Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as "Strangers" and the Semiotics of Reclassification more

Names That Show Time: Turkish Jews as “Strangers” and the Semiotics of Reclassification Marcy Brink-Danan ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss the anthropological value of focusing on ontological processes in which seemingly local, native, or indigenous people are reclassified as foreigners. Building on theories of language and time, I show, through the ethnographic example of Jewish naming in Istanbul, how names come to signify foreignness. I also explore naming as a process through which the subjects of reclassification themselves understand presentday ontologies as historically informed and context dependent. By studying moments of categorical reassignment, I detail the social semiotic processes that drive the classification of signs as indices of belonging or exclusion. Anthropologists increasingly study military, juridical, and economic ontologies that reorder, relocate, and restrict human (and nonhuman) groups. I illuminate a quieter space, that of naming, through which classifications are made and undone. Keywords: ontology, classification, names, Jews, Turkey ¨ ¨ ˘ ¨ ¨ OZET Bu makalede, yerel, yoreye ait ve dogma buyume yerli kisilerin yabancı olarak yeniden sınıflandırılmasının ¸ ¨ ¨ ¨˘¨ ¨ ¸ ˘ ˘ goruldugu varlıksal (ontolojik) sureclere odaklanmanın antropolojik degerini tartısacagım. Calısmayı dil ve zaman ¸ ¸ ¸ ¨ ¨ ˘ kuramları uzerine kurarak, ˙stanbul Musevilerinin adlandırılmasını konu alan etnografik bir ornekleme aracılıgı ile, I ¨ ˘ ¨ isimlerin nasıl bir yabancılık anlamı yuklendigini gostermeyi umuyorum. Aynı zamanda, yeniden sınıflandırmaya ¨ ˘ mazur kalanların kendilerinin guncel ontolojileri tarihsel olarak belirlenmis ve baglama dayalı olarak kavrayageldikleri ¸ ¨ ¸ ˘ ¨ surecleri de arastırıyorum. Kategorilerin yeniden tayin edildigi belirli anları irdeleyerek, gostergelerin sınıflandırılmasını ¸ ¨ ¨¸ ¨ ¨ ¨ ¸ ¨ aidiyet ve dıslama endeksine donusturen toplumsal gostergebilimsel surecleri ayrıntılandırıyorum. Antropologlar gun ¸ ¨ gectikce insan (ve insan olmayan) grupları tekrar duzene sokan, yerinden eden ya da kısıtlayan askeri, hukuksal ¸ ¸ ¨ ˘ ˘ ve ekonomik ontolojilerin uzerine egiliyorlar. Bense daha sessiz sedasız bir mekana egilerek, sınıflandırmaların insa ¸ ˘ edilip tekrar bozuldugu isimlendirme alanına ısık tutmaya calısıyorum. ¸ ¸ ¸ ´ ´ ´ RESUME Cet article interroge, d’un point de vue anthropologique, le bien-fonde des processus ontologiques par ´ ´ ´ ` lesquels des populations dites locales, natives ou autochtones sont (re-)categorisees comme etrangeres. A travers ` ´ l’exemple ethnographique des noms juifs a Istanbul, et en m’appuyant sur les theories du langage et du temps, ` ´ ´ je montre comment les noms en viennent a signifier “etranger.” J’explore egalement la nomination en tant que ` ˆ ´ ´ processus a travers lequel les sujets de cette reclassification eux-memes percoivent ces schemas de categorisation ¸ ´ ´ ´ ´ ´ comme determines par une histoire et dependants d’un contexte. En etudiant certains moments de reassignation ´ ´ ` fondamentaux, je precise les processus semiotiques sociaux qui conduisent a la classification de signes comme in´ dices d’appartenance ou d’exclusion. Les anthropologues etudient de plus en plus les ontologies militaires, juridiques ´ ´ ´ et economiques qui reordonnent, resituent et restreignent des groupes humains (et nonhumains). Mon etude met ` ´ ` en lumiere les mecanismes d’un espace plus discret, celui de la nomination, a travers lequel des classifications sont ´ faites et defaites. AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 3, pp. 384–396, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. c 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01247.x Brink-Danan How do people become aware that they are strangers in their own lands? Someone must make them so. Sometimes they are forcibly removed. Sometimes they are just reclassified. —Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place • Names That Show Time 385 In this article, I discuss the value of focusing on moments in which people are “reclassified” by looking to the semiotic resources involved in ontology: the ascribed being or essence of things, the categories of things that are thought to exist or can exist in any specific domain, and the specific attributes assigned to them. Ontologies, as Ian Hacking writes, refer to “what comes into existence with the historical dynamics of naming.” Pursuing a “historical ontology,” then, demands something that philosophical study of ontology tout court might pursue but more often does not: identification of mutating assignments of essence and its predicates in specific time and place. [Stoler 2008:4] O ne quickly observes in Istanbul a wide variety of political, religious, and class affiliations: “The Istanbul cityscape is like a raised Braille script that the traveler can read as a code for the different forces and interests, and the negotiations among them, that characterize the city” (White 2002:4). A space in which social distinctions are commonly encoded and decoded are interactions—in the bank, in the classroom, at the market—in which people make introductions. This is particularly salient in the seemingly banal but politically fraught ontological process of marking a name “Turkish” or “foreign.” Although there is no official census of Jews in Turkey, estimates range from 20,000 to 25,000 (Toktas 2006:123), ¸ making Turkey today home to the highest number of Jews of all the lands that once comprised the Ottoman Empire.1 The vast majority of Turkish Jews are Sephardic (Spanish) Jews whose ancestors arrived in the Ottoman Empire fleeing the Spanish expulsion. Despite over half a millennium of life in the region, Turkish citizenship and fluency in the Turkish language, Turkish Jews are regularly reclassified as “yabancı” (lit., stranger or foreigner) in everyday interactions with Muslim Turks.2 These everyday moments of reclassification offer a productive starting point for examination of how one knows he or she is a stranger. Following Georg Simmel’s (1950) understanding of the role of “strangers” as cultural brokers, sociological literature has focused on how this category of person exhibits a heightened awareness of the arbitrariness of cultural classifications. Through what linguistic and social practices is one made a stranger in the first place? Using the ethnographic example of Turkish Jewry, a focus on names may help parse the process through which populations find themselves reclassified and the sense made of these ontological shifts. Anna Tsing’s (1993) phrase “just reclassified” in the epigraph above invites an elaboration about the linguistic operations through which classification works as well as a closer look at which actors, speeches, and genres are involved and the social consequences of these identity performances. A semiotic approach is suggestive for an understanding of how people recall and reinterpret processes of human reclassification across contexts, offering a productive lens through which to study how (and when) other subjects sometimes marked as “foreign”—such as minorities, immigrants, laborers, corporations, and even plants (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001)—get deemed “strangers” (or “aliens” or “others,” etc.). Such an approach also allows us to consider the implications these processes have for the “strangers” themselves as well as for those who claim to not be strange—that is, “natives” or “locals.” To focus precisely on mutating assignments of essence, I highlight an ontological process that I call “chronomastics,” which I define as discourse about