“The Turk” in the Czech Imagination (1870s-1923)

Front matter

“The Turk” in the Czech Imagination (1870s-1923)

Jitka Maleckova

Ss < S S = 3 W Q S o © S. t

Contents

Acknowledgments VII List of Figures IX

Introduction: Why Czechs and Turks? 1 an A © bd

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Introduction

Why Czechs and Turks?

“Do you like the Turks? Do you like those heathen dogs? You don't, do you?” the Good Soldier Svejk says to Palivec, the innkeeper, in Jaroslav HaSek’s famous novel. Palivec replies: “One customer is as good as another, never mind a Turk. For tradesmen like us politics doesn’t enter into it. Pay your beer, sit down in my pub and jabber what you like. That’s my principle. It’s all the same to me whether our Ferdinand was done in by a Serb or Turk, Catholic or Moslem, anarchist or Young Czech.”! The views that Svejk and Palivec express here are reflective of the ways many Czechs felt about the Turks in the first decades of the 20th century. But Švejk's words are particularly significant because, love him or hate him, the amiable, servile “idiot” Svejk is Czech literature’s most emblematic figure and for many the embodiment of the Czech national character. That HaSek even mentions the Turks in his brilliant anti-war novel and has Svejk voice strong anti-Turkish sentiments therefore demands an explanation. And that is what this book tries to do: explain why the Turks remained a persistent and often quite prominent image in early-20th-century Czech society, which for generations had had little direct contact with the Ottoman Empire and its inhabitants. For although it was not only in times and places of conflict that Europeans turned their attention to the Turks, direct contact with the Ottoman Empire naturally increased the level of interest in Turkish themes.

Between the 14th and 17th centuries the battlefields on which European armies clashed with the usually victorious Ottomans moved from Southeastern Europe to the regions controlled by the Italian states, and from there to Central Europe and further East. In the aftermath of these conflicts large areas of Southern, Eastern and Central Europe came under Ottoman rule. The Ottoman army was still able to threaten Vienna in 1683, but Ottoman power then started to recede, and only the Southeast of Europe remained in Ottoman hands. Another important watershed in Europeans' relations with the Ottoman Empire and their interest in the Middle East was Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. By the early 19th century, the Ottoman army was no longer a threat to the modern states of Europe, and despite the Ottoman Empire's attempts to reform itself, the balance of power between the former rivals shifted to Europe's advantage. The Ottoman army continued to wage war, but its major

1 Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War, trans. Cecil Parrott (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 9.

© JITKA MALECKOVÁ AND CHARLES UNIVERSITY, FACULTY OF ARTS, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004440791 002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC By-NC-ND 4.0 license.

rival was now Russia, and in the mid-19th century Western states went so far as to support the Ottoman Empire militarily in a war against Russia. In the decades that followed, the Ottoman army was involved in further armed conflicts, including the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, the war with Italy over Tripoli in 1911-1912 and the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913. Even when not at war, the government had to face rebellions and protests from discontented segments of the population in the empire, sometimes instigated or supported from the outside, especially by Russia, often exploited by European statesmen, and always closely followed and debated by the European public. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire grew closer to Europe in areas of the economy, trade, diplomacy, and culture, and in the way of life among the elites in Istanbul. Accompanying these developments was that the Ottoman government became increasingly dependent on the help and capital of European powers, just as the struggle between these powers for influence in the empire and for its territory was starting to accelerate. Modernization continued, and in some respects culminated, under Sultan Abdülhamid 11 (1876-1909), whose reign coincided with a large part of the period that this book is concerned with, even though by contemporaries his rule was considered the epitome of autocracy and tyranny? In the empire, the opposition movement, spearheaded by Ottoman intellectuals, spread at the turn of the century through the ranks of army officers and some bureaucrats and resulted in the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.? The Young Turk government established after the revolution allied itself with the Central Powers and brought the Ottoman Empire into World War 1, which precipitated the dissolution of the empire.

The Ottoman Turks were for centuries viewed as a major threat to Europe and “the souls of Europeans." They were also a source of fascination and figured centrally in European perceptions of "the Other" Turkish themes have abounded in European literature, art, and thinking. They can even be found in countries that are separated from the Turks by an ocean.^ Earlier scholarship has tended to argue that a fairly uniform image of “the Turk" held sway across Europe and has highlighted how from the late middle ages the Turks were

2 On the rule of Abdülhamid 11 see Benjamin C. Fortna, "The Reign of Abdülhamid 11,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, ed. I. Metin Kunt, vol. 4, Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Regat Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 38-61.

