European Xenophobia of the “Turks”: A brief Intertextual Reflection
Two posts ago, I discussed the first recorded petition against racialized chattel slavery in the North American English colonies. Several times I highlighted the petition’s Eurocentrism and European xenophobia of “Turks.” For example, after defending abolition by implicitly using Jesus’s teachings to do unto others as we would have them do unto us (Matthew 7:12), the petition’s German authors write:
How fearful and faint-hearted are many on sea, when they see a strange vessel, -being afraid it should be a Turk, and they should be taken, and sold for slaves into Turkey. Now what is this better done, as Turks doe?
The rhetorical question presumes a common religious, transnational xenophobia. The German authors are essentially asking, “Do you, European colonial Christians, want to act like those barbarous, strange, non-Christian Turks?” Their presumed answer: “Surely not!”
This doubly anti-Turk presumption reminds me of a passage in Edward Said’s classic The World, The Text, and the Critic. In the introduction, Said highlights the significance of Erich Auerbach writing Mimesis—a book on “the representation of reality in Western literature”—in Istanbul, Turkey. After reminding readers that Auerbach wrote Mimesis as an exiled German Jew seeking refuge from Nazi Europe, Said writes:
That Auerbach should choose to mention Istanbul as the place of his exile adds yet another dose of drama to the actual fact of Mimesis. To any European trained principally, as Auerbach was, in medieval and renaissance Roman literatures, Istanbul does not simply connote a place outside Europe. Istanbul represents the terrible Turk, as well as Islam, the scourge of Christendom, the great Oriental apostasy incarnate. Throughout the classical period of European culture Turkey was the Orient, Islam its most redoubtable and aggressive representative. That was not all, though. The Orient and Islam also stood for the ultimate alienation from the Opposition to Europe, the European tradition of Christian Latinity, as well as to putative authority of ecclesia, humanistic learning, and cultural community. For centuries Turkey and Islam hung over Europe like a gigantic composite monster, seeming to threaten Europe with destruction. To have been an exile in Istanbul at that time of fascism in Europe was a deeply resonating and intense form of exile from Europe.
The German abolitionist immigrants who decried “the traffick of men-body” while living in a North American English colony voiced the fear Said describes. For them, the “Turk” was “a gigantic composite monster” that all white European Christians dreaded. Indeed, these German immigrants presumed that even those inhabiting Penn’s Forest would be moved to terror at the thought of being “taken, and sold for slaves into Turkey.”
Recognizing that “For centuries Turkey and Islam hung over Europe” can help you understand texts as divergent as Mimesis and a 1688 petition against racialized chattel slavery in Pennsylvania. Such are Europe’s savage anxieties.