names highlighting an awareness of times past. This neologism builds on the noun onomastics, the study of names and their meanings, while focusing attention specifically on names as social objects that articulate contemporary and past classifications. Studying chronomastics draws our attention to bigger questions about how names signal the past as a process of differentiation and points out the lessons this process offers for the study of other practices of distinction and “othering,” from hate speech to “we talk.” Chronomastics illuminates more broadly the ways that ontological speech acts are palimpsests of meaning that accrue over time. For example, in 2002, Lusi, a Turkish Jewish student, and I decided to rent an apartment together in Istanbul where I was conducting anthropological fieldwork with the Jewish community. Lusi is a Turkish citizen, speaks and dresses like the Istanbul urbanite that she is, and is only distinguishable from other Muslim Turks because her first and last names are regularly considered “non-Turkish.” On meeting her, real-estate brokers would invariably ask, “Nerelisiniz?” (lit., where are you from). The situation once bordered on the farcical when, despite Lusi’s insistence on her “Turkishness,” neither the agent nor his secretary could spell her name while completing the rental paperwork. Lusi (who uses both the French spelling [Lucie] and the legal, phonetic, Turkish one [Lusi]) patiently pronounced each letter separately, using the mnemonic spelling technique of Turkish schoolchildren in which letters are made clear by reference to Turkish cities: “L” as in L¨ leburgaz, “U” as in Urfa, “S” as in Samsun, and u “I” as in Istanbul.3 Bernard Lewis argues that Turkish identity is expressed in a zero-sum game: “One may speak of Christian Arabs, but a Christian Turk is an absurdity and a contradiction in terms . . . a non-Muslim in Turkey may be called a Turkish citizen, but never a Turk” (2001:15). In the symbolic realm of naming, I found that Turks of various religious and political persuasions—Jews included—define “Turkishness” through a set of unmarked, canonical names achieved through a century of erasure of non-Muslim claims of membership in the Turkish nation. When I introduced Lusi to Volkan, a waiter at a cafe I frequented in Istanbul, he joked with her, “Is that your real name? You can’t be Turkish!” (field notes, October 386 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010 2002). During another visit to the cafe, Volkan asked me if I had figured out what was “going on” with my roommate. He urged me to spy on her, saying, “One day, when she isn’t looking, take her identity card and see what it says. I’ll bet ‘Lusi’ isn’t her real name!” (field notes, October 2002). Another example of naming as a critical ontological process became apparent when, during an interview conducted in 2003, a Turkish Jewish woman in her fifties recounted her son’s ordeal of living in Turkey with a “foreign” name: Last year my son won an academic award. The university dean congratulated him on speaking “such excellent Turkish—for a foreigner!” . . . He is interested in politics and studied political science in one of the best universities in Turkey. Nonetheless, he can’t be a politician in Turkey with our [Jewish] family name. He feels very frustrated by this as he has no interest in living abroad. [Brink-Danan 2009:8] This woman explained that her son was “completely Turkish” and that he was offended when she suggested that he consider leaving Turkey for some place where his name might not hinder his political aspirations. Sometimes being classified as a foreigner seems a minor inconvenience, without heavy material consequences; however, in other cases, being marked as foreign, both in the present and the past, engenders more serious results, including economic and political exclusions.4 The act of marking someone as “foreign” thus opens up questions of social and material consequences of naming as “a vocabulary of inclusion and exclusion” (Herzfeld 1982:299). But how does this vocabulary obtain the power to include or exclude? One way of studying sites of exclusion or inclusion is to examine power struggles around naming itself. Jacques Derrida viewed linguistic power as obtained by breaking utterances, such as names, from their prior contexts (Butler 1997:2, 141–151). Muslim Turks who classify Jewish Turks as “foreigners” through naming dialogues seem to forget past contexts and are likely unaware of the repetition of similar speech events over one’s lifetime and beyond. But what of the memory of prior contexts held by those being named? If contested claims between my friend Lusi and Muslim Turks led to awkward moments, fear, or dismay, it is likely because Lusi regularly interprets—as do other Jews—these moments by building on a chain of meaning that accrues over time, drawing precisely on those very historical contexts that many Muslim Turks deny in the present. But in the minds of those—in this case, Jews—being classified “out” of the collective, episodes like those recounted above between Lusi and real estate brokers or caf´ waiters are not isoe lated from reclassifying performances in prior contexts. My Jewish informants regularly set individual naming events, even seemingly innocuous ones, into historical relief against a backdrop of socializing discourses that teach Jews to fear being reclassified as foreigners. In this article, I contextualize the present in the past by providing some background about Ottoman and Turkish naming customs as a way to historicize the sense Jews make today of being classified as “non-Turkish.” I also offer a selec- tion of anthropological considerations of names as context dependent, an idea on which I elaborate with a theory that sees onomastic practices as a rich site for historical memory. I then describe a stage show in Istanbul in which a character with a popular Turkish Jewish name, Salomon, performs across multiple historical contexts. Toward an examination of how minorities resist being classified as strangers, I also describe a Turkish Jew’s process of writing an “onomasticon,” a book of his community’s surnames. Out of the multiple occurrences of chronomastics I observed in Istanbul, these examples of talking, dancing, and writing represent various modes of symbolic representation and interpretation, showing how “linguistic phenomena often link up with non-linguistic signs to represent and actualize history” (Parmentier 2007:274). These examples also illuminate the different forms that chronomastics can take: from the collective group enterprise of a stage performance to the private study of the scholar as well as the smaller encounters that take place in the street, school, or store. Finally, I propose ways for anthropologists to examine other kinds of reclassifications—racial, ethnic, gendered, or class based— through the model that chronomastics provides. By making classificatory processes its central focus, I show in this article that ontological shifts are not always the result of large-scale political, economic, or military remapping; they depend also on subtle choices about symbolic marking (such as names), the interpretation of these symbols, and discourses and performances about classification (and, at times, resistance to it) observable in everyday life. TURKISH JEWISH NAMES: A HISTORY OF SHIFTING SIGNIFIERS In her work on everyday Turkish state-making practices, Yael Navaro-Yashin recounts how she is regularly compelled, like Lusi and so many of my informants, to lecture Turks about the history of non-Muslim minorities in the region: As a person of “minority” status in Turkey, I was not perceived as a proper native by many of my own informants, whether