3 On the Young Turks see M. Şükrü Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Stefano Taglia, Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Young Turks on the Challenges of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2017).

4 See Justin McCarthy, The Turk in America: Creation of an Enduring Prejudice (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2010).

regarded as the enemy of Christendom.* This opinion has been challenged by more recent scholars, who see variety in the views of the Turks that existed around Europe at any given time and place,“ and there is moreover an increasing awareness among historians today that the Ottoman Empire was also a part of Europe, and not merely its foe.” How the Turks were portrayed and what image of them prevailed was affected by various factors, such as particular power relations or whether or not Europe was at war with the Ottoman Empire at the time, and in areas controlled by the Turks these images also responded to the Turks' position as rulers and oppressors.

The imagery further reflected a fear of and a curiosity about religious and cultural difference. Islam and the Ottoman Turks occupied an important place in the discourses of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. But religious animosity was not the only lens through which the Turks were viewed. The humanist historians in the Italian states that were threatened by Ottoman military power in the 15th century were driven by political considerations when, in their shock at the fall of Constantinople in 1453, they tried to find an explanation for the Ottomans’ success by studying Ottoman history? In the 16th century, when Ottoman power and expansion on European territory culminated, the Turks were not only viewed with fear but also with a sense of awe; this sentiment was expressed in the epithet Magnifique or "Magnificent" that was used in Europe to refer to Sultan Süleyman (called Kanuni, "The Lawgiver,” by the Ottomans), who embodied Ottoman glory at its peak. Even in the border regions between Christendom and Islam, the relationships and interactions between the rulers and inhabitants of the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires were very diverse, as Charlotte Colding Smith, among others, has shown using manifold forms of depictions and descriptions of Ottoman Turks that existed

5 See, e.g., Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517) (Niewkoop: B. De Graaf, 1967); Richard William Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

6 James G. Harper, “Introduction,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750, ed. James G. Harper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 1; Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6ff.; David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto, "Introduction," in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St Martin's Press, 1999), 2.

7 See, e.g., Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman, eds., The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Pascal Firges et al., eds., Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

8 Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3-4.

in the 15th and 16th centuries.? This imagery could also serve various symbolic functions. Ivan Kalmar, for example, interprets the 17th-century depiction of Turks as savants on the astronomical clock in Prague as symbolizing the futility of knowledge when unaccompanied by Christian faith: “If you have worldly wisdom, but not the Holy Faith, then you might as well be a Turk.”!°

It has long been established that the European perception of Ottoman rule as despotic, a judgment that began to be even more salient in European thought in the 17th and then especially in the 18th century, played an instrumental role in the debates on European political institutions at that time, which included conceptions of Enlightened despotism.” The European debate on Oriental despotism was moreover in reality directed at Europe itself, while the Orient mostly figured in it just rhetorically.!? Larry Wolff has argued that in the long 18th century, from the 1680s to the 1820s, when the Ottoman Empire was no longer viewed primarily in religious terms and was not yet being looked on as the "Sick Man of Europe,’ it "inspired a balance of fear, interest, curiosity, titillation, entertainment, and even sympathy.” This made “the Turk” an appealing character to introduce into European opera, “through which Europeans explored what it meant to be European."? Wolff illustrates the seemingly obvious, but often overlooked fact that France's experience with the Ottoman Turks was very different from that of Venice and the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire's traditional military foes. As a result, they had an entirely distinct attitude toward the Turks, and this was reflected even in opera.!^

Images of the Turks in any given country were linked to the specific situation in that country. Thus, despite the strong influence of Enlightenment notions of

9 Charlotte Colding Smith, Images of Islam, 1453-1600: Turks in Germany and Central Europe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), 2ff.

10 Ivan Kalmar, "The Turks of Prague: The Mundane and the Sublime," in Orient-Orientalistik- Orientalismus: Geschichte und Aktualitát einer Debatte, ed. Burkhard Schnepel, Gunnar Brands, and Hanne Schónig (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 272. In his book on early Orientalism, Kalmar argues that "the Orient illustrates man's inability or unwillingness to recognize the presence of God in the world.’ Ivan Kalmar, Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (New York: Routledge, 2012), 44.

