Profile | Marc David Baer

Mavi Boncuk | 

Marc David Baer[1] (PhD, History, University of Chicago) is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of five books: Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), winner, Albert Hourani Prize, Middle East Studies Association of North America, Best Book in Middle East Studies, translated into Turkish as IV. Mehmet Döneminde Osmanlı Avrupa'sında İhtida ve Fetih(Istanbul: Hil, 2010); The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), translated into Turkish as Selânikli Dönmeler: Musevilikten Dönenler, Müslüman Devrimciler, ve Laik Türkler (Istanbul: Doğan, 2011), to be published in Greek translation in 2018; At Meydanı'nda Ölüm: 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Hoşgörü veİhtida (Death on the Hippodrome: Gender, Tolerance, and Conversion in 17th century Istanbul) (Istanbul: Koç Yayınları, 2016); and the forthcoming German, Jewish, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus and Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide.

In addition, he has published works on Turks in Germany including “Mistaken for Jews: Turkish PhD Students in Nazi Germany” (German Studies Review) and “Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Berlin and the Shoah” (Comparative Studies in Society & History) as well as German-Jewish converts to Islam including “Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and ‘The Message of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to Europe.’” (New German Critique) and “Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and German-Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus" (The American Historical Review).

Marc David Baer two forthcoming books will be released in 2020. The first is entitled German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus[2] [3] in the Religion, Culture, and Public Life series with Columbia University Press (March 2020). Hugo Marcus (1880-1966) was born a German-Jew, but converted to Islam, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to the Second World War. He was also a gay man who never called himself so but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile. Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. He explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of being German, gay and Muslim that positioned Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on notions of sexuality and competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe.

The second book will be released in April 2020 with the Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, Indiana University Press. In Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide, Baer confronts long-standing convictions about harmonious Turkish-Jewish relations to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants and victims of another. He delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. In this, he aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, democide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.

[1] T: +44 (0)20 7849 4975 | E: m.d.baer[at]lse[dot]ac[dot]uk

[2 ] Hugo Hamid Marcus (1880–1966): From 1923 to 1935, Dr. Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was among the leading German Muslims in Berlin. The son of a Jewish industrialist, and a homosexual, Marcus studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century. To support his family after financial reverses caused by World War I, he tutored foreign Muslim doctoral students in German. This led to his conversion to Islam, and for a dozen years, under the adopted name Hamid, he was the most important German in Berlin's mosque community. Nevertheless, he did not terminate his membership in the Jewish community, nor his ties to friends in the homosexual rights movement. The Nazis incarcerated Marcus in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a Jew in 1938 since his Jewish background and homosexual activism placed him high on the list of National Socialism's undesirables. He was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on November 9, 1938. He was interned in Sachsenhausen for several weeks until the mosque's imam, S. M. Abdullah, secured his release.
Dr. Hugo Marcus was a German Jewish convert to Islam who played a prominent role in the cultural and intellectual life of the Ahmadi community that thrived in interwar Berlin. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Marcus published numerous essays devoted to the philosophical explication of Islam in light of German Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Goethe, and Lessing. Although Marcus rarely, if ever, alluded to his Jewish origins, this study contends that it is precisely his conception of Islam and his figuration of the Muslim that brings the invisible contours of his Jewishness to light. It traces the continuities between Marcus’s portrayal of Islam and Muslims and then-regnant modes of German Jewish self-representation. Marcus’s reticence on the subject of his origins notwithstanding, his interpretation of Islam situates him within the legacy of German Jewish liberalism and its tradition of religious and cultural self-definition. LINKhttps://muse.jhu.edu/article/736897

See also:
Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and 'the message of the holy prophet Muhammad to Europe'  PDF LINK

[3] Pub Date: April 2020 | ISBN: 9780231196710

320 Pages| Columbia University Press

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Goethe as Pole Star
1. Fighting for Gay Rights in Berlin, 1900–1925
2. Queer Convert: Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany, 1925–1933
3. A Jewish Muslim in Nazi Berlin, 1933–1939
4. Who Writes Lives: Swiss Refuge, 1939–1965
5. Hans Alienus: Yearning, Gay Writer, 1948–1965
Conclusion: A Goethe Mosque for Berlin[4]
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile.

In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

See also:  Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus

Marc David Baer

The American Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 140–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.140

Baer, Marc David (2017) 

Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany: Hugo Marcus and 'the message of the holy prophet Muhammad to Europe'. New German Critique, 44 (2 131). pp. 163-200. ISSN 0094-033X 

Abstract

The article explores the Islam envisioned in the extensive writings of one of the most prominent German converts to Islam in Weimar Germany, the Jewish poet, philosopher, and political activist Hugo Marcus (1880–1966). Marcus's understanding of Islam is a surprisingly Eurocentric and even Germanic one. It is not only the religion of the German past, Marcus claims, but also, given its faith in the intellect and in progress, the religion of the future. His ideas do not figure in the historiography of Weimar Germany. While many of the new political notions of the future that Weimar writers contemplated have been explored, scholars have paid less attention to the spiritual and religious utopias envisioned in the 1920s. This article engages with German responses to the rupture of World War I and the realm of imagined political possibilities in Weimar Germany by focusing on one such utopia overlooked in historiography, Marcus's German-Islamic synthesis. 



[4] Goethe Mosque for Berlin: The mosque is located in a part of the building of the Johanniskirche in Berlin-Moabit. The Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque is the only self-described liberal mosque in Germany. It was inaugurated in June 2017, and is named after medieval Andalusian-Arabic polymath Ibn Rushd and German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The mosque was founded by Seyran Ateş, a German lawyer and Muslim feminist of Kurdish-Turkish descent. The mosque is characterised as liberal; it bans face-covering, it allows women and men to pray together, and it accepts LGBT worshippers.

Turkish mass media displayed the Rushd-Goethe mosque as part of the Gülen movement, a claim denied by Ercan Karakoyun, chairman of the Gülen-affiliated foundation in Germany Stiftung Dialog und Bildung.