Islamist or secularist. In encounters in my own city Istanbul, the first thing that incited curiosity on an everyday basis was my name. [2002:14] If, in beginning fieldwork in 2002, I found the regularity with which Lusi was considered “foreign” surprising, I soon learned that naming was a critical place for Turkish Jewish identity work, offering a personal and social site for negotiations of belonging and ostracism in the Turkish national project. When I discussed the issue of names with Lusi, she suggested that I interview her grandmother, Naile, who often recalled a dramatic (and traumatic) story about her own mother and a time when having the “wrong” name caused serious problems. Born in the Ottoman Empire, Naile’s mother had been an outstanding student at the French-language schools of the Alliance Isra´ lite Universelle, a Jewish school system e Brink-Danan • Names That Show Time 387 that dominated the educational landscape of North African, Middle Eastern, and Balkan Jewish communities from the late 19th century until the mid–20th century (Rodrigue 1990). At 18, Naile’s mother went to Paris to study for a teaching position. While traveling by train during World War I, she reached the French border and encountered guards demanding identification. When signing her name, she wrote “Grasya,” the Judeo-Spanish name listed on her official identification. Then, on one document, she wrote “Juli,” the name by which she was known at school. The inconsistency of her signatures raised suspicion. In what Naile imagined to be “another inquisition,” the guards questioned Grasya–Juli, who tried to explain that she had two names because she and her community were in the process of “Westernizing.” Her protests proved unconvincing: the guards stripped her and hosed her down with icy water so she wouldn’t complete her mission to deliver the government secrets they assumed were written in invisible ink on her skin. After returning to Constantinople to work as a French teacher, Juli (or was she Grasya?) married and bore a child. When choosing her baby’s name, she rejected a longstanding Sephardic Jewish kinship-naming pattern of calling a female child after one’s father’s mother. The couple thus named their Jewish child neither a Judeo-Spanish nor a French name; they chose the most “Turkish” name they could find, that of Ottoman Sultan Abd¨ lhamid II’s daughu ter: “Call her ‘Naile,’” they had said, “and our child will not suffer.”5 The symbolic and physical violence of Grasya–Juli’s naming story has secured its place in Lusi’s family lore, not only serving as a site of historical memory but also pointing to the myth value of Turkish Jewish names that act as critical objects through which Turkish Jews understand difference as it has been tangled in nets of time and cultural change. At the beginning of the 21st century when Lusi’s name is “reclassified” outside the Turkish collective through a “where are you from originally” conversation (Beck 2006:165), she recalls her great-grandmother’s stories of name-based exclusions in her attempt to make sense of the present social situation. Despite their initial marking of her as a yabancı, landlords did not deny Lusi an apartment. Nonetheless, even when no harm seems implied in being marked as “foreign,” Lusi’s memories of the “Naile story” lead her to wonder what border guards lie in wait for her—what social and material penalties might accompany this ontological assignment. Name talk such as Naile’s story allows Jews in Turkey to recall different conditions for citizenship in changing political and social landscapes, invoking historical contexts in which names signal belonging or ostracism. As Asif Agha observes, “the data of social life plucked from their isolable moments invariably point to lived moments that lie beyond them” (2005:1). One way to understand what linguistic data “points to” is to analyze speech acts that explicitly interpret the way meaning shifts across contexts. Richard Bauman described the approach as one that gives us a vantage point on social formations larger than those of the immediate interaction order, and it gives us ways of thinking of power and authority in discourse-based terms larger than those that are immediately and locally produced in the bounded speech event. [2005:146] Jews’ names in Istanbul, even the most seemingly “Turkish” ones such as “Naile,” signify this community’s somewhat baroque history of survival across changing languages, borders, and political regimes. If Turkish Jews now take it for granted that having a name (or using one on official documents) that “sounds Turkish” is desirable, Jewish names in 18th- and 19th-century Istanbul reflected a conservative cultural practice of retaining “traditional” personal names. These included, for men, Biblical Hebrew names or a suffix including God’s name. For women, “nonreligious” names in Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, or Turkish—especially ones that described them as “life-giving,” “worthy,” or “queens”—were popular (Bornstein-Makovetsky 1997:16– 17). However, the Europeanization of the Ottoman Empire that began in the late 19th century (Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000; Stein 2003) shifted Jewish naming patterns away from what were then considered “traditional” Jewish names, such as Grasya, and toward an adoption of more “modern” French or Western European–sounding names, such as “Juli” (Bornstein-Makovetsky 1997:21). The positive social value attributed to a “pure” Turkish name reflects the effects of the transition from the polyethnic Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republicanism during which names garnered a new symbolic weight of association. Since its establishment in 1923, the Turkish Republic has implemented multiple policies toward the nationalization of minorities (Baer 2007; Bozdo˘ an and Kasaba 1997). These g policies focus on the definition of “Turkish citizenship” and have implications for the way in which Turkish Jews generally envision their difference as belonging outside of the public sphere. As part of Mustafa Kemal Atat¨ rk’s nationu alist Westernizing campaign, in addition to the well-known Romanization of Turkish and the exchange of the fez for the fedora (Lewis 2001), Turks were compelled by law in 1934 to adopt a family name (Bali 1999; Lewis 2001; see also Scott et al. 2002). Although as recognized minorities Jews, Armenians, and Greeks were exempt from this policy (T¨ rk¨ z 2007:901), u o they responded to this law in a variety of ways ranging from cultural resistance to enthusiastic assimilation. An official statement issued in 1925 by the Turkish Jewish community renounced special privileges in lieu of citizenship in a secular Turkish Republic, but again families and individuals reacted differently to these changes.6 Some Turkish Jews retained their historical names drawn from Hebrew (e.g., Levi), Roman (e.g., Bonofiel), Judeo-Spanish (e.g., Aseo), Greek (e.g., Politi), or Turkish (e.g., Alev). Others complied by retaining part of their historical name and adding a Turkifying suffix or prefix to the original name (e.g., -¨ z; b¨ y¨ k-). Some “Turkified” their name by translating it o u u into modern Turkish. Yet others transliterated their name 388 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010 following the rules of Turkish phonetic transcription (e.g., Kohen). Finally, many replaced their old name with a seemingly unrelated Turkish name. These varied choices reflect how even the most powerful state classifications do not always trump community and individual ontologies. Although viewed by some historians as a model for minority integration (Altabe et al. 1999; Shaw 1991), the assimilation