11 Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 51—71. See also Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998), 26-50.

12 Joan-Pau Rubiés, "Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu,” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 1-2 (February 2005): 111.

13 Larry Wolff, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 2.

14 Wolff, The Singing Turk, 4.

Oriental despotism that to a certain degree unified the European perception of the Ottoman Empire, the ways the Turks were viewed around Europe continued to vary. The best-known and most studied opinions on the Turks in the modern period were those of the French and British, and generalizations about the “European” relationship to the Turks are therefore based on the views of two countries for whom, incidentally, the Ottoman Empire was never a major foe or mortal danger. Unlike the French and the British, who were further away, the people who lived under Ottoman rule or in the border areas that were for centuries the stage of fighting between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires saw the Turks as a more imminent threat. In a richly documented account of Habsburg-Ottoman relations and of views on the Turks in German-speaking Central Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, Paula Sutter Fichtner highlighted the Austrian population's extremely hostile opinion of the Turks. This dislike affects even the author herself, who declares to have written her book as a warning to those “who wish at all times to communicate productively with dangerous, persistent and abidingly distasteful enemies."!6 The prevalence of negative attitudes toward the Turks in the Austrian regions is similarly revealed in the work of Andre Gingrich, which offers a critical perspective on modern Austrian opinions about the Turks and the Muslims of Bosnia." The Ottoman Turks were also viewed as the enemy by Southeast Europeans, who were living under Ottoman rule or in fear of it. But even among the Southern Slavs the images of the Turks were more diverse. They did not just allude to the "Turkish yoke," but reflected also a more positive relationship with the Ottoman Turks, especially among the Muslim population.!®

15 See Ash Cirakman, From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe:" European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: PeterLang, 2002); Christoph Bode, ed., West Meets East: Klassiker der britischen Orient- Reiseliteratur (Heidelberg: Universitátsverlag Karl Winter, 1997); Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

16 X Paula Sutter Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526- 1850 (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 71.

17 Andre Gingrich, “Frontier Myths of Orientalism: The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe,’ in Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School, ed. Bojan Baskar and Borut Brumen (Ljubljana: Institut za multikulturne raziskave, 1998), 2:99—128; Andre Gingrich, "Blame It on the Turks: Language Regimes and the Culture of Frontier Orientalism in Eastern Austria,” in Diskurs — Politik — Identitüt / Discourse — Politics — Identity, ed. R. De Cillia et al. (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 71-81; Andre Gingrich, "The Nearby Frontier: Structural Analyses of Myths of Orientalism,” Diogenes 60, no. 2 (2015): 60—66.

18 See Srđan M. Jovanović, "The Ottoman Empire as Friend and Foe: Perceptions of Ottoman Rule in Serbia and Bosnia and Thereupon Based Nationalisms,” Review of Social Studies 4,

The Czechs were never under Ottoman rule. Yet, the wars with the Ottoman Empire had a significant impact on Czech history: “the Turkish threat” helped propel Ferdinand of Habsburg onto the Czech throne in 1526, making the Czech lands part of the Habsburg Empire, whose ruling dynasty cast itself as the defender of Christianity against Islam. The Turks thus at that time became a relevant Other in the eyes of the Czechs and the influence of the wars continued to shape Czechs’ attitudes toward the Turks into the modern era? There was no single "Czech image of the Turks" in the early modern period, as Tomás Rataj and, more recently, Laura Lisy-Wagner have shown.?° According to Lisy- Wagner, the introduction of "the Turk" into the early modern construction of Czechness destabilized the German/Czech dichotomy.?! Early modern Czechs used the Turkish subject to establish a place for themselves within or in relation to Europe, and their views on the Turks were affected by their ambivalent relationship to Catholic Habsburg rule and to the Germans. By the 19th century, the Turks were no longer an immediate concern for the Czechs, but "the Turk" remained present in Czech public discourse and notions about the Turks were expressed in travel writing, scholarship, and journalism, as well as in literature and the arts. Nevertheless, Czech opinions on the Turks in the modern era have been left largely unexplored. While Czech scholars have dealt with Czech attitudes toward Islam and the Middle East more generally?

no.1 (Spring 2017): 71-89; Bozidar Jezernik, “Imagining ‘the Turk,” in Imagining “the Turk,” ed. Bozidar Jezernik (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 116.

