Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks

Marc Baer is a major scholar of Ottoman Jewish history, and in this manuscript he demonstrates not only his erudition and knowledge of the sources but his courage on confronting a major myth of Ottoman history and current Turkish politics: the tolerance and defense of Jews by the Ottoman and Turkish state.

~Ronald Grigor Suny, editor of A Question of Genocide

A very significant study regarding the origins of violence and its denial in Turkey through the empirical study of not only antisemitism, but also its connection to genocide denial.

~Fatma Müge Göçek, author of The Transformation of Turkey

Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks is a tour de force that is written with a backdrop of 500 years of Jewish history, spanning from when the Ottoman Empire embraced Jewish refugees fleeing Spain in 1492 all the way until today. In between those years, there were days of honey and days of onions, and as Baer shows, it was often only the sweetness we heard about, with the bitterness buried deep within the souls who suffered it, covered up by an 'utopian narrative of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish history.'

~Louis Fishman, Turkish Studies

In this disturbing and thought-provoking book, Marc David Baer, a Jewish American and a long-time academic scholar of Turkish Studies, bursts the bubble that the Turks throughout history were "God's rod" for the Jews, who smote the antisemitic Christians, welcomed Jews from the Spanish Inquisition and saved them from the Holocaust. 

~Times Literary Supplement TLS