of Jews to Turkish national culture has been regarded as imperfect (Bali 2001; Kastoryano 1992). Although minority Turkification was compelled in early Republican Turkey, assimilatory gestures, such as minority adoption of “Turkish and Muslim” names, were regarded by ultranationalists as sneaky attempts by minorities to dissimulate as “real Turks” (Eissenstat 2005:253).7 In fact, not unlike Jews elsewhere in the Diaspora (Kaganoff 1977:18–19), many Turkish Jews that I met had double names—one for the Jewish community and one for civic purposes—as a matter of security and to deal with the annoyance of all those questions about foreignness. Someone known as “Mo´s” to his Jewish friends ı and family will use “Metin” at school or on his business card. Marriage forms at the rabbinate therefore ask not only for the “legal” (i.e., Turkish) name of the individuals registering to marry but also the Hebrew or Jewish names that will be used in the ceremony. In a letter sent home from the Jewish school in Istanbul, a postscript reminds parents to “make sure your children know their Jewish names, too!” According to a Turkish folklorist, “The change in personal names in Turkey was probably the most successful component of the complex process of modernization introduced by bureaucrat intellectuals” (Basg¨ z 1999:214). ¸ o Nonetheless, the creation of the Turkish Republic was not the first time that local Jews were subjects of reclassifying regimes. As Meltem T¨ rk¨ z (2007) describes, Turkish Jews u o have memories of a deeper history of regime change and co-occurring symbolic shifts, offering the case of a Turkish Jewish man whose relationship to his name shifted over time. This interviewee, Sami Altında˘ , described how his father g received a Turkified surname from Atat¨ rk that brought the u elder much pride. In his forties, Sami rejected the name as a falsehood, claiming, “I am not Altında˘ ” (T¨ rk¨ z 2007:902– g u o 903). His feelings changed after learning about earlier name changes from an elderly family member; in his estimation, his family had changed names at least 20 times over two millennia. Sami finally had to abandon any notion of retrieving an “authentic” name, explaining, “So I concluded that Altında˘ is as valid a surname as those other surnames [we g have carried]” (T¨ rk¨ z 2007:903). u o Simply put, what counts today as a “Turkish,” “Jewish,” or “foreign” name is the product of changing political and interpretive structures that, over time, condition our understanding of what names generally mean. As Miyako Inoue (2004) argues, the denaturalizing of national ideologies requires an awareness of how signs come to signify what they do. By undoing naturalized assumptions of iconicity believed to obtain between names and nations (Steedly 1996), anthropologists have found that ontologies are products of ideological processes that erase their own histories (Gal and Irvine 1995). This is particularly salient in the seemingly ahistorical process of marking a Jewish name as “Turkish” or “foreign.” However, the method of T¨ rk¨ z’s intriguu o ing study derives from memories of Turkish name changes and suggests that not only do names change meaning in terms of their interpretations over time but also Jews in Turkey exhibit a heightened awareness about this process and mythologize the history of changing names (or changing interpretations of names) to understand their contemporary meanings. Through participant-observation, I likewise found that Turkish Jews regularly employ chronomastics to reinscribe the erased history of present-day ontologies. What anthropological theories might forward our understanding of how, over time, names become claims? THINKING ANTHROPOLOGICALLY ABOUT NAMING, CONTEXT, AND TIME How have anthropologists thought about names and their meanings? Nearly a half-century ago, Claude L´ vi-Strauss e (1966:215) critiqued semiotic readings of names qua indices of identity. Recently, Maurice Bloch, considering how names accrue meaning, reiterated L´ vi-Strauss’s rejection e of the “old and dangerous semiotic model of signifiers signifying signifieds” (2006:98). If one wants to understand what names mean, it may be dangerous to assume that the sign relationship between a name and its interpretation is fixed at some original or “baptismal” (Kripke 1981; Putnam 1975) moment or that it is stable across contexts. Michael Silverstein (2005:11) warned that abstract theories of names’ baptismal meanings and their later, or cross-contextual, interpretations must be tested through ethnographic study. As Betsy Rymes’s ethnography of gang names revealed, “the meaning of a name can be transformed in different social contexts without losing its association with the initial referent” (1996:237, see also 1999). Marco Jacquemet (1992:741) similarly argues about the importance of context, showing its central importance in the referentiality of mafia nicknames in and outside of the courtroom. Generalizing from the example of a Jewish name in the Moroccan town of Sifrou, Samuel Cooper has described a model of relational processing that makes us “contextualized persons”: “Geertz uses the example of a Sifrou native’s name, which carries the attachment Sifroui to his name when he is away from Sifrou, or a Jew yahud, who is called yahudi” (1999:18). Using different ethnographic data, these examples all emphasize the importance of considering the meaning made from names in a range of contexts. As made clear by the intense dialogues about naming that I observed in Istanbul, Turkish Jews interpret names through their ability to conjure up past contexts. But what, then, to make of name talk that points to the past as a kind of interpretive context (see Davidson 2007)? Anthropologists’ increased attention to “signs that show time,” a phrase coined by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1986:25), has resulted in research on symbolic practices Brink-Danan • Names That Show Time 389 that anchor, contest, or otherwise signal moves across the “chronotope,” the time-space matrix (Agha 2007; Bauman 2005; Lempert and Perrino 2007). This article’s title, “Names That Show Time,” itself builds on Bakhtin’s phrasing because it resonates with the way Jews in Istanbul invoke naming as a way to signify history. Thinking about how name talk achieves ontological goals by relying on both present and past meanings, Goldberg writes, “Such relations and accompanying rhetoric utilize social links to the past, but restructure them in terms of contemporary social patterns and cultural meanings” (1997:59). Recent approaches to the anthropology of naming emphasize the ways that cultural codes about names are indeed “entangled in history” (vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006:1– 30). One way in which the anthropological study of naming might comb through these tangles is by thinking of names as “signs of history” and “signs in history” (Parmentier 1987, 2007). In Richard Parmentier’s formulation, “signs of history” are those media that represent the past, such as books, gravestones, and so forth, whereas “signs in history” take on heightened social meaning precisely because of their function of representing the past. For example, if a gravestone is a “sign of history,” to deface a gravestone is to create a “sign in history.” The act of defacing a “sign of history” necessarily seizes on the first signifier of the past to create a new meaning about the past that is usable toward present claims. Parmentier (2007:273) argues this distinction is not one of opposition but of inclusion: signs in history rely on an established chain of meaning but extend it for their own use. Parmentier’s distinction focuses on the metapragmatics of names