19 Early modern Czech perceptions of the Turks have received correspondingly detailed attention by scholars. See, e.g., Zdeňka Tichá, Jak staří Čechové poznávali svět (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1985); Josef Kunský, Čeští cestovatelé, 2 vols. (Prague: Orbis, 1961); Tomáš Rataj, “Obraz Turka v české renesanční společnosti ve světle cestopisné literatury, Folia Historica Bohemica 17 (1994): 59—83; Jiří Hrubeš and Josef Polišenský, “Turecká otázka, uherská povstání a veřejné mínění předbělohorských Cech,” Historický časopis 7, no. 1 (1959): 74— 103; Eduard Petrů, “Das Bild der Tůrkei in Reisebeschreibungen des 16. Jahrhunderts," in Studien zum Humanismus in den böhmischen Ländern, ed. Hans-Bernd Harder et al., vol. 3, Die Bedeutung der humanistischen Topographien und Reisebeschreibungen in der Kultur der bóhmischen Lander bis zur Zeit Balbins, ed. Hans-Bernd Harder et al. (Cologne: Bóhlau, 1993). Another line of research deals with the Turks in the context of Czech relations with other Slavs and the Balkan countries. For an older but rather comprehensive overview of these relations see Václav Žáček et al., Češi a Jihoslované v minulosti: Od nejstarších dob do roku 1918 (Prague: Academia, 1975); Růžena Havránková, “Česká veřejnost na pomoc protitureckým povstáním jižních Slovanů,” Slovanské historické studie 6 (1966): 5-53.

20 Tomáš Rataj, České země ve stínu půlměsíce: Obraz Turka v raně novověké literatuře z českých zemí (Prague: Scriptorium, 2002); Laura Lisy-Wagner, Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 1453-1683 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).

21 Lisy-Wagner Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 171.

22 See, e.g., Miloš Mendel, Bronislav Ostřanský, and Tomáš Rataj, Islám v srdci Evropy: Vlivy islámské civilizace na dějiny a současnost českých zemí (Prague: Academia, 2007).

mainstream Czech historiography tends to avoid uncomfortable questions, such as those that touch on Czech Orientalism or colonial ambitions. Notable exceptions can be found mainly in the works of the younger generation of scholars, who have studied, for instance, Czech travelers to the Middle East and Czech images of Egypt and the Balkan Slavs.?3

This book examines Czechs’ views of the Turks in the last half century of the existence of the Ottoman Empire, from the 1870s, marked by uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans that were closely watched by the Czechs, up to 1923, when the Turkish Republic was founded.?^ The establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state in 1918 was a major turning point in Czech history, and immediately after the emergence of the Czechoslovak Republic interest in foreign countries, including all things Turkish, temporarily decreased. Writings about the Turks that appeared between 1918 and 1923 drew on knowledge, travels, and stereotypes from an earlier period and reflected the reality of the time in which the Ottoman Empire existed. In this sense, 1923 was a more important watershed than 1918. The book asks what motivated Czechs at the turn of the century to take an interest in the Turks and their country. The relatively long period covered here has been chosen so that it is possible to examine whether one hegemonic stereotype of the Turks survived from earlier times, or whether diverse views existed in parallel to each other, not all of which were necessarily based on the binary opposition between the Czechs and the Turks. Is it possible to identify a specific "Czech" perception of the Turks, or, to put it differently, how did the views of the Turks reflect the fact that they were produced by Czechs, citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and members of a Central European nation struggling for national rights?

23 Lucie Storchová, ed., “Mezi houfy lotrüv se pustiti...”: České cestopisy o Egyptě 15.-17. století (Prague: Set out, 2005); Adéla Jůnová Macková et al., “Krasny, báječný, nešťastný Egypt!” Čeští cestovatelé konce 19. a první poloviny 20. století (Prague: Libri, 2009). See also several chapters in the conference-based edited volume, Kateřina Piorecká and Václav Petrbok, eds., Cizí, jiné, exotické v české kultuře 19. století: Sborník příspěvků z 27. ročníku sympozia k problematice 19. století; Plzeň, 22.-24. února 2007 (Prague: Academia, 2008); Hana Navrátilová, Egypt v české kultuře přelomu devatenáctého a dvacátého století (Prague: Set out, 2001); František Šístek, Junáci, horalé a lenoši: Obraz Černé Hory a Černohorců v české společnosti, 1830-2006 (Prague: Historický ústav, 2011).

