Netflix series awakens ghosts of past for Turkey's Jews

IZMIR, Turkey — In Izmir’s minuscule Jewish community, Turkey's second largest after the 10,000-strong population in Istanbul, a Netflix series is a hot topic.

“I was deeply moved by it,” said Tilda Koenka, project assistant for Izmir Jewish Heritage Project. “It is a cinematic feast with its balanced story of our plight, the old, half-forgotten Ladino songs and our culture and traditions that are represented both accurately and with sensitivity. Through its multilayered storyline, it has shed light on a history that we have not dared speak about, even among family.”

Since its release on Nov. 5, “The Club,” Netflix’s six-episode series about Turkey’s ever-shrinking Jewish minority, has been both accused of waking the ghosts of the country’s turbulent past with its non-Muslim minorities and praised for breaking the code of silence among the Jews often called Turkey's "model minority” on the past injustices that deprived them of their wealth, language and in some cases, life.

Ozgur Kaymak, whose doctoral thesis is on Istanbul’s ethno-religious communities and their memories, told Al-Monitor, “This is the first series that has touched upon Turkey’s Jewish community without succumbing to victimization, caricaturization of Jews as evil bankers or greedy money-lenders or succumbing to rose-scented nostalgia on how multi-ethnic neighbors lived together all in harmony around the Galata tower in the good old days.”