used to commemorate change over time (as signs in history). To signify difference in the present using Parmentier’s theoretical formulation, a signifier like “Lusi” must first seize on a history of French names being adopted by Ottoman minorities to signify the history of this category of names excluded from the Turkish onomastic canon. Further, “Naile” can be read as a “sign of history” in that it reflects the process of Turkification in place at the time of its giving. But the resurrection of the “Naile story” as family lore transforms the name into a “sign in history” that socializes a new generation of Turkish Jews into an awareness of the precariousness of social classifications. Naile’s story shows how chronomastics serve to socialize family members into historical awareness and reminds us that we “must take seriously Bakhtin’s suggestion that a person’s discourse, or voice, is always already engaged in a dialogue with precedents. . . . In this sense . . . the analysis of discourse is necessarily historical” (Irvine 2004:105). PERFORMING THE NAME ACROSS THE CHRONOTOPE The denotation of a name as “foreign” in and of itself is not always negative. Indeed, it can sometimes be a source of social capital (Goldberg 1997:54–55). This is partially dependent on who is classifying whom and the power re- lations that obtain between classifier and classified. Given that the work of reclassification often takes place at the level of connotation rather than denotation, understanding this process thus requires some probing of the different interpretative logics on which “foreigners” and “natives” draw. As Hill (1998) argues about the racist undertones of Mock Spanish, a useful distinction can be made between “direct indexicality,” or what names seem to “index” in the dictionary sense, and “indirect indexicality,” or what names connote by indirect association with other negatively (or positively) valued social categories (e.g., “minority,” “outsider,” etc.). Often non-Jewish Turks are unaware of the dangerous indirect connotations Jews read into interpretations of their names as “foreign.” Although non-Jewish Turks seem oblivious to these negative connotations, Turkish Jews have been socialized, through storytelling as well as other performative genres, to know that having a “foreign” name in prior historical contexts has led to exclusion, expulsion, and death. Some of the most productive sites of sociality—and socialization—for the Jewish community of Istanbul are its family clubs. The centers provide a “Jewish” space for boys in club uniforms to play basketball, for women to meet over coffee, and for teens to choreograph folk dances in the auditorium. While living in Istanbul, I attended community-theater productions that took place at these clubs, including the following: a cabaret of songs in French, Turkish, Greek, and Hebrew; a Judeo-Spanish and Turkish play about a Jewish neighborhood in Istanbul; and a folkloric dance performance narrating the Biblical account of the Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery. By observing these performances, I found that chronomastics—and, really, any ontological process—is not just located in the realm of bounded speech events, such as dyadic conversations between Lusi and a broker or between her and her grandmother. In Istanbul this is a dialogue that frequently takes place on communal stages and requires scripting, rehearsal, and public spectacle. One of these performances was a show called Salomons of the Dance. Its narrative chronicled Jewish history from the perspective of a series of fictional characters all with the same name: Salomon. The Hebrew name “Shlomo”— which in its Turkish iteration becomes “Salomon” and refers to the King of Biblical Israel—is popular in its many local variations, pronunciations, and spellings in Jewish communities throughout the world. The show’s performers enacted wandering generations of Salomons both horizontally throughout sites in the Diaspora and vertically through time. In each era presented on stage, the name “Salomon” indexed a Jew, but what the play strikingly presented was not the direct indexicality of Salomon qua Jew but, rather, indirect indexicality—that is, what a man marked as a “Salomon” might say, even feel, as the bearer of such a name, given his particular cultural and historical milieu. The actor portraying Salomon number 1 appeared on stage in a red and black satin costume playing the role of a 390 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010 Spanish Jew from around 1490. The actor was a 20-yearold community star, famous for his energetic lead singing in a popular Turkish band that plays rock versions of JudeoSpanish songs. During this show, he crooned in Spanish, girls dancing around him, swinging lacy fans to the rhythm of the canned musical soundtrack. Suddenly, the staged festivities froze as the troupe enacted the expulsion of Spanish Jewry. The scene took place in Turkish (although many in the audience still speak Judeo-Spanish, inherited from ancestors who fled a scene such as this). As Ann Stoler suggests, “The claim that there are essences that distinguish social kinds is very different than positing that these essences are unchanging and stable in time” (2008:4). This claim is evidenced by the performance of centuries of Salomons acting out an essentialized identity against shifting backdrops: a court doctor called Salomon performed his royal duties to the Ottoman Sultan as a harem of dancers seductively gyrated; the menacing gates of Auschwitz framed the end of life for a young Greek Jew named Salomon; and a Sabbath meal in Istanbul awaited Salomon, the father of the house and a businessman in charge of a wholesale fabric store, “Salomon’s Silks,” that is much like those still in operation in Sisli, an area of Istanbul where ¸¸ many Jews own small clothing shops and the streets of which at day’s end swim in discarded material. Viewing the spectacle of one name attached to characters in multiple historical contexts highlighted the semiotic tension of a signifier whose signifieds change yet somehow continue to index “Jewishness.”8 The name “Salomon” iconically represents Jewishness in the community’s imagination and in Turkish society more generally. Anti-Semitic “Salomon Fikraları” (lit., Salomon’s Tales), a popular cartoon series in the 1930s Turkish press, portrayed a Jewish man named Salomon as foolish, money hungry, and unattractive (Bali 1999; Bayraktar 2006). Although the performance piece played out some of those stereotypes, given the longue dur´ e offered by the show’s e narrative, the name “Salomon” indexed Jewish men in a wide range of social and historical contexts. By “telescoping” (Cooper 1999:16) across the chronotope in such a dramatic fashion, the show rehearsed, literally and figuratively, how the rights and responsibilities of one with such a name shift depending on where a particular Salomon falls in the ever-changing chronotope. The narrative of Jewish names in Istanbul has traversed time and demands a multisited reading. Turkish Jews demonstrate awareness that being a Salomon meant different things at different times and to different audiences. Salomons of the Dance performers enacted settings in which the name indexes, on the one hand, an idyllic situation (pre-Inquisition era of the “golden age” of Spain) and, on the other hand, a nightmare (transport to Auschwitz). A Salomon who found himself a Jewish subject of the Spanish Inquisition would be expected to wear clothes that distinguish him from non-Jews, would be engaged in certain trades, speak certain languages, and eventually convert or flee the terri- tory. The configuration of multiple semiotic spheres would build a set