Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust (review)

Minority rights in the contemporary Republic of Turkey remain a volatile issue. News dispatches frequently feature the latest violent encounter between Turkish security personnel and Kurdish rebels. Digging a bit deeper, one easily finds newly published works on the region's tortured history of Turkish-Greek conflicts or violence against the Armenians. In a sense, twentieth-century Turkey's violent relationship with its minorities seems a modern betrayal of the tolerance associated with the Ottoman Empire.

Yet, one thread of historical continuity appears to affirm Turkey's imperial heritage of tolerance—the situation of Turkey's Jews. In recent years, a wide variety of politicians, activists, and commentators have lauded the decidedly positive relations Jews have enjoyed with the Republic of Turkey as well as the Ottoman Empire. This narrative emphasizes the Empire's ready acceptance of Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century. Upon arrival, Jews established lives relatively free from the persecution suffered in Western Europe, or soon to be suffered in the Russian Empire. Turkey continues to boast a thriving Jewish community, a dramatic contrast to the disappearance of Jewish life in places such as Iraq and Syria. Moreover, Ankara remains an ally of Israel in diplomatic and military affairs. In the wake of 9/11 and the two intifadas, Turkey often is vaunted as a model of how the Islamic world might live peacefully with Jews at home and abroad.

Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust provides several substantial—and often disconcerting—correctives to this widespread understanding. Guttstadt's critique follows three principle lines of inquiry: 1) the meaning of tolerance and integration under Ottoman rule; 2) the evolution of antisemitism in early republican Turkey and Ankara's attitude toward Nazi Germany; and 3) the fate of Turkish Jews in Europe and Turkish responses to the Holocaust. In her approach towards the latter two topics, Guttstadt makes several important contributions to the study of Turkey and to the general history of Jewish life in the twentieth century.

The first quarter of the book investigates the concept of tolerance towards Jews in the Ottoman lands in the decades preceding the First World War. Scholars such as Rifat Bali and the late Stanford Shaw have argued that the Ottomans' remarkable tolerance set the precedent for the equal treatment accorded the Jews in the Republic declared in 1923. Guttstadt's analysis is less celebratory. Finding tangible differences between "tolerance" and "equality," Guttstadt reminds the reader that Jews, like other non-Muslims, remained second-class citizens subject to discrimination by the Empire as well as to hostility from their neighbors. This distinction is crucial, she argues, to comprehending the patterns of anti-Jewish discrimination that followed the collapse of Ottoman rule.

In a recent study of émigré s living in the early Turkish Republic, Arnold Reisman echoes the notion that Ankara provided a safe haven for Jews and other refugees fleeing Nazi oppression. Their arrival proved beneficial to both parties, since many of those newly arrived were academics and professionals who would contribute to the intellectual capital of the country. Guttstadt's research does not contradict these claims. However, her work counters that the story of European (and not necessarily Jewish) émigré s in interwar Turkey represents only a small spectrum of the experiences connecting Ankara with German National Socialism. Guttstadt underscores the fact that the Turkish state under Mustafa Kemal Atatü rk exhibited very strong antisemitic (and even fascistic) tendencies. The new dogma of Turkish nationalism dictated that Jews, like Armenians and others, would not be included within the Turkish majority as a result of their religion, "race," and languages. In addition to a harsh regime of political indoctrination and economic disenfranchisement, Jews also were subject to acts of mass violence (such as in Thrace in 1934). Although many prominent figures in Turkish politics did borrow aspects of Nazi ideology, Guttstadt correctly locates anti-Jewish policies in interwar Turkey within the context of Ankara's broader agenda of nationalist...