Description

İsmail FAİK, editor.

انسانيت

[İnsaniyet / Humanity]

Istanbul: Organ edu Parti Socialiste Ottoman 1326 [1910].

Folio, 4 pp. with an illustration (soft folds, tiny tears in margins, otherwise in a good condition).

 

[Accompanied with:]

 

2.

اشتراك. Jaurnal [sic] socialiste.  İchtirak

[Participation, No: 254.]

Istanbul: 1328 [1912].

4°: 16 pp. with two black and portraits, original pink cover with a portrait and lettering (lacking the last wrapper, unbound, otherwise in a good clean condition).

 

 

This is the first edition of a newspaper İnsaniyet (also İnsaniyat with a French undertitle L‘Humanité), issued by the Ottoman Socialist Party and featuring Karl Marx on the cover, which is the first representation of this author in the Ottoman press.

The Ottoman Socialist Party only existed for three years, between 1910 and 1913, and started publishing their newspaper İnsaniyet in their first year. As the association was not an official political party, it can be today seen more like a gathering of various intellectuals, based on the older movements of mostly non-Muslim (Bulgarian, Greek, Jewish, Armenian) socialist groups of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Socialist Party was suppressed by the Young Turks in 1913 and only returned in the form of the Turkish Socialist Party, which also only existed for three years between 1919 and 1922.

1910 was a groundbreaking year for the socialist movement in Istanbul. In the same year two important publications were issued: the first portrait of Karl Marx on the cover of the party’s first newspaper and the first Ottoman separately issued socialist book Sosyalizm, which was a translation of George Tournaire’s Le Socialisme by Haydar Rifat (Yorulmaz, 1877-1942), who would 23 years later became known as the first Turkish translator of the complete text of Das Kapital.

 

Karl Marx in the Ottoman Press

The first time the Ottoman press mentioned Karl Marx, appears to be in the February 9^th, 1871, edition of Hakaiku’l-Vekayi magazine.

Until the early 20^th century there were many calls to translate Marx’s work in the newspapers and magazines. In 1888, now a lost Armenian translation of Das Kapital was allegedly made in Istanbul, which Marx described with the following words:

 

An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production.

(See: Sungur Savran & E. Ahmet Tonak, Marx’s Capital in Turkey, 2018, with quoted older literature).

 

The second magazine in our lot (with a pink cover) was issued on June 7^th, 1328 (i. e. 1912), less than three months before the first translation of separate sections of Das Kapital to Ottoman.

The translation was made by Bohor Israel, a Jewish author from Istanbul, who published the passages under the tile ‘Iktisad-i Içtimaiye‘ [Social Economics] in the first and only issue of the magazine Ceride-i Felsefiye [Philosphical Newspaper] on August 22, 1328 (1912). Enthusiastically, Israel authored all the articles in the publication.

The complete translation of Das Kapital was never made in the Ottoman language and only appeared as a separate publication in Turkish in 1933.

References: Cf.: Sungur Savran & E. Ahmet Tonak, Marx’s Capital in Turkey, 2018; Bilal YURTOĞLU, Bahûr İsrâîl’in Cerîde-i Felsefiye’si ve Osmanlı’da İlk Das Kapital Tefrikası, 2016.