The Turek Family

The surname Turek is born from an imaginary encounter between Central Europe and the Ottoman Orient. In Western Slavic languages, turek literally means "Turk," and the word circulated both as an ethnic designation and as a mocking or admiring nickname. The name Turek, in Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Eastern Yiddish, derives from turek "Turk," used either as an ethnic name for a Turk, or as a sobriquet for someone judged to resemble a Turk. In a Poland long at odds with the Sublime Porte, from the siege of Vienna to the frontier wars, the figure of the Turk was familiar: it spoke of absolute otherness, the distant, sometimes the Eastern merchant, sometimes the convert. That a Jew should be burdened with such a name is hardly surprising: in the minds of their Christian neighbors, Jews and Turks shared otherness, the turban, non-Christian law, the trade in fabrics and spices.

This ambivalence is the first lesson the name teaches. It places the Tureks at the exact point where European Judaism encounters the relation to the foreigner — that cardinal value which the Torah hammers home through the commandment to love the ger, the foreigner who dwells among us, "for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt." To bear the name of the Other was, for these families, to be designated as the insider foreigner — and to make of this designation, across generations, an assumed identity. One must here distinguish several paths of attribution. Turek is also, in Polish and among Jews originating from Poland, a habitation name referring to a place. Thus, two men bearing the same surname could have no connection: one held his name from a physical trait, the other from his native city. The repertories of Beider and Menk teach precisely this methodological caution: a single surname often masks independent lineages, and onomastics alone never grounds kinship [Dictionaries of East European and Judeo-German surnames]. This is a lesson of humility before the sources, which the historian owes to the memory of the families whose traces he recounts.

Beyond the nickname, there is the city. Turek, chief town of Great Poland (Wielkopolska), was home to one of those Jewish communities born late, in the shadow of the partitions of Poland. Jews arrived there at the very end of the eighteenth century. The oldest known Jewish community of Turek dates back to 1798. Jews appeared for the first time in Turek at the end of the eighteenth century; they came to the city after a fire had destroyed part of the town of Dobra. This point of origin — flight after fire — inscribed the community from the outset in the experience of exile and new beginning, which is the very fabric of Jewish history.

The first families bore names marked by Prussian influence, a sign of the territorial upheavals of the era. The first arrivals must have reached the town of Turek in 1798; they showed clear Prussian influence in their dress, language and bearing, and bore names such as Miller, Schiffer, Glicksman, Fuchs, Winter, Oppenheim, Taube. Growth was at first slow: in 1808, the Jewish population of the city numbered 33 persons out of a total of 764 inhabitants; in 1827, there were 95 Jews out of 2,302 souls. This gradual rise testifies to an involvement in collective life: arriving destitute, these Jews built within a few decades the institutions of a true kehilla — place of prayer, cemetery, schools — bearing that concern for the common good that tradition calls tzorkhei tzibbur, the needs of the community.

The economic foundation of the community rested on the trade in animals and merchandise. They bought from peasants, at fairs, livestock, horses, sheep and geese, which they then resold. To this commerce in animals and fairs was added, in a city whose very name would become synonymous with weaving, the textile craft. The existence in Turek of a Museum of Weaving Crafts attests to this vocation. Grazyna Piasecka directs the Muzeum Rzemiosla Tkackiego, the Museum of Weaving Crafts of Turek. In this patient labor of the fair and the loom is expressed a modest but tenacious economic action: not accumulation, but useful insertion into the fabric of a small town, the honest exchange that nourishes and connects. This is a quiet virtue, that of parnassa — honest livelihood — which Jewish wisdom places at the foundation of human dignity.

In the 19th Century

In the 19th century, Turek fell under the Kingdom of Poland under Russian tutelage, and its Jewish community grew at the pace of the region's political convulsions. The great upheaval of the century was the January Insurrection, which local Memory retained as a founding event. The January Insurrection of 1863/64 figures among the significant historical events of Turek. The Jews of the small towns of the Kingdom experienced these uprisings with ambivalence: loyal to the city that sheltered them, exposed to the reprisals of the occupier as well as to the suspicions of the insurgents, they learned a relationship to war made of prudence and solidarity—not the exaltation of arms, but the protection of the vulnerable, the maintenance of worship and mutual aid in the midst of disorder.

Despite these trials, the community continued to grow, until on the eve of the Second World War it had become a substantial component of the population. On March 1st, 1938, the Jewish population stood at 2,216 persons out of 9,879 inhabitants. The ratio thus established—nearly one inhabitant in five—echoes the observations of the city's chroniclers. There was somewhere in Poland a Jewish community in this very city of Turek, whose Jewish population, never more than a quarter of the Polish population, nonetheless left its mark on the city. This "mark" was not merely demographic: it lay in the density of a religious, social, and intellectual life. Turek, and countless cities similar to it, composed a singular Jewish world, a world that no longer exists.

The city produced its figures. The Memorial Book mentions among notable personalities the sculptor Henoch Glicenstein, whose name connects Turek to the great currents of European Jewish art [International Jewish Cemetery Project]. In this flowering of artistic and communal knowledge—synagogues, schools, charitable works—one reads one of the most constant traits of the Memory of Israel: the conviction that a community, however small, is measured not by its wealth but by its capacity to teach, to create, and to care. The mutual aid societies, the hevra kadisha watching over the dead, the dowry funds for poor girls—all these institutions with which Turek had equipped itself speak of organized charity, tzedaka as a duty of justice far more than as alms.