of meanings making him who he was then.9 A Salomon living in German-occupied Thessalonica during World War II would learn that his name created a deadly subjectivity. Defining Salomon as “a Jewish man’s name” offered no interpretive context, either vertically through time or horizontally across continents (not to mention class, religion, race, etc.). The performance insisted on the name “Salomon” as a “rigid designator” (Kripke 1981), a sign that appears to designate the same thing across contexts. Indeed, it would appear that “the generalizing effect of time ultimately works in favor of category over individual” (Herzfeld 1982:300), and here the name “Salomon” indexed an unchanging, even essential, identity. Unlike Susan Blum’s findings about how Chinese language ideologies define naming as a system of meaning in which “signifiers and their homophones are seen as somehow inseparable from the signifieds” (1997:357), the Turkish Jewish ideology made explicit by this performance is one that understands naming as against the philosophy of naming as rigid designator popularized by Paul Kripke. Instead, Turkish Jews see naming as a Saussurean model in which names mark people in a relatively arbitrary and certainly malleable sign relationship. As David Sutton writes, “The fact that naming practices are seen as ‘custom’ does not mean that we should assume that they are static” (1997:428). Through linguistic (and perilinguistic) clues, publicly performed chronomastics such as Salomons of the Dance reiterate the community-wide understanding of how a chain of meanings can attach to one name over time. ONOMAST-ICONS AND HISTORICIZING RECLASSIFICATIONS In 2003, I accompanied a Turkish Jewish friend, Rahel, on a research trip to Istanbul’s Atat¨ rk Library. As a Turk, u she officially had access to a subsection of archives not open to non-Turkish citizens, yet the librarians eyed her name on the request form with suspicion. Part of the librarian’s job description at the national library includes deciding who has access (based on Turkish citizenship) to the archives and who needs special permission to access these sources. When asked for additional identification, my friend became indignant, protesting, “I am a [Turkish] citizen and that is my name.” Still unsure, they then asked, “Are you Armenian?” Annoyed, albeit not surprised, to have her citizenship in question yet again, Rahel sighed, “No, I am Jewish” (field notes, March 2003). It may not be surprising, perhaps, that most of my Turkish Jewish friends’ names are not found in popular reference books, such as a book of Turkish personal names, T¨ rkiye’de Kadιn - Erkek Adlarι S¨zl¨ gu (A Dictionary of Women u o u˘ ¨ and Men’s Personal Names in Turkey; Aysan and Tuncay 1992). Although reference books such as these seem authoritative, they are themselves the artifacts of human reclassifications Brink-Danan • Names That Show Time 391 (not unlike those made by the librarian) in which certain names, deemed outside of collective, simply do not appear. I first encountered this dictionary in 2000 in the office of Baruh Pinto, then a 90-year-old Turkish Jewish man hard at work writing his own book about Turkish Jewish family names. The walls of his home office were lined with reference books: nearly 50 dictionaries occupied a central throne above an old IBM computer, sets of encyclopedias filled the shelves, and the remaining spaces were covered by maps of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Republic, biblical Israel, and the Iberian Peninsula. Among all those reference books was Baruh’s own contribution to the world of onomastic knowledge, a 500page tome called What’s Behind a Name? (Pinto 1997). The book includes an elaborate compilation of family names and a Turkish Jewish community history from the Spanish Inquisition to the present. His project was based on the premise that, throughout time, Jews adapted to new circumstances by changing their names to become modern, trying, when possible, to preserve something of the previous name’s spirit. When I met him, he had just begun a new project, a Sephardic onomasticon (a book of his community’s surnames; see Pinto 2004), analyzing the layers of meaning attributable to Turkish Jewish family names found on a list of community members given him by the office of the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul. I became Baruh’s volunteer assistant, typing for him and enjoying his company and coffee. I loved watching him bent over the list of names at his desk, painstakingly searching for meaning, flipping alphabetically through his vast collection of dictionaries and checking for references in biblical translations. His method for etymological mystery solving was to classify names according to their posited origin as biblical, cultural, theophoric, and toponymic. When confronted with an ambiguous name (which happened more often than not), Baruh searched for the name’s origins in the Bible as well as in any atlas and in any dictionary in Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Italian, Greek, or Latin, in which he sought references to professional, physical, moral particularities, animals, plants, and precious stones or metals (Pinto 2004:6). After exhausting the possibility of finding onomastic meaning in dictionaries, he moved on to his favorite reference tool, the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972). A consummate bricoleur, he pieced together information from various frames through which he experienced the world, calling his project “a patchwork.” He drew from many sources and fragments in Turkish Jewish history, literally cutting out pieces of paper with different sources of etymologies and pasting them into other chapters. When I checked if a name made ˘ more sense if it was written with a soft “G” (in Turkish, a G) or a hard “G,” he complained that the Rabbinate’s list didn’t distinguish between Latin letters and those with Turkish diacritics: “to them it doesn’t matter if they spell a Jewish person’s name with an S or an S, as long as they pay their ¸ dues on time; to me it matters tremendously!” (field notes, March 2003). A typical entry looked like this (see Table 1): TABLE 1. Entry in the Sephardic Onomasticon Etymology in 1. English, 2. French, 3. Hebrew, 4. Judeo-Espanyol, 5. Spanish, 6. Turkish Family Name Notes Does not appear in Kaganoff, Enc. Jud., BBL concordance, Devello˘ lu, etc. g BEVN = distance, distance, merhak, distaniye, distancia, maziye NAKIL = history, histoire, divre, Estoria, Historia, Hikaye Com. It probably refers to the long past of the Jewish people. Bevnakil 1. Long distance story 2. Histoire relevant 3. Divre mi Mirhak 4. Estoria de un pasado lesano ¸ 5. Historia de un pasado lejano 6. Uzak bir maziye, ba˘ lı g bir hikaye Source: Pinto 2004:91. Rather than defining Jewish names through one dictionary, Baruh’s work parsed meaning intertextually across reference works. This is evident in the above example in which, under the notes section, he explains that he cannot find the name “Bevnakil” in reference books such as a book of Jewish names (Kaganoff 1977), Ottoman-Turkish Encyclopedic Glossaries (Devello˘ lu 1999), the Encyclopedia Judaica g (1972), or biblical concordances. Seeking meaning intertextually across reference books signals how the selection above—and other entries in Baruh’s onomasticon—can be read as a map of the process through which Baruh analyzes each name. I selected the name above from hundreds of entries because it nicely illustrates an idea Baruh conveys throughout his work: each name is a story and, at times, a “long-distance” (chronotopic) one that travels across time and space. In his first book, What’s Behind a Name (1997), Baruh argues