National Assembly unanimously passed a law under the terms of which the family name Ata Türk (subsequently, Atatürk, in a single word) was solemnly conferred upon the president of the Republic of Turkey. Mustafa Kemal became “The Father Turk.” At the beginning of December, the parliamentary member for Kocaeli, øbrahim Süreyya, proposed the prohibition of the use of this patronym par excellence by any other person.68 The creation of a separate and exclusive onomastic status for the head of state shows us that the act of naming was also a celebration, and that the name Atatürk was also an honorific title. Without a doubt, in this denomination we must seek international parallels

66. Yildiz, “Ne Mutlu,” 156.67. Hobsbawm, Nations, 108.68. In exchange for which he received from Mustafa Kemal in person the name Yı÷ıt, “The Brave.”

Enver Konukçu, “Yeni harfler ve devlet büyüklerinin imzaları” [“The New Characters and the Signatures of Statesmen”], in 80. Yılında Türk Harf ønkılabı Uluslararası Sempozyumu [International Symposium on the Occasion of the 80th Anniversary of the Alphabet Revolution], ed. Tülay Alim Baran (Istanbul: Yeditepe Üniversitesi Atatürk ølkeleri ve ønkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü, 2009), 290-302; 296, 301 and after.

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK XVII

with the Duce, the Führer, and the Father of the peoples.69 Nevertheless, in the context of the personality cult surrounding Mustafa Kemal from the middle of the 1920s, the process takes on an original rhetorical character that might well suit the term “creationist.” The leader of the war of independence against the Allies and the Greeks (1919-1922) had already been rewarded, in 1921, with the title Gazî, traditionally given to Muslim leaders who won signal victories over the Infidel. But henceforth, the renown of the founder of “New Turkey” would be written into the race’s new secular future:

He is the greatest Turk. Ata Türk is not his family name, it is he himself. Atatürk will fly like a flag over history. The future of Turkish history is to be found in his shadow. . . . A name was necessary with which to decorate the one who saved his nation from death, a most pure and genuine Turkish name. What better name to give him than that of Ata [ancestor]? Turkish is an inexhaustible spring. The Gazî, by tracing back to the source of the spring, has swept away the rubble heaped for centuries upon it. It is He who is the streaming water of this spring, which revives and energizes, like the summer sun, that which had been destroyed. Blessings upon Him and his name.70

It is legitimate here to borrow Mona Ozouf’s notion of the transfer of sacrality;71 both the blessing and the capitalization (“It is He . . .”) evidently echo the written conventions and the forms of deference used to refer to the Almighty in Old Testament tradition. Atatürk is in effect a theorem of transcendence,72 by which he is at once the heir of the “Great Turk” (a caliph to replace the caliph73) and the Hyper-Turk (“more-Turkish-than-Thou”). But he was also the Arch-Turk, located at the wellspring of the nation. This is how we must read this astonishing passage taken from an article by the official linguist Agop Martaian, the well-(re)named Dilâçar [“Explainer-of-the-Language”], in which Mustafa Kemal’s patronym comes to resonate with echoes of the famous prehistoric Turkish race.

The Sumerian language undoubtedly resembles all languages, for it is the closest heir of the mother language of the alpine race of central Asia and of the Ata-Türks (the palaealpine proto-Turks); in the same way, it is the “dominant language” over all others.74

It is here, perhaps, that the reform of family names in Turkey reveals itself in all its cognitive violence. “The great Kemal Atatürk, by having the Grand National Assembly of Turkey adopt the law on family names, succeeded in that great undertaking: he gave the Turkish an existence as a nation.” Put another way, the word creates the thing. Enver Behnan, the author of those few lines,

69. Also in use as a semiofficial title, from 1934, was the expression Büyük Önder [“Great Leader”].70. “Ata Türk,” østanbul, November 26, 1934, 1.71. Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).72. Étienne Copeaux, “La transcendance d’Atatürk,” in Saints et héros du Moyen-Orient contem-

porain, ed. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2002), 121-138.73. In the latter years of his life, Mustafa Kemal stayed increasingly regularly, and for longer, in

the former imperial Ottoman palace of Dolmabahçe, in Istanbul, where he died in November 1938.74. A. Dilaçar, “Les bases bio-psychologiques de la théorie Güneú-Dil [Langue-Soleil],” Türk

Dili 21-22 (February 1937): 80-92, 83. On this Armenian intellectual, a convert to Kemalist racialism, see Türkay, A. Dilâçar (Ankara: TDK, 1982).

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XVIII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

further propounds the principle which was, from that point forward, to guide the onomastic choices of his fellow citizens:

After the revolution of family names, each Turk must give his child the name of Turk, by virtue of the principle “He who is a Turk gives the name Turk!” He who does not give a Turkish name is not a Turk. And so, here is my book, where you will find 3,396 Turkish names. Help yourselves!75

