‘We are happy to get rid of non-Muslim citizens,” the Turkish consul in Rome told Anthony Gad Bigio, an architect and urban planner now living in Washington DC after he had applied to relinquish his Turkish nationality. Not much had changed, Bigio reflected, since Gad Franco, his grandfather, had been reduced to penury by the Turkish state.
The decline and fall of Franco, traced by Bigio in his new book, A Sephardi Turkish Patriot, epitomized the plight of Turkish Jews – and indeed all non-Muslim minorities, marginalized and persecuted by Turkish ethno-nationalism. Franco’s tragedy was particularly poignant, as he had begun his career with high hopes that independent Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman empire, would be a beacon of equality, tolerance, and respect for civil and minority rights. Franco’s story is skilfully woven into a general history of the Jews of Turkey in Bigio’s book.
Empires rise and fall
At its zenith, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the gates of Vienna to North Africa and the border with Persia. It had thriving, cosmopolitan trading ports, such as Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut, Salonika, and Izmir. Izmir boasted a Greek majority, thousands of “Levantine” and foreign residents, Armenians, and Jews. But in the 19th century, the Western powers backed minority rights, and chunks of the empire broke away as Bulgars, Romanians, Serbs, Albanians, and Greeks proclaimed their independence.
At the start of the 20th century, the crumbling Ottoman Empire was beset by wars. Armenian and Greek territorial designs brought forth massacres. The Turks committed genocide against more than a million Armenians and forcibly displaced thousands more. Greeks and Turks swapped places in what has euphemistically been called “ethnic simplification.”
The modern state of Turkey emerged much truncated from the war but undertook to safeguard minority rights in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
The Jewish journalist
A self-made journalist, lawyer, and jurist, Franco, who was born in 1881, was an influential member of the French-speaking elite, with excellent connections to politicians and intellectuals. A disciple of the assimilationist Alliance Israélite schools network, he opposed Zionism. As a representative of the community, he fought for Jews to integrate into newly independent Turkey, under its reformist, Western-orientated leader, Kemal Ataturk. While many Jews emigrated, Franco actually returned from France in 1920 to help reconstruct the new Turkey.
Although Franco became a successful and wealthy lawyer, he worried that Kemalist Turkey was becoming increasingly authoritarian and ethno-nationalist. The Ottomanist ideal of a secular, pluralistic state with equal rights for all was receding, as Ataturk struggled for control against a Kurdish insurgency. Instead, Bigio writes, the Turkish Republic sought Soviet-style eradication of religion and the abolition of community institutions.
Then came a drive against any minority that did not speak Turkish.
There had been a Jewish presence in Turkey for 2,000 years, but the bulk of the community were Ladino-speakers who had fled the Spanish Inquisition. They had been in Turkey for 500 years – and could hardly be called foreign. Nevertheless, the state embarked on a Turkification campaign centered on language. “Compatriot, speak Turkish!” was the official slogan in the 1930s. With the Greeks and Armenians fading out of the picture, the Jews, although historically close to Muslims, became the scapegoat of choice. They were accused of being speculators and black marketeers.
In May 1941, Armenian, Greek, and Jewish men, including Franco’s brother Marcel, were conscripted into labor battalions. But the coup de grace came in 1942 when the state imposed a swingeing wealth tax (varlik vergesi) on all non-Muslim minorities, in order to replenish its depleted coffers. This amounted to legalized dispossession of the non-Muslim merchant class. Together with 5,000 others who could not pay, Franco was sent to do back-breaking work in forced labor camps. His health declined as he shoveled snow. Stung by the Turkish Republic’s betrayal of its loyal citizens, he urged his son to emigrate to Palestine.
Four years before he died, Franco wrote an article, “Mea Culpa,” in 1950, to apologize for having believed that the Jews had a future in Turkey. The only bulwark against racial and religious discrimination was Zionism. Some 40 percent of the Turkish-Jewish community ended up fleeing to Israel.
Under the radar
UNTIL RECENT tensions under the Islamic fundamentalist Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to light, Jews in modern Turkey have not attracted much attention when compared to their treatment in Arab states.
But while Arab states criminalized Zionism in 1948, Turkey had already declared Zionism illegal in 1934. While Arab states like Iraq banned Jews from public service in the 1940s, Turkey had already imposed a ban in the 1930s. Whereas Egypt and other Arab League countries
introduced an Arabization company law that decreed that 75% of company staff must be Muslim in 1947, Turkey had insisted that non-Muslims be fired from companies as early as 1923. Those despoiled of their property by the Varlik Vergisi were never compensated.
Jews in Arab countries suffered riots in the 1940s, but these were foreshadowed by the Thrace riots of 1934 when the Turkish state forcibly evicted 10,000 Jews. And during the relatively benign postwar years, the 1955 riots erupted against the Greek minority: 30 died while the police stood by. Thousands more Jews were prompted to leave.
As with Arab nationalism, xenophobic Turkish nationalism exacted a fearsome price from its minorities. Why has Turkey never been held accountable for its persecution and dispossession of Jews?
There are several reasons for this.
In spite of popular pro-Nazi feeling, Turkey was neutral during WWII and some of its diplomats even saved Jews. In 1949, Turkey established diplomatic relations with Israel and placed itself firmly in the postwar US sphere of influence. As Bigio puts it, American Jewish organizations did not want to trouble the new diplomatic relationship on behalf of the Varlik Vergisi victims.
In this excellent, eye-opening, and very readable work, Anthony Gad Bigio has cast a spotlight on a little-known tragedy. Gad’s story is one of betrayal by the Turkish Republic, but it is ultimately a vindication of Zionism.
The writer is co-founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, and the author of Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell).