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Professor Marc David Baer

Professor
Department of International History

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About

Marc David Baer (PhD, History, University of Chicago, 2001) is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of six books:

  1. 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; Short list, Best First Book in the History of Religions, American Academy of Religion; translated into Turkish as IV. Mehmet Döneminde Osmanlı Avrupa'sında İhtida ve Fetih (Istanbul: Hil, 2010).
  2. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), Finalist, Sephardic Culture category, National Jewish Book Awards; translated into Turkish as Selânikli Dönmeler: Musevilikten Dönenler, Müslüman Devrimciler, ve Laik Türkler (Istanbul: Doğan, 2011), and translated into Greek as Οι ντονμε τησ θεσσαλονικησ: Εξισλαμισθέντες Εβραίοι, Επαναστάτες Μουσουλμάνοι, Κοσμικοί Τούρκοι (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2020).
  3. 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) (in Turkish).
  4. German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
  5. Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2020), Winner, Dr Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research; translated into Turkish as Koruyucu Sultanlar ve Hoşgörülü Türkler: Osmanlı Yahudi Tarihini Yazmak, Ermeni Soykırımı’nı İnkâr Etmek (Istanbul: Aras, 2024).
  6. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (London: Basic Books UK and New York: Basic Books USA, 2021), Shortlist, Wolfson History Prize. One of the ‘best paperbacks of 2022’ according to The Sunday Times. The Ottomans has been translated into 12 languages.

Marc David Baer published two books in 2020. The first, released in March 2020 with the Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, Indiana University Press, is called 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.

The second, entitled German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus was released in April 2020 with the Religion, Culture, and Public Life series, Columbia University Press. 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.

In 2021, Baer published The Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic, Asian antithesis of the Christian, European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans' domain was multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious, reaching deep into Europe's heart. Indeed, as it expanded across Eastern Europe, Asia, and North Africa, the Ottomans saw their empire as the new Rome. In The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs, Baer offers a major new history of the Ottoman dynasty, recounting their remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, and trace their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic, and Byzantine heritage. Rulers viewed themselves as both devout Muslims and the rightful successors to the Roman Empire, calling themselves not only khans and sultans but also caliphs, emperors, and caesars. They managed their vast empire by striking a delicate balance: for most of the dynasty's existence, the Ottomans pioneered principles of religious tolerance, even as they used religious conversion to integrate conquered peoples and populate the ruling class. But in the nineteenth century, the dynasty embraced exclusivity and intolerance, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ultimately the empire's demise after the First World War. The Ottomans vividly reveals the dynasty's full history and its enduring impact on Europe and the world.

Other titles: Head of Department, Academic Board Representative

Expertise

Early Modern and Modern Europe and Middle East; Ottoman Empire; Turkey; Germany; Muslim-Jewish Relations