Jews of Turkey Today

Jews in Contemporary Turkey
Franklin Hugh Adler
Though listed as twenty thousand, the Jewish population of contemporary
Turkey, a country of nearly seventy-one million, is actually
closer to fifteen thousand and shrinking, a relic of what had been one
of the most important components of the so-called Ottoman mosaic. At
the beginning of the Turkish Republic, in 1923, the Jewish population
was 81,454. In Istanbul alone there were 47,035 Jews, roughly thirteen
percent of a city that then numbered 373,124.1 Sephardim, those who
came from Spain and Portugal after the expulsions of 1492, are the
most celebrated group of Ottoman Jews, for they came to play such
an important role in commerce, medicine and diplomacy, yet there
had been an older Romaniot group of Jews that had been living continuously
in Asia Minor from Biblical times, mentioned by Aristotle
and several Roman sources, including Josephus.2 Jews, in fact, had
inhabited this land long before the birth of Mohammed and the Islamic
conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, or for that matter, the
arrival and conquests of the Turks, beginning in the eleventh century.
On the eve of the birth of Islam, most of world Jewry lived under Byzantine
or Persian rule in the lands of the Mediterranean basin.
Nevertheless, Turkey’s diminished Jewish population of 15,000 is
the largest concentration of Jews in a predominantly Muslim land, a
relic not only of what had been a central component of the distinctively
Ottoman mosaic, but, more tragically, all that is left of the Jewish
presence in Levantine society, from North Africa through Asia Minor,
where Jews also had been a vital and permanent feature in the social,
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economic and cultural landscape.3 With the rise of Arab nationalism,
and the creation of the state of Israel, 940,000 Jews were forced to leave
Arab countries under circumstances often far more brutal than those
visited upon displaced Palestinians, a population of 726,000, according
to U.N. sources.4 The large and prosperous Jewish community of
Baghdad consisted of 77,542 Jews, while 10,537 lived in Basra, and
10,340 in Mosul.5 It is highly unlikely that Jews will ever reclaim their
distinguished place in the Arabo-Islamic world, even with changes
of regime. For example, in February 2004 the Iraqi Governing Council
quickly approved provisions allowing tens of thousands of exiles
to return, with the sole exception of Iraqi Jews who had lived there
continuously for 3,500 years.6 Nevertheless, history is full of surprises
and unanticipated turns, especially in these ancient lands that have
witnessed flowers of hope as well as rivers of tears. An examination
of Jews in contemporary Turkey is thus a window looking out at a
broader horizon of disappointments and possibilities.
*****
In most respects, Turkish Jews fared far better under the Millet organizational
scheme of the Ottoman Empire than they did under the
Republic. “For more than three hundred years they lived as a distinct
unit with its particular religion, culture, and language in the mosaic
of different religions and ethnic groups that together comprised the
Ottoman Levant.”7 Though all non-Muslims occupied a subordinate
position and an inferior juridical status within this scheme, they were
nevertheless allowed a degree of autonomy in their internal affairs
that, in certain respects, insulated them from the dysfunctions and
bureaucratic inertia of the larger society. Jews, Greeks and Armenians
carved out important niches in the Empire’s economy, developed superior
educational systems, and, with the payment poll tax (cizye) were
spared onerous duties such as military service. Jews in particular had
prospered from the place it had cultivated in the old Ottoman structure
that began to rapidly disintegrate by the end of the eighteenth century.
The age of reforms, referred to as the Tanzimat, led to political centralization,
unification, and secularism inspired by the French model, one
that allowed for none of the communal autonomy that had existed
earlier. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Millets persisted as a
cultural and sociological reality, but no longer had juridical status or
political significance.8
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On the one hand, Jews were largely unprepared for the transition
from Millet to minority; on the other, the republican political program
made no serious effort to integrate the non-Muslim communities into
a new national community. Jews, for the most part, did not speak
Turkish with great facility, but spoke Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish). If
they were educated beyond primary schooling, they learned French
and became one of the largest francophone groups in the region, thanks
to a network of schools constructed and maintained by French Jews
through the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Such French influence in the
Jewish community, together with the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment
movement, led to a significant group of Jewish modernizers,
some of whom (Albert Fua, Emmanuel Carasso and Nissim Mazliach)
not only supported the Young Turk movement, based in Salonika where
Jews were particularly influential, but played a leading role. It soon
became clear, however, that the republican commitment to equality, on
which Jewish support had been predicated, was substantively empty.
