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On the Outside Looking In: Jewish Émigrés and Turkish Citizenship in the Early Republican Period

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Turkish Jews and their Diasporas

Part of the book series: Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe ((MOMEIDSEE))

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Abstract

This chapter examines how the emigration of Jews predated the wave of emigration after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 by at least a century, and how it continued from the late Ottoman period through the early Turkish Republic. Jews left Turkey in large numbers in response to Turkification efforts that sought to both assimilate and marginalize Jews and others. Jews holding Turkish passports migrated throughout Western Europe, the Americas, and further afield, and, in places like Mexico, became synonymous with governmental perceptions of who constituted a “Turk.” At the same time, many acquired additional citizenships while continuing to travel on Turkish passports in direct contravention of Turkish law. In doing so, they provoked Turkish officials to articulate the boundaries of Turkish citizenship and nationality in ways that at times overlapped and at times diverged from the ways in which “Turkishness” was mapped onto Jews still resident in Turkey.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Legation de la Republique Turque a Mexico, “Nota Verbal,” 1 September 1935, III-297-12, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter SRE), Mexico City, Mexico.

  2. 2.

    “Diario Oficial, 7/15/1927,” quoted in Thersa Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 102-103.

  3. 3.

    On the Treaty of Friendship between Turkey and Mexico, see Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Yer Numarası: 157, Kutu Numarası: 26, Dosya Gömleği: 62, Sıra no: 17, Sayı: 5827, Cumhuriyet Arşivi, (hereafter BCA), Ankara, Turkey; Tratado de Amistad, 1927, III-183-2, SRE. For the Turkish letter of complaint, and the SRE response that this ministry also did not agree with including Turkish citizens in the restrictions on “oriental immigration,” see “Restricciones a la Inmigracíon de Turcos,” 21-26-51, SRE.

  4. 4.

    Legación de Turquie to the Secretary of the Mexican Foreign Ministry,10/18/1934, expediente III-297-12, SRE.

  5. 5.

    Mehmet Münir Ertegün, 11/29/1934, Dosya no: 400, Sıra no: 28, Dosya Gömleği: 802, Kutu Numarası: 267, Fon no: 30 10 0 0, BCA.

  6. 6.

    Tekinalp, né Moiz Cohen, for example, developed a list of Ten Commandments [Evâmir-i Aşare] for Jewish Turkification. These included Turkifying names; speaking Turkish; praying in Turkish; Turkifying schools; sending children to public schools; getting involved in public affairs; maintaining close social relations with Turks; uprooting the spirit of a religious community; performing one’s specific task in regard to the national economy; and knowing one’s rights. Tekinalp ve Türkleştirme, transliterated by Yıldız Akpolat. (Erzurum: Femomen Yayıncılık, 2005), esp. 59; La Boz de Oriente , a Ladino periodical predominantly published in Hebrew characters, published an article by Tekinalp that put forward a seven-point platform for Jewish Turkification. Here, he articulated, among other points, that “our mother tongue is Turkish; we should think in Turkish and speak Turkish; Our culture is Turkish culture,” and that because language is a mirror for spirit, Turkish Jews should speak Turkish because “the hearts of Turkish Jews are not bound to any other country’s language culture and ideals.” See Tekin Alp [sic], “Türk Kültür Birliğinin Düsturları,” La Boz de Oriente , 23 July 1934. 1. Several weeks after Tekinalp’s publishing of Türkleştirme, the Turkish Jewish historian Abraham Galanté also published a booklet that encouraged all minorities in Turkey to adopt the Turkish language. Galanté highlighted the steps Turkish Jews—Sephardi and Ashkenazi alike—had taken to learn Turkish. But he also asserted that the state could take a role in encouraging Turkification by opening public schools in places with large minority populations and by placing “competent” [muktedir] instructors in minority schools. With state support, minorities would embrace the Turkish language, as Jews had already done in Bulgaria and Serbia where the state had supported their efforts to abandon Judeo-Spanish.