that names served as indexes for change and continuity, sometimes traveling long distances with their owners, other times remaining true to a baptismal meaning, and still other times shifting with fashion and the political demands of time and place. Although Baruh’s research began as a postretirement hobby, classifying information was a task familiar to him from his first career operating a Kardex file system. Baruh described his first profession to me in the context of a story of a reunion with his estranged sister that itself points to his 392 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010 awareness of the importance of understanding the political consequences of reclassifications across time: In 1942, finding work (in Turkey) was impossible. I would arrive to an interview and find the post filled. My name sounded foreign and people were very nationalistic at the time. Unable to find work in Istanbul, I left for [British] Palestine. There I found a job working as a Kardexman, filing forms by name or category. One day, working in the Kardex room, I heard that someone wanted to see me. To my surprise, in walked my sister, Rachelle, who had left Istanbul and settled in Paris. When the Nazis occupied Paris, my sister wanted to leave France. Because she was Sephardic, she turned to the Spanish Consulate that offered her protection as a descendant of Spaniards. Once she arrived in Spain, she was told, “It is true that you are a Spanish subject, but this is valid only when you are living outside of Spain.” As a consequence, she had to leave Spain for Palestine. [Personal communication, April 2003] Paralleling the chronotopic features of Naile’s narrative, the story Baruh recounted shows how the ontologics of his profession as a Kardexman dovetail with the way governments, politicians, and individuals file people into changeable categories of “citizen” and “alien” (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001), often knowable exclusively through by name and subject to revision and reinterpretation during political change. Baruh filed as a profession and as a hobby, as a way of making ends meet and as a way of sorting out his family’s layers of shifting associations. Given that his own life had been influenced by the ongoing reclassifications of categories of citizenship and belonging, it seemed fitting that he would dedicate his later years to sorting out these crossed lines and transposing them into a comprehensive work outlining the effects of these larger historical processes on Jewish names. He turned to onomastics (or chronomastics) to highlight the temporal implications of the project of understanding how he himself, over time, had been made a foreigner. Baruh’s research process revealed how names as markers of identity are hardened into icons (symbols that are understood through convention as identical to what they purport to represent). Such symbols become iconic by means of the historical and present-day ordering and assignment of names (and other symbols) to interpretive or mythical frames. Unlike Baruh, the bibliophile, most people don’t consult multiple reference books as they go about their business classifying people and things they encounter. Instead, people draw on a set of myths that shape how we classify persons, places, and things. Myth “abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible” (Barthes 1987:132).10 Baruh’s colossal project, The Sephardi Onomasticon, shows how chronomastics traces the ideological process through which things seem to mean something by themselves (i.e., how myths enable signifiers, like names, to signify signifieds). If names today seem obviously “Turkish” or “foreign,” these classifications rely on shortcuts that are products of cultural codes, socialized and naturalized to save what semiotician Umberto Eco has called “definitional energies” (1984:84). By going back over the etymologic trails, by reinvesting definitional energies, Baruh’s chronomastics resisted reclassification of Turkish Jewish names as “foreign.” By slowly pulling apart the tangles of Ottoman and Turkish Jewish names and by exposing the history of reclassifications to which Turkish Jews have been subject, Baruh (like the performers of Salomons of the Dance) returned reified icons to their proper place in Turkish Jewish naming ideology as shifting, fluid indexes. He denaturalized the reclassifications that Lusi, Selim, Rahel, and other Turkish Jews face on a daily basis by organizing them into time-bound and context-specific interpretations. In addition to its inherent value as a “hobby,” he saw his onomastic research as benefitting the Turkish Jewish community, global Sephardic Jewry, and the world at large. This wide-reaching pedagogical and socializing goal was made explicit in his choice to publish the onomasticon’s preface in the six languages largely used to define the names themselves (English, French, Hebrew, Judeo-Espanyol, Spanish, and Turkish). He did so to reach a wide audience, especially an audience of dispersed Sephardic Jews who might be researching how their own names caused them to be “reclassified,” despite the fact that this decision caused him enormous editorial complications and costs. Attention to ontology’s process—as exemplified by Naile’s narratives, the performance of Salomons of the Dance, and Baruh’s onomastic project—returns a sense of chronotopic complexity to otherwise naturalized (i.e., decontextualized and dehistoricized) signs of history, making them, instead, signs in history. CONCLUSION To take up the name one is called is no simple submission to prior authority, for the name is already unmoored from prior context, and entered into the labor of self definition. —Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative Pace Butler, as I have shown here, names are not always “unmoored” from historical context, at least not by Turkish Jews forced into the labor of self-definition each time their names are considered “foreign.” What names once meant is not necessarily the same today, but neither is the past absent in current readings of their signification. In the Turkish Jewish view, names are consolidations of old meanings and new ones that come together to reveal something about the “contemporary” (Rabinow et al. 2008).11 As this case study shows, new political systems, and the symbolic systems that accompany them, engender reclassifications that rely on the ability of old signifiers to signify something new or new signifiers to signify something old. Although episodes of ahistorical “reclassifying”—such as those that take place between Muslim Turks and Lusi, Selim, or Rahel—appear to be simple denotative moves, they are themselves the effects of a laborintensive socializing process that builds meaning across time. By documenting cases of everyday dialogues in which names are marked as “strange,” I show how questions of ontology are omnipresent, which, as Michael Herzfeld argues, “often Brink-Danan • Names That Show Time 393 reduces them to a banal and unthinking obviousness: the relationship between experienced reality and the discourses that render it palpable have often—like gossip—escaped critical attention, filtered out of anthropologists’ awareness” (2002:186). As “apt illustrations” (Gluckman 2006:15) of the widespread, extensive, and dedicated cultural processes through which people become aware of names as markers of difference, the ethnographic examples of the regularity with which Jews are mistaken for foreigners drew my attention to the importance of studying ontology with an anthropological lens. However, family narratives (Naile’s story), a communal performance (Salomons of the Dance), and an individual intellectual pursuit (Baruh’s