In effect, the Young Turks appropriated the most dubious aspects of
the French Jacobin model—relentless unification, centralization and
cultural homogenization—while rejecting its most democratic ones,
most specifically a generous universalism and principled commitment
to equality. What emerged was a pathological compound of top-down
control and standardization, fused with fanatical ethno-nationalism.
Instead of creating a new, inclusive civil society based on the historical
experience of multicultural Ottomanism, the Kemalist project became
one of so-called Turkicization which left no social, cultural or political
space for those who were non-Turks and non-Muslims, for those who
had once enjoyed Millet status, for those who now would become isolated
and suspect minorities. When the Republic was founded in 1923,
non-Muslim bureaucrats were at first treated with suspicion and then
quickly eliminated.
There were, of course, contingencies that must be noted. The republican
state emerged in a moment, not of peace, but war and crisis. Large
expanses of the old Ottoman realm were lost in a decade of relentless
military combat that spanned the Balkan wars of 1912–13, World War
One, and the Turkish war of independence of 1920–1922. Turks and
other Muslims had been mistreated in what we now call balkanization,
as boundaries and populations were caught up in constant struggle.
Most of the Armenian population perished in Turkish acts of genocide,
and most of the Greeks were transferred to Greece in return for the
transfer of most Turks to Turkey. Under these circumstances, creating
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a new republic could not be disassociated with the project of national
salvation. This truly had become a tragic moment for dominant nations
as well as minorities in the region, regardless of political ideology or
state design. Unlike Greeks and Armenians who were associated with
hostile neighbors, Jews suffered less, though there had been a strong
suspicion that the treatment of the Armenians was a warning to the
other minorities as well. Analytically, it is thus difficult to differentiate
between anti-Semitism per se and anti-minority prejudice; most likely,
at this point, the former was subsumed under the latter, as doctrinal
anti-Semitism, generally speaking, has been alien to the Ottoman experience.
Nevertheless, it is not at all difficult to imagine that, under such
circumstances, anti-minority sentiment could become transformed into
anti-Semitism. And, indeed, this is what appears to have happened. In
1934, pogroms broke out in Thrace whose unprotected Jewish communities
permanently resettled in Istanbul. Turkey did not enter World
War Two, so its Jews were not exposed to the immediate dangers that
faced their coreligionists in Europe. In 1941, non-Muslim males were
conscripted for military service. Not permitted to bear arms, they were
sent off for forced labor instead. In December 1941, the S.S. Struma
docked in Istanbul. It was an overloaded, unseaworthy vessel that had
departed from the Romanian port of Constanta, bound for Palestine
carrying 767 Jews fleeing the Germans. Its hull leaking and its engine
malfunctioning, the refugees implored the Turkish government for
sanctuary. The appeal was denied, and after two months of further
negotiation the boat with all of its passengers, who the whole time had
been confined to the ship, was ordered to leave. Five miles at sea in the
Bosphorus, it sank with the loss of 428 men, 269 women and 70 children.
9 In November 1942, the discriminatory wealth tax (Varlik Vergisi)
was levied whereby non-Muslims were assessed at confiscatory rates,
which were not subject to appeal. Those who could not pay within a
month were deported for forced labor during the harsh winter, breaking
stones for a new road at Askale. The press and politicians praised
the measures against people of “alien blood,” who were “Turks in
name only.” Under public criticism from the United States, including
a series of articles in the New York Times, and from other Allied
powers as the war was turning against the Axis powers, the republic
stopped enforcing the tax. “Subsequent government inquiries exposed
the injustices that had been committed, but proposals to compensate
the victims were never implemented.”10 For many Turkish Jews, this
was the last straw; by 1949 more than 31,000 left for the new state of
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Israel where eventually 60,000 would settle, roughly four times the size
of the present Jewish community in Turkey.