    Avram Galanti, Vatandaș : Türkçe Konuș! Yahud Türkçe’nin Ta’mîmi Meselesi, Tarihî, İçtimâî Siyâsî Tedkîk (Istanbul: Hüsn-i Tabîat Matbaası, 1928), 37-39, 46-47.

  7. 7.

    “La Turkia y los Judios,” La Boz de Oriente, 11 February, 1935, 2-3.

  8. 8.

    The emigration of individuals from the portions of the Ottoman Empire that later became Syria and Lebanon has been explored in the greatest depth. Among others, see Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (London: Hurst, 2014); Lily Pearl Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); Isa Blumi, Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Stacy D. Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On the emigration of Ottoman Armenians, see David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Camila Pastor: The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). On Ottoman Jewish émigrés in the United States and elsewhere, see Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Ibid., “Identity Imperative: Ottoman Jews in Wartime and Interwar Britain,” Immigrants and Minorities (2014): 1-31; Julia Phillips Cohen, “The East as a Career: Far Away Moses and Company in the Marketplace of Empires,” Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 35-77; Devin E. Naar, “Turkinos beyond the Empire: Ottoman Jews in America, 1893 to 1924,” Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 174-205; Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

  9. 9.

    For example, İçduygu et al. list Ottoman and Turkish censuses and statistical abstracts that note that the Jewish population of Turkey decreased from 128,000 to 82,000 between 1914 and 1927, and to 77,000 in 1945 (prior to the creation of the Jewish State), and from there to 38,000 by 1965; roughly 1/3 of the Jewish population left between 1914 and 1927, while the 1945 Jewish population was sixty percent of the pre-World War I numbers. Although close to half of the remaining Turkish Jewish population would leave following Israel’s creation (not all of them to Israel), the authors disregarded the earlier emigration, noting that it was limited in comparison to that of Armenians and Greeks (not propelled by genocide or population exchanges), and that “as Israel’s founding still lay in the future (1948), the emigration of Jewish masses awaited the following decade” and that “the main reason for the decline in Jewish population was the establishment of Israel.” Ahmet İçduygu, Şule Toktaș, B. Ali Soner, “The Politics of Population in a Nation-Building Process: Emigration of Non-Muslims from Turkey,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 2 (2008), 370, 375. Kemal Karpat asserts that “the source of emigration to the New World was Syria, and to a lesser extent, southeastern Anatolia,” focusing on emigrants from Syria/Lebanon/Palestine, and the large outflow of Armenians from Anatolia, making no note of the presence of Jews (Sephardic or otherwise) among these emigrating populations.Kemal Karpat, “The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (May 1985), 175.

  10. 10.

    See Corry Guttstadt, Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marc David Baer, “Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Germany,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 330-355.

  11. 11.

    Devin E. Naar, “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World’: Salonican Jews en route to New York,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 35, no. 2 (Fall, 2009): 76.

  12. 12.

    In 1893, for example, Ottoman authorities sought to clear the way for Ottoman subjects wanting to travel for trade purposes to the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. See Gömlek: 30, dosya: 2031, DH.MKT, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (hereafter, BOA), Istanbul, Turkey.

  13. 13.

    Lily Pearl Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 5.

  14. 14.

    David Gutman, “Migrants, Revolutionaries, and Spies: Surveillance, Politics, and Ottoman Identity in the United States,” in Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent E. Schull, eds., Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th-20th Centuries (Bloomington: 2016), 287-288, 292.

  15. 15.

    Annie Benveniste, Le Bosphore à la Roquette: la communauté judéo-espagnole à Paris (1914-1940) (Paris: 1989); Annie Benveniste, “The Judeo-Spanish Community in Paris,” in From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardi History and Culture (Leiden, 1999); on Manchester, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

  16. 16.

    On Argentina, see Adriana Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); on Cuba, Margalit Bejarano, “From All Their Habitations: Sephardic Jews in Cuba,” Judaism 51, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 96-108; on Mexico, see Devi Mays, Forging Ties, Forging Passports: Migration and the Modern Sephardi Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).

  17. 17.