The surname Turek did not remain confined to Greater Poland. Like all names formed on the figure of the "Turk," it experienced variants and kinships throughout central and eastern Europe, which comparative onomastics allows us to map. Czech and Slovak forms correspond to Polish and Hungarian derivatives, and a constellation of properly Jewish names designating oriental origin. According to genealogical records, the family of names built on "Turc" comprises, among Jews, forms such as Turkow or Turkov, while the Polono-Czech produces Turek, Turecek, Turkowski and Turkiewicz [Genealogy for the TURK Surname]. These variants signal that the same foundation — the idea of the Orient, the Turk, of elsewhere — nourished distinct lineages according to languages and borders.

This onomastic dispersion illuminates a broader phenomenon: the name "of the Turk" connects the Ashkenazi of Poland to the Sephardic and Ottoman world, where Jews actually lived in Turkish lands, speaking Judeo-Spanish. The lexicographer Yehuda A. de Yoná, publishing in 1902 his Judeo-Spanish, French and Turkish dictionary, illustrates this porosity of Jewish worlds between the West and the Ottoman Empire [de Yoná, 1902]. Where the Ashkenazi of Turek bore the name of the Turk as a label come from without, the Jews of Salonika, Istanbul or Smyrna lived in effective contact with Turkish culture — so that the same word, "Turk," says to one the stranger and to the other the neighbor. It is in this gap that the value of tolerance is bound: the Jewish tradition has always refused to make the stranger an enemy in principle, and the history of Turek, straddling these meanings, reminds us that Judaism thought of itself, everywhere, as a hospitality among worlds. We will therefore advance, with the caution that is warranted, that the surname Turek was less a unique lineage than a family of names — reflection of a diaspora that made circulation between cultures its condition and its genius.

The history of the Turek community ends in fire. Barely had the war begun when the city fell into German hands, and one of the very first acts of the occupier targeted the sacred heart of the community. On September 22, 1939, a group of German officers from the Schutzstaffel formation — the SS — led several hundred men, women, and children into the synagogue, then, after cordoning off the temple with a line of gendarmes and soldiers, set it ablaze. On that day, it is not merely walls that burn, but one hundred and forty years of prayer, study, and collective life. The synagogue set afire with its faithful is the inverted, satanic image of everything this Great Book has sought to say: where the community had built to pray and teach, the occupier destroys to erase.

The liquidation follows its relentless course. In December 1940, the Jewish population of Turek, along with other Jews brought from neighboring localities, was concentrated before its deportation. Of the flourishing community of 1938, soon nothing remains but the desecrated cemetery and the memory recorded by survivors in the memorial book — that Yizkor Bukh which, refusing oblivion, accomplishes the most imperious of Jewish duties: zakhor, remember. It is in this act of memory that the piety of the lineage is expressed, ultimate and unshakeable: no longer worship in the temple, but fidelity to the dead, the transmission of the names of those who have no grave. To write Turek after Turek, to recite the names, to draw up the list of the disappeared — this is the final communal work of a murdered world, and the reason for being of this book.

There remains to be weighed what the Turek lineage bequeaths to the Memory of Israel. Here, tradition and archive answer one another. Tradition — that of the nickname, of the "Turk," of the designated stranger — speaks to the ambivalence of an existence always perceived as other. Archive — the censuses, the Books of Remembrance, the stones of the cemetery — confirms and embodies this condition: a community born of flight, grown through commerce and weaving, erased by fire. Turek and innumerable similar towns composed a singular Jewish world, a world that no longer exists. The name Turek becomes then a condensation of the Jewish History of Eastern Europe: imposed alterity, local rootedness, destruction, Memory.

The chroniclers themselves wished to formulate this legacy. The editor of the Book of Remembrance concludes his evocation by seeking to say what these Jews of the small town truly were. In conclusion, one can say that the Jews of Turek were… — and what the source leaves suspended, History completes: they were men and women of fair and trade, of synagogue and mutual aid, held to be strangers and yet deeply bound to their town. It is this interweaving of the singular and the collective that gives the name its weight. Each Turek family, whether it holds its patronym from the nickname or from the town, carries within it this founding paradox: to be named "the Other" and to make of this alterity a calling to fidelity, to Memory and to hospitality between worlds.

Between the mocking nickname and the city of Grande-Pologne, between the Ashkenazi of the Kingdom of Poland and the distant echo of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, the name Turek traces a geography of alterity. There was never a single Turek lineage, but a family of names, all knotted around the same image — the Turk, the foreigner, the man come from elsewhere. From this onomastic matter, history made emerge a tangible reality: the community of Turek, born in 1798 from flight after the fire of Dobra, growing to more than two thousand souls in 1938, living from the trade of beasts and weaving, then burned in its synagogue on September 22, 1939.

Among all the virtues that the tradition of Israel has carried, it is the relationship to the foreigner that this lineage will, among all, have best expressed. Named "the Turk" by the gaze of others, the Turek embodied the Jewish condition itself: that of the ger, the foreigner whom the Law commands to love because one has oneself been one. They made of this imposed alterity not a withdrawn wound, but a manner of being in the world — inserted in a small town without dissolving into it, bound by the very name they bore to the Orient, to the neighbor, to the distant. And when all was destroyed, they expressed the last and the highest of faithfulnesses, that of Memory: zakhor. This Great Book is nothing other than the prolongation of this commandment — to speak the name of Turek so that the vanished world it designates is not entirely so.