*****
Already during the 1930s it had become clear that a distinctive form
of anti-Semitism, not simply disdain of Turkey’s minorities, had taken
root. Cevat Rifat Altilhan, who published the first Turkish editions of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, traveled to
Germany where he met with Nazi leaders who subsidized his dissemination
of German anti-Semitic propaganda. Between 1940 and 1998,
Mein Kampf was published in twenty-nine separate editions, while the
Protocols was published ninety-three times between 1934 and 1991.11
As Rifat Bali, the leading student of Turkish anti-Semitism notes, Turkey
had rigid censorship during this period that was meticulously
applied against the Left and the Kurds. One can only wonder why
it was seldom applied against the nationalists of the extreme right
and the Islamists, who beyond classically anti-Semitic imported texts
like those cited, target the Jews as the cause for every misfortune that
befalls Turkey, beginning with the assertion that it was the Jews who
foisted the secular state upon the country, through their agent, none
other than Kemal Ataturk, who allegedly was a dönme, a cryptic Jew.12
Islamist anti-Semitism became still more radical after the Iranian Revolution,
conjuring Jewish or Zionist conspiracies behind every humiliation
suffered by Muslims in Turkey and throughout the world. And
yet, despite the dissemination of such venomous tracts, it is difficult
to ascertain the degree to which it has had an impact on public opinion.
Unlike France, for example, there has been no wave of physical
assaults nor vandalism of property, aside from the attacks of Neve Shalom
(Oasis of Peace) synagogue in 1986 and 2003 (the first conducted
by Palestinians associated with Abu Nidal; the second by Turkish presumptive
associates of Al-Qaida). Turkish Jews have serious security
concerns in the wake of the bombings of Neve Shalom and the Sisli
synagogues in November 2003, but these are centered on distinctively
Jewish sites and institutions, not the fear typical of French Jews concerning
attacks in public spaces or personal property.
The Jewish community continues to live in a world of dhimmitude
where subordinate status and second-class citizenship is uncontested.
Turkish Jews, as many scholars have pointed out, prefer to remain
“hidden” and apolitical, traits that they brought even to Israel, accordMacalester
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ing to one study entitled The Unseen Israelis. There are no prominent
social critics who are Jews, as incredible as that might sound, only one
major journalist, and only a handful of academics in non-technical disciplines.
The Jewish community of Turkey has produced no shortage
of world-class scholars (Seyla Benhabib, Aaron Rodrigue, Esther Benbassa,
Riva Kastoryano, Nora Seni, Dani Rodrik, Mahir Shaul, Karen
and Henri Barkey, to name a few), but, as Rifat Bali suggests, they were
mostly trained and made their reputations abroad, in Israel, Europe,
or the United States. Jewish children know they will never hold high
public office, and are steered mostly toward commerce, engineering,
or the physical sciences.
Lina Filiba, vice-president of the Jewish Community, argues that
quiet diplomacy, not contestation, has worked to their advantage
compared to the treatment of other minorities. In this way, they have
secured permission to construct new synagogues and enhance existing
structures, as well as other benefits. Relations with the present Islamist
ruling party, she maintains, are especially good because as believers,
not secularists, they understand and respect the spiritual needs of the
Jewish community. Bension Pinto, president of the Jewish Community,
says that things are “a thousand times better than before,” though he
could not predict how long this will remain the case.13 In response to
Jewish critics, such as the historian Rifat Bali, who argue that the community’s
complicity in dhimmitude has made the situation worse, Lina
Filiba responds by saying that the community has not been passive or
submissive in quietly defending Jewish interests, but has diplomatic
cards of its own that occasionally have been played, most importantly
relations with American Jews whose political clout successive Turkish
governments has needed to counter the influence of Greek and
Armenians lobbies on obvious issues. Anything that endangers or disadvantages
Turkish Jews, she suggested, would have immediate and
potentially devastating diplomatic consequences. In fact, the Turkish
government occasionally treated its Jewish community as a pawn, not
a recognized force, when dealing with American Jews. For example, in
1988 Ambassador Sükü Alekdag threatened that if the U.S. Holocaust
Museum made any reference whatsoever to the Armenians, “it will go
badly for the Jews in Turkey. Also for the refugees from Iran. We permit
them to cross into our territory, you know, even without passports.
