Jews of Turkey: Migration, Culture and Memory explores the culture of Jews who immigrated from East Turkey to Israel. The study reveals the cultural values of their communities, way of life, beliefs and traditions in the multicultural and multi-religious environment that was the East of Turkey. The book presents their immigration processes, social relationships, and memories of their past from a cultural perspective. Consequently, this study reconstructs the life of Eastern Jews of Turkey before their immigration to Israel. The anthropological fieldwork for this research was carried out over a year in Israel. The author visited eleven cities, where he found Jewish communities from the Ottoman Empire. The book examines their history and origins, personal stories of their immigration, and different social aspects, such as their relationships with Muslims, other Jewish neighbourhoods, the family, childhood, status of women, marriages, clothing, cuisine, religious life, education, economic conditions, Shabbat and holidays. This is the first book that discusses multiple Jewish communities living in Israel who moved from East Turkey. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students who are interested in Jewish and Israeli studies, Turkish minorities and anthropology. Süleyman Şanlı is the chair of the anthropology department at Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey. He was a visiting scholar at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, where he conducted the anthropological fieldwork on Jews who migrated to Israel from Turkey. His research interests are, Ottoman Jews, Jews of Turkey, Jewish cultural studies and social and cultural anthropology.

This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.

This book presents aliving history of the Turkish Jews. Author Elli Kohen attempts to combine the patience of the chronicler with the folksy humor of the storyteller, without undermining the presentation of the Sephardic Jews cultural history.

This book analyses the minority politics of the Turkish republic and the country's ambivalent policies regarding Jewish refugees and Turkish Jews living abroad.

Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period is about the history of the Turkish Jews from 1950 to present. By using unpublished primary sources as well as secondary sources, the book describes the struggle of Turkish Jews for the application of their constitutional rights, their fight against anti-Semitism and the indifferent attitude of the Turkish establishment to these problems. Finally, it describes Turkish Jewish leadership’s involvement in the lobbying efforts on behalf of the Turkish Republic against the acceptance of resolutions in the U.S. Congress recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French-Jewish organization founded in 1860, occupies a crucial place in the history of Sephardi communities in the modern period. In the fifty years after its creation, the Alliance established a vast network of schools in the lands of Islam for the purpose of "civilizing" the local Jewish communities and remaking them in the idealized self-image of French Jewry. This study, drawing on the author's extensive research in the archives of the Alliance in Paris, focuses on the work of the Alliance among Turkish Jewry, one of the communities most strongly affected by the organizations' activities. Although the Alliance played a conclusive role in the Westernization of Turkish Jews, it was also the unwitting catalyst for the emrgence of new political movements such as Zionism, which turned away from the Alliance's ideology and ultimately threatened the survival of its schools. This book illuminates an important episode in the history of Sephardi and French Jewries as they interacted through the Alliance Israélite Universelle and draws important conclusions about the transformation of European as well as Middle Eastern Jewries in the modern era.

An examination of why Jews promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while denying the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey. Based on historical narrative, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire and then, later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then how can we believe that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians? Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to find the origin of these myths. He aims to foster reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront, accept, and deal with them. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer aims to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide. “[Baer] demonstrates not only his erudition and knowledge of the sources but his courage on confronting a major myth of Ottoman history and current Turkish politics: the tolerance and defense of Jews by the Ottoman and Turkish state.” —Ronald Grigor Suny, editor of A Question of Genocide “A very significant study regarding the origins of violence and its denial in Turkey through the empirical study of not only antisemitism, but also its connection to genocide denial.” —Fatma Müge Göçek, author of The Transformation of Turkey