onomasticon) illustrate the ongoing (although qualitatively different) labor that must take place across time for reclassification to occur and, importantly, for it to be rehistoricized. “Semiosis across encounters” (Agha 2005) can be understood through sustained ethnographic observations of cultural producers who labor to expose the changing ontological status of meaning across time. Chronomastics focuses on the moments of friction in which indexical meanings are temporally (if only temporarily) reshuffled. Chronomastics, in its various genres (family stories, theatrical events, and onomastic research), allows Turkish Jews to understand their present classifications as built on earlier ontologies, as “signs that show time” or “signs in history.” Jews in Turkey perform knowledge of the way signs, in this case, names, build on previous meanings to limit meaning through what linguistic anthropology terms the “regimentation of indexicals” (Hill 2005; Silverstein 2003)—that is, the way signs link up with meanings in a particular formation. Knowledge of the history of changing meanings attached to names can be used to understand, even mythologize, the ability of indexicals that were once regimented to march in different formations. The idea that signs index certain interpretations through the codes of language and culture implies that humans themselves are regimented into understanding what things mean. Although, of course, we learn what things mean by being socialized into codes of meaning, another critical element of socialization, as evident in the Turkish Jewish case, is knowledge about particular ideologies of sign relationships themselves. Linguistic anthropology here offered the tools of discourse analysis and theories of signification, but a focus on reclassificatory practices has important implications for legal and political anthropology, especially, as well as for a more general understanding of how “strangeness” is modified, interpreted, and rejected by those in the center as well as those on the margins. For anthropologists studying human classifications—be they citizenship based, class linked, caste determined, gender conditioned, or racially defined— the question of how ontological meaning is made over time demands an untangling of those indexes that may seem natural in their contexts but are revealed to be the result of specific historical processes. Studying chronomastics high- lights how narratives about naming serve a socializing function that “involves a series of events, intertextually linked” (Wortham 2005:97). Chronomastics points to ways in which myths about naming can historicize the precariousness of inclusions and exclusions to which Turkish Jews—and so many others—have been subject over time. By bringing together an analysis of names and time, I invite further attention to critical moments of socialization, sites for the production of knowledge about the making—and marking— of ontology across time and its effects on today’s social fabric. Marcy Brink-Danan Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; Marcy_Brink-Danan@brown.edu NOTES Acknowledgments. The following fellowships and institutions supported research for this article: Fulbright-Hays, National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Maurice Amado Foundation for Sephardic Studies, the Eastern Consortium of Persian and Turkish, the Mellon Foundation, and the Judaic Studies and Anthropology departments at Brown and Stanford Universities. Extra thanks to Tom Boellstorff, Bianca Dahl, Paja Faudree, Yukiko Koga, Jessaca Leinaweaver, Pamela Dorn Sezgin, Daniel Smith, and the AA anonymous reviewers for thoughtful readings of earlier drafts of this article. 1. Outside of Israel. 2. See Levy (1999:635) for similar experiences among indigenous Jews in Morocco who, through migration and changing political theaters, have been categorized as and adopted into social structures paralleling those typically occupied by “foreigners.” 3. The one real estate agent who didn’t ask Lusi about her origins was himself Jewish, as quickly became clear when he used the Judeo-Spanish word for “Jewish” (cudyo) in a call to a landlord, saying that that he had “iki cudyo kızlar” (two Jewish girls) looking for an apartment. Lusi here was identified as part of a group but not a foreign one. It behooves us to attend to the styles of discourse that accompany different kinds of chronomastic practices, from the private conversation to a speech delivered by a leader. The difference is one of scale but also of form; certain forms of classifying language might be appropriate for one kind of event while offensive in another. This distinction is also relevant to the question of agents and audiences. If a Muslim instead of Jewish real-estate agent had said to a landlord, “I have two Jewish girls here looking for an apartment,” I imagine the mood in the room would have been quite strained. 4. See Bering (1992) for a detailed account of the dramatic politics of Jewish naming in Germany before and during the rise of National Socialism. 5. As noted by Pamela Dorn Sezgin (personal communication, November 18, 2009), this naming choice may reflect the special relationship that this sultan maintained with Ottoman Jews: when he was ousted from power, he resided with a 394 American Anthropologist • Vol. 112, No. 3 • September 2010 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Jewish family in Salonika. Nonetheless, in Naile’s account, the “Turkishness” of the name, rather than its possible indirect “Jewish” referent, was the rationale behind her mother’s choice. The “Official Turkish Jewish Community Renunciation of Special Privileges Provided by the Treaty of Lausanne, Article 42, 15 September 1925” (in Shaw 1991) was not without provisions, especially dealing with questions of marriage and divorce. Whether this renunciation reflected a true desire to assimilate to Turkish policies is unknown; historical research suggests that the Jews had no option but to issue a nationalist pronouncement (Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000:102). Sutherland (1994) explores similar bureaucratic suspicion of Gypsy name changes in the U.S. context. Carucci’s analysis of Marhsallese names recuperates a semiotic model that does not assume meaning is stable: “Changes in signifiers, or changes in rules of use, alter the types of realities which can result from new combinations of the code” (1984:154). This is what Hanks (1986) calls an “intertextual series,” in which texts point back to prior contexts. Knowledge of what constitutes a proper intertextual series allows Turkish Jews to perform a world in which the name “Salomon” today is identifiable as “Jewish,” although what “Jewish” itself signifies is explicitly shown here to be unstable. 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FOR FURTHER READING (These selections were made by the American Anthropologist editorial interns as examples of research related in some way to this article. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.) Azoulay, Katya Gibel 2001 Jewish in America or the Search for an Identity. American Anthropologist 103(1):197–203. Bryant, Rebecca 2004 Personal States: Making Connections between People and Bureaucracy in Turkey. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27(2):129–131. Goldschmidt, Henry 2006 The Voices of Jacob on the Streets of Brooklyn: Black and Jewish Israelites in and around Crown Heights. American Ethnologist 33(3):378–396. Kockelman, Paul 2006 A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(1):76–102. Levy, Andr´ e 2003 Notes on Jewish-Muslim Relationships: Revisiting the Vanishing Moroccan Jewish Community. Cultural Anthropology 18(3):365–397.