24 This book does not deal with the history of Czech relations with the Balkans. For this history see Žáček et al., Češi a Jihoslované v minulosti; Šístek, Junáci, horalé a lenoši; Miroslav Šesták et al., Dějiny jihoslovanských zemí, 2nd ed. (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2009); Ladislav Hladký et al., Vztahy Čechů s národy a zeměmi jihovýchodní Evropy / Relations between Czechs and the Nations and Countries of Southeastern Europe (Prague: Historický ústav, 2010); Ladislav Hladký et al., eds., České a slovenské odborné práce o jihovýchodní Evropě: Bibliografie za léta 1991-2000 / Czech and Slovak Scholarly Works on Southeast Europe: Bibliography from 1991-2000 (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2003).

Over the course of the period analyzed here and especially in the late 19th century, the meaning and uses of the terms "Czech" and "Turk" were not self-evident, or at least they were less clear than they are today. The complicated history of both terms cannot be given justice in a brief note and has already been described elsewhere,?° but a word of explanation is necessary at this point. Whose views on whom are we inquiring into? For centuries, Ottoman Turks identified primarily with the Ottoman Empire's ruling dynasty and Islam, although other allegiances existed as well. Only in the late 19th century did the educated Ottoman-Turkish elites start to reflect on their "Turkishness," of which they had been previously aware, but which only became significant at the turn of the century and especially after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. And it was even later, after World War 1 and the formation of the Turkish Republic, that Turkish identity became more widespread. "Turk" was a term that Western authors used to refer not just to the Ottoman Turks, but also to other Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, and occasionally to Muslims who were not even the subjects of that Empire. Conversely, both “Muslim” and “Ottoman” were used to denote a Turk.?6 The terminology was not consistent and in some European languages usage oscillated also between words with different connotations. The Czechs, like other Europeans, called the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire "Turks" (Turci), but they used also other terms, as the chapters below will show. The book marginally refers to Muslims more generally and to other ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire but focuses on Czechs' views of the Ottoman Turks and those who were called Turks in Bosnia-Herzegovina.?’

"Czechness" is not much easier to define than “Turkishness," although the percentage of the population of the Czech lands who by the 1870s identified as Czechs was immeasurably greater than the level of Turkish identification

25 Fora concise overview of the emergence of Turkish nationalism see David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876—1908 (London: Frank Cass, 1977); on more recent perspectives on Turkish nationalism and its history see Modern Türkiye'de Siyasi Düşünce, vol. 4, Milliyetçilik, ed. Tanil Bora and Murat Gültekingil (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008). For the Czech case see Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

26 The Turks themselves were slow to adopt the denomination Turk. On the ethnonyms of the Turks see Kushner, Turkish Nationalism, 20-26; see also Mehmet Kalpakli, “Turk and Ottoman: A Brief Introduction to Their Images in the Ottoman Empire,’ in Historical Image of the Turk in Europe: 15th Century to the Present; Political and Civilisational Aspects, ed. Mustafa Soykut (Istanbul: The 1s1s Press, 2003), 13-18.

27 The inconsistency of the sources is reflected in the terminology applied in their interpretation: "Turks" appear even where “Ottomans” or “Ottoman Turks" and occasionally “Muslims" might be more precise, but effort has been made to make the meaning clear from the context.

among Ottoman Turks. Scholars have often too easily attributed Czechness to those for whom ethnic identity was either not very relevant or whose identification could even change depending on the situation and the perceived advantages to this identification. Many Czechs and the Germans who lived in the Czech lands and at their borders (or perhaps more precisely many Czechspeakers and German-speakers?9) were throughout the 19th century flexible about their national belonging, as Tara Zahra has convincingly demonstrated.?? Speaking about "Czech" views is thus a generalization employed to avoid qualifying the word each time it appears. While this book analyzes works written in Czech by “Czechs,” it does not suggest that everybody who wrote in Czech was deeply concerned with his or her Czech identity. Most Czechs, including the authors mentioned in this book, were loyal subjects of the Habsburg Empire and some did not identify solely as Czechs, although intellectual elites tended to consider national belonging important and often worked tirelessly to spread and strengthen their compatriots' allegiance to the Czech nation. In the book, "Czech" refers to views expressed by authors who wrote in Czech on Turkish themes and whose works, each in its own idiosyncratic way, integrated the Turks into modern Czech culture, especially educational non-fiction.