Each word taken from the Turkish language is a metonym of the ethnonym Türk. To bear a Turkish name, or to bear the name Türk: it is one and the same thing. This is an example of the “hold of the national over the nominal” that is characteristic of so many patronymic nationalisms.76 What is not found elsewhere is the use of the national ethnonym as a patronym, modified in numerous ways in the onomastic inventory imposed on the population. As an example there is Fahri Sabit “Protect Turk” [Korutürk], president of the repub-lic from 1973 to 1980, who also received his surname from Mustafa Kemal. This allegedly took place in March 1935 at Karpiç – one of the capital’s smart restaurants – when the young military officer in his thirties crossed the path of the “Father Turk.”77 But when it comes to Turkophoric names – since that is indeed what this is about – the subalterns were not to be outdone. After the Father Turk come his people: great numbers of Mr. “Turk Son” [Türko÷lu], Uncle “Turk Blood” [Türkkan], and Aunt “Pure Turk” [Arıtürk]. Here are the thousands by the name of “Race Turk” [Soytürk] inhabiting the civil registers, and there, the “True Turks” [Öztürk] – often Kurds – who each day bear the name of their “identity.”78

The full meaning of surname reform in Turkey cannot be grasped by representing it as an exercise in social control and the bureaucratization of society – which it also is, of course. If we envisage it from the point of view of those who carried it out, that is, from an internal perspective, we can state that the patronyms put into circulation on the Turkish onomastic marketplace in the 1930s crystallized and objectivized a whole political imaginary: the reform of family names was also an exercise in glorification of the national self, and the construction of a metahistorical reputation. To that extent, it supported the notion of patronymic nationalism. We have seen that in the soy adı the whole semantic range of the genus is affected, in as much as it encompassed the generational, the genealogical, and the phylogenetic. Biological engender-ment contends here against national regeneration, family relationships fuse with ethnic heredity – and what we are then left with is patronymic racialism.

It could quite justifiably be argued, to be sophisticated and sometimes a little dreary, that the remodeling of the world through the creation of this

75. Behnan, Türk Soyadı, 4, 18.76. Lapierre, Changer de nom, 54 and after.77. Konukçu, “Yeni harfler,” 300.78. By which family names reveal their assimilationist aspect – at least for the Muslim ethnic

minorities: Eissenstat, “Metaphors of Race.”

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TO CALL A TURK A TURK XIX

vast scenario, of these meanings, and these words, was never the idea of more than a small group of leaders and intellectuals of their time, the 1930s – and that consequently, the discourse studied here tells us nothing of the way in which each individual received, interpreted, and gave meaning to the official patronymic discourse. But it remains the case, firstly, that in reaching into the privacy of individual personal names, the anthroponymic norm represented a more effective vehicle for the introduction of the national than the incantation of any kind of discursive political propaganda, or indeed of any social labeling via the transformation of collective nouns. Secondly, it is worth remembering, with Paul Siblot, that linguistic categories are also categories of practice; they are praxemes, the manipulation of which affects our view of the social world as much as that world is refracted through them:

This relationship to the real via praxis is not carried on in one direction only. Praxemes are not restricted to recording the information provided by sense experience or by practical experience, to taking on board the meanings conveyed by the discourse in which they are produced. The dialectical relationship with the real also works in the other direction; words act upon us and in so doing are just as much praxemes. We conceive and perceive the world through the templates they provide; through them we determine our attitude, and we act. Praxemes also exercise a feedback effect on our practices, one that imbues words with their power and their purposive force.

It is therefore to be expected that men of power seek to enact that power through their use. Lacking the ability to exercise the absolute dictatorship of Big Brother, they can hope to dictate the behavior of their subjects through the representations the latter can make of the world and of their situation.79

Emmanuel SZUREK

CETOBAC-EHESS/CNRS École normale supérieure (département d’histoire),

45, rue d’Ulm 75 005 Paris

[email protected]

79. Paul Siblot, “Appeler les choses par leur nom. Problématiques du nom, de la nomination et des renominations,” in Akin, Noms et Re-noms, 13-31; 29.

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XX REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE

Abstract / Résumé

Emmanuel Szurek

To Call a Turk a Turk: Patronymic Nationalism in Turkey in the 1930s

By their denotative and even more their connotative charge, large numbers of Turkish patronyms are repositories loaded with symbolism. To understand this, one must examine the discursive context in which the “Surname Law” of June 1934 was adopted. The Kemalist leaders imported into Turkey the European anthroponymic system and had the Anatolian population choose surnames from an onomastic stock selected according to etymological and semantic criteria. In its actual linguistic dimension, the alteration of anthroponyms in Turkey displays a particularly strong case of nationalization of cognition.

KEYWORDS: Turkey, 1930s, Kemalism, onomastics, linguistic nationalism, racialism ■

Emmanuel Szurek

Appeler les Turcs par leur nom. Le nationalisme patronymique dans la Turquie des années 1930

Par leur charge dénotative et surtout connotative, un grand nombre de patronymes turcs charrient un pesant référentiel symbolique. Pour le comprendre, il faut examiner le contexte discursif dans lequel fut adoptée la « loi sur les noms de famille » (juin 1934), lorsque les dirigeants kémalistes entreprirent d’importer le système anthroponymique européen en Turquie et d’amener la population anatolienne à se choisir un nom parmi un stock onomastique sélectionné selon des critères étymologiques et sémantiques. Dans sa dimension proprement linguistique, l’altération des anthroponymes en Turquie offre un cas particulièrement poussé de nationalisation de la cognition.

MOTS-CLÉS : Turquie, années 1930, kémalisme, onomastique, nationalisme linguistique, racialisme ■

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To Call a Turk a Turk: Patronymic Nationalism in Turkey in the 1930s

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