    On Mexico, see Liz Hamui de Halabe, Identidad colectiva: Rasgos culturales de los inmigrantes judeo-alepinos en México (Mexico City: JGH Editores, 1997); Liz Hamui de Halabe, ed. Los Judíos de Alepo en México (Mexico City: Magúen David, 1989); on Seattle, see Albert Adatto, “Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community,” (M.A. Thesis, 1939); on New York, see Devin Naar.

  18. 18.

    See, for example, Joseph Schemonti, États des Ottomans au Méxique, Devoirs de l’Empire à leur Égard, Remèdes (Constantinople, 1909). Gömlek: 11, dosya: 77, HR.SYS, BOA; “Les Livres,” Correspondence d’Orient, 9/15/1909, 32; “Une visite de S.E. José Castellot: Les Ottomans au Mexique,” La Jeune Turquie, 3/29/1911, 2; “Un interesante folleto del Doctor A. Shemonti: Pide que haya representantes de su país,” El Imparcial, 4/15/1911, 8; Gömlek: 9, dosya: 77, HR.SYS, BOA.

  19. 19.

    See Engin Deniz Akarlı, “Ottoman Attitudes Towards Lebanese Emigration, 1885-1910,” in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration, ed. A. Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (London: 1992), 110, 116.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.; Karpat “The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860-1914,” 187.

  21. 21.

    Haim Vitale Rovero Abuaf, naturalization, Dir. Gral. de Gob., Sria. de Relaciones Exteriores, Turquía, 2/361.10732, caja 111, exp. 32, Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Mexico City, Mexico.

  22. 22.

    Pasaportos, Consulado de Marsella, 1935, IV-717-3, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, SRE.

  23. 23.

    Menahem Balli, Passport, VII(N)-195-6, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, SRE.

  24. 24.

    Soner Çağaptay, “Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 3 (May 2004): 87.

  25. 25.

    Soner Çağaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism: Who is a Turk? (London: Routledge, 2006), 15; Ahmet İçduygu and Özlem Kaygusuz, “The Politics of Citizenship by Drawing Borders: Foreign Policy and the Construction of National Citizenship Identity in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 6 (Nov. 2004), 40.

  26. 26.

    Ahmet İçduygu, Yılmaz Çolak, and Nalan Soyarık, “What is the Matter with Citizenship?: A Turkish Debate,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, no. 4 (Oct. 1999), 195.

  27. 27.

    During this same period, Muslims of non-ethnically Turkish origins were also targets of Turkification policies. Like those targeting religious minorities, the policies aimed at ethnic minorities hinged upon the adoption of Turkish language and culture and the elision of distinct ethnic identities.

  28. 28.

    Letter from Tire to AIU headquarters, 2/7/1924, HM3/694, AIU Turquie XCVI E 1126.1, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, Israel.

  29. 29.

    Nathan Sissa, interview by Monika Unikel, 4/17/1989, Archivo de Amigos de la Universidad Hebrea de Jerusalén, Mexico City, Mexico.

  30. 30.

    Soner Çağaptay, “Citizenship Policies in Interwar Turkey,” Nations and Nationalism 9, no. 4 (2003), 605-608.

  31. 31.

    The Cumhuriyet Arşivi holds many cases of denaturalization. Sometimes, over 200 people were denaturalized with a single decree. In such large instances, invididuals’ names are not recorded in the archival records available to researchers. It was also rare for the records to note the nationalities that emigrants acquired without permission. On Davit Kori kızı Viktoria, see October 8, 1930, Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Kutu Numarası: 14, Dosya Gömleği: 65, Sıra no: 6, Dosya no: 2-238, BCA. On Avram Mulho, see 5/2/1928, Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 1, Yer No: 28.27.4, Dosya: 2-136, sayi: 6529, BCA.

  32. 32.

    Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Kutu Numarası: 11, Dosya Gömleği: 40, Sıra no: 14, BCA.

  33. 33.

    Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Kutu Numarası: 7, Dosya Gömleği: 62, Sıra no: 20, Dosya no:1-161, BCA.

  34. 34.

    Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 10 0 0, Kutu Numarası: 99, Dosya Gömleği: 640, Sıra no: 18, Dosya no:88, BCA.

  35. 35.

    Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others; The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xvi.

  36. 36.

