Cumhuriyet Yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri - Bir Türkleştirme Serüveni (1923-1945)

When looking at the minority question during the Republican era, the attitude and policies regarding the country's Jews has up to now been placed at a whole different level than that of the other minorities, and with the complete acquiescence of the community's leaders a past has been contrived that presents a picture of peaceful, uninterrupted Turkish-Jewish unity through the ages. Within this fictional past all events that might be seen as contradictory to this view of Turkish tolerance and mercy toward its Jewish population-events such as the pressure on them to forego the special rights accorded them by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, the "Compatriot, Speak Turkish!" campaigns, the pogroms and looting of the Jewish communities of Turkish Thrace, the conscription of twenty non Muslims labor batallions during World War II, the turning away of the ill-fated Struma,an aging freighter carrying Romanian Jewish refugees, and the Capital Tax: such events are always either glossed over or treated as isolated incidents. The author, who has done meticulous archival work both in Turkey and abroad in researching this topic, calls this view of Turkish Jewish history into question, asserting instead that all of the aforementioned events were actually a piece of the often tense relations between these groups, and that, as such, they represented aspects of the regime's systematic and longstanding policy of ‘Turkifying' the country's minorities.

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Bir Turklestirme Seruveni (An Odyssey of Turkification)

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