That could all stop.”14
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*****
There are two alternative futures that confront the Turkish Jewish community.
The first is further diminution, a continuation of the pattern
that has persisted since the creation of the Republic in 1923. If not
entire families, children, especially those who pursued their university
studies abroad, will remain in Israel, Europe or the United States. A
brain drain has taken place during the past twenty years affecting all
Turks, not just Jews. Among better educated and more affluent Turkish
families, more relatives than ever before have settled abroad where
opportunities in the academy, science and commerce are more plentiful
and far better paid. As Jews are disproportionately represented in this
group, but comprise a vastly smaller population, the differential effect
on the Jewish community would be far more pronounced than among
Turks in general. In fact, this is the future anticipated by leadership
of the Jewish community; that it will become smaller quantitatively
though hopefully better qualitatively.
Alternatively, one could imagine a more optimistic future if the
Turkish economy prospers, especially if accession to the European
Union takes place, securing external guarantees for human rights and
the genesis of a more open, dynamic civil society where equality for all
Turks might become possible. Under such circumstances, Jews might
return to Turkey and reconstitute the dwindling community. Despite
the vicissitudes of Middle East politics, and the emergence of an ever
more popular Islamist party, relations between Turkey and Israel in
trade, as well as security, have remained strong. Unlike other Muslim
countries, Jews who left can always return to visit or remain. In
terms of tourism, Turkey, one hour away by air, has become a prime
Israeli venue, attracting 300,000 tourists per year. One striking aspect
of globalization has been the rise of so called “transnationals” who for
professional reasons have multiple residences. If the Turkish economy
continues to grow, and if trade and technical relations with Israel continue
to develop, transnational Jews might become a new element
of Turkey’s Jewish community. One could well imagine transnational
Jews originating from Europe and perhaps America as well. Of course,
should meaningful and lasting peace come to the Middle East, conditions
would be created for émigré Jews to return to all of their Levantine
homelands, not just Turkey, where with Muslims they could
reconstitute what had once been such a vital, diverse, multicultural
space. •
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Notes
1. Riva Kastoryano, “From Millet to Community: The Jews of Istanbul,” in Ottoman and
Turkish Jewry, ed. Aron Rodrigue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 255.
On the same theme, see Aron Rodrigue, “From Millet to Minority: Turkish Jewry,” in
Paths of Emancipation, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995). For an excellent history of Sephardic Jewry, see Esther Benbassa and
Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2. Walter Weiker, Ottomans, Turks and the Jewish Polity (New York: University Press of
America, 1992), pp. 2–7.
3. On Levantine culture, see Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993).
4. For full documentation and case histories, see Moïse Rahmani, L’exode oublié, Juifs des
pays arabes (Paris: Editions Raphael, 2003) and Shmuel Trigano, ed., L’exclusion des Juifs
des pays arabes (Paris: Pardès, 2003).
5. Reeva Spector Simon, “Iraq,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern
Times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 348.
6. New York Times, 26 February 2004.
7. Aron Rodrigue, “From Millet to Minority,” p. 239.
8. See Riva Kastoryano, “From Millet to Community.”
9. Howard Sachar, Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered (New York:
Vintage, 1994), p. 105.
10. George Gruen, “Turkey,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern
Times, ed. Simon, Laskier, and Reguer, p. 308.
11. Rifat Bali, Les relations entre Turcs et Juifs dans La Turquie Moderne (Istanbul: Isis, 2001),
pp. 49, 68.
12. Interview with Rifat Bali, 31 May 2004. The term dönme refers to a sect descending
from the followers of the 17th-century messianic pretender Sabbetai Zevi. Faced with
the choice of death or converting to Islam, Zevi and his followers chose the latter, though
secretly they remained Jews.
13. Interviews with Lina Filiba and Bension Pinto, 3 June 2004.
14. Howard Sachar, Farewell España, p. 110.

Source: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1395&context=macintl