    Tara Zahra, “The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands,” Contemporary European History 17, no. 2 (May 2008): 138.

  37. 37.

    Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 28-29.

  38. 38.

    Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belongong in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 94.

  39. 39.

    Yeşim Bayar, “In Pursuit of Homogeneity: The Lausanne Conference, Minorities and the Turkish Nation,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 1 (2014), 114.

  40. 40.

    Treaty of Peace with Turkey Signed at Lausanne, July 24, 1923, from The Treaties of Peace 1919-1923, Vol. II (New York: 1924).

  41. 41.

    Treaty of Peace with Turkey Signed at Lausanne, July 24, 1923, from The Treaties of Peace 1919-1923, Vol. II (New York: 1924).

  42. 42.

    Chris Gratien and Emily K. Pope-Obeda, “Ottoman Migrants, U.S. Deportation Law and Statelessness during the Interwar Era,” Mashriq and Mahjar 5, no. 2 (2018): 124-158.

  43. 43.

    For example, close to 900 people from Turkey acquired Italian nationality in the aftermath of the Treaty of Lausanne, but between 100-150 of these individuals did not complete their actions and could therefore potentially and fraudulently retain Turkish citizenship. See Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Kutu Numarası: 8, Dosya Gömleği: 6, Sıra no: 6, Dosya no:104-27, BCA.

  44. 44.

    Subsecretary of the SRE to the Secretary of Gobernación, Mexico City, 11/6/1926, DDG., SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  45. 45.

    Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, “‘Turco’ Immigrants in Latin America,” The Americas 53, no 1 (Jul., 1996) 2-4, 8.

  46. 46.

    Lily Pearl Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 24.

  47. 47.

    San Pedro, Coah., 1/5/1927, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  48. 48.

    San Pedro, Coah., 1/5/1927, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  49. 49.

    Governor of San Luís Potosí to the Secretary of Gobernación, San Luís Potosí, 12/6/1926, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN; Irapuato, Guanajuato, 12/11/1926, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  50. 50.

    Shelomo Meyuhas, “La Imigrasion de nuestros ermanos en Mexico por Shelomo Mehuyas,” La Amerika, 8/29/1919, 2.

  51. 51.

    Tacuba de Morelos, D.F., 12/16/1926, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  52. 52.

    Secretary of Saltillo to the Secretary of Gobernacíon, Saltillo, Coahuila, 12/14/1926, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  53. 53.

    Leon, Guanajuato, 12/13/1926, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  54. 54.

    Censo General de los Subditos Turcos Residentes en el municipio de Veracruz, DDG, SRE, Turquía, 2/360(496)-1, caja: 14, exp. 12, AGN.

  55. 55.

    Mexican records only preserve the date of arrival, not when individuals departed from their countries of origin. It is likely that some of those who arrived in Mexico after 1923 had departed from what would become Turkey when that territory was under Ottoman or Interallied authority.

  56. 56.

    « Avis aux orientaux sujets turcs, » Le Livre d’Or de l’Orient (Paris, 1930), 138.

  57. 57.

    Başvekâlet, Fon no: 30 18 1 2, Kutu Numarası: 43, Dosya Gömleği: 17, Sıra no: 11, Dosya no:107-77

  58. 58.

    IV-305-57, SRE.

  59. 59.

    Dir. Gral. de Gob., Sria. de Relaciones Exteriores, Turquía, 2/367(21)-1, caja 7, exp. 33, AGN; Dir. Gral. de Gob., 2/367(496)/10031, AGN.

  60. 60.

    Alberto I. Farji to the Minister of Foreign Relations, 11/16/1931, IV-333-54, SRE.

  61. 61.

    Eduardo Villaseñor to Alberto Farji, 11/26/1931, Ibid.

  62. 62.

    IV-450-107, SRE.

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  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Devi Mays

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  1. Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

    Kerem Öktem

  2. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu

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Mays, D. (2022). On the Outside Looking In: Jewish Émigrés and Turkish Citizenship in the Early Republican Period. In: Öktem, K., Yosmaoğlu, I.K. (eds) Turkish Jews and their Diasporas. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87798-9_4

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