Given the position of the Czech population within the Habsburg Empire, mainstream Czech attitudes toward the Turks in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries will necessarily diverge at least somewhat from the prevailing outlook of both the imperial powers, including the views of the German-speaking Austrian elites??? and the peoples who experienced direct Ottoman rule. Czechs’ views were shaped not just by the early modern “Turkish wars,” the armed conflicts that occurred between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire, but also by the location of the Czech lands. The territory inhabited by the Czech population did not, for the most part, neighbor on the Ottoman Empire, but at the same time Czechs were not so remote from Ottoman Turks as to pay no attention to them at all. It is my contention that Czechs' views of the Turks are illuminative not despite the relative distance between the Turks

28 Onthe broader context of Czech-German relations and identification in Bohemia at that time see Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / The Belknap Press, 2016), 292-99.

29 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900—1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). See also Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1-18.

30 Compare with the views of Austrians as described by Fichtner, Terror and Toleration, 21-72.

and the Czechs, but precisely because of this distance. They reveal how people construct Others irrespective of and sometimes especially in the absence of direct contact with them.

The Turks were not the most relevant Other for the Czechs in the early 2oth century, nor did the Turks play a major role in the master narrative of Czech history?! Nonetheless, Czech views of the Turks touch on and expose phenomena that transcend the framework of Czech history. Politically, the Czechs exemplify the response of a Central European people to the different and the unknown and their early-20th-century attitudes can shed light on the persistence of stereotypes whose effects can be felt even today. When, in 2016, Czech politicians rejected the European Union's proposal to abolish visas for the Turks, they justified their position by citing human rights abuses in Turkey. The discussion in the Czech media, however, alluded to the Turkish wars and newspaper articles quoted Svejk’s words about the Turks, which almost every Czech knows.?? The growing importance placed on relations between Europe and its neighbors in the 21st century makes it ever more important to better understand the different trajectories along which attitudes like this are constructed. People in Central or East-Central European countries are often at odds with the viewpoints espoused in what is commonly understood to be “Europe,” especially with respect to attitudes toward immigrants and the Muslim world, but the sources of anti-immigration opinion in each country differ? The reactions of Central European peoples to non-European Others are usually interpreted as responses to a perceived threat;?^ and an analysis of the way Czech views on the then most important “non-European” Others, the Turks, were

31 In the master narrative of Czech history, which well into the 20th century was based on the work of František Palacký, the medieval Bohemian state was portrayed as the state of the Czech nation and the recurring encounters and confrontations with the Germans were identified as the defining feature of Czech history. For more on the Czech master narrative see Gernot Heiss et al., “Habsburg’s Difficult Legacy: Comparing and Relating Austrian, Czech, Magyar and Slovak National Historical Master Narratives,” in Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, ed. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 367—404.

32 “Máš rád Turky? Máš rád ty pohanské psy?,’ iDnes, February 26, 2016, accessed July 10, 2017, http://martinkavka.blog.idnes.cz/blog.aspx?c=496883.

33 See, e.g., “Special Eurobarometer 469: Integration of Immigrants in the European Union,” accessed December 5, 2019, http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/S2169 88 2 469_ENG.

34 On the differences between East European countries and for various explanations of East European attitudes toward Muslims see Alexander Yendell, “Understanding and Explaining Islamophobia in Eastern Europe,” Connections: A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists (December 15, 2018), accessed December 5, 2019, https://www.connections.clio-online.net/article/id/artikel-4658.

constructed in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries can add nuance to the explanation of these attitudes.

Analytically, the Czechs are an example of a large but understudied type of society that is seldom included in inquiries into the relationship between the West and the Muslim world: they were neither colonizers nor colonized; they were never under the Ottoman thumb, but had participated in wars with the Ottoman Empire and were close enough to the Turks for the latter to play a role in Czech culture and self-identification. In this respect, the Czechs were not unique. The Turks were a relevant but not the most important Other for large parts of Europe. Research on Czech attitudes to this Other may help broaden the range of approaches to exploring the relationship between the West and societies outside Europe, beyond the colonizer/colonized binary that still often dominates analyses of Europe's relations with the Muslim world.