Replies

Indeed there is a far-reaching and long-standing connection between Jews/Israel and Turkey, reaching back to the Ottoman empire. Few are aware of it and many prefer to see everything as Jews+Christians versus Islam. It more often than not was Christians versus Islam+Jews (see the Crusades).

There was a huge influx of Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal who fled to the Ottoman Empire after the Catholic Reconquista 1492. A number of them converted (some only on surface - the so called “Dönmeh”) to Sunni Islam after the failure of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zvi.

Jews also supported before WW1 the “Young Turk” reform movement (whose leaders were responsible for the Armenian genocide).

The pro-Ottoman policies of the German Empire before and during WW1 was in no small part the work of Jews (who were very hostile to the Russian Empire): the German “Intelligence Bureau for the East” where Mid-East policies were shaped, was led by Max von Oppenheim and Eugen Mittwoch. One of the operatives was the Zionist activist Nahum Goldmann. The “Intelligence Bureau for the East” deviced the idea that the Ottoman sultan in his function as Sunni caliph should call for “global Jihad” against the Entente powers - this was largely the branchild of Oppenheim.

Also one the great armament and financial suppliers of the Ottoman Empire under the “Young Turk” regime was the Russian-born Jew Israil Helphand (aka Alexander Parvus)... who also played a key role in getting the German Empire’s secret service to smuggle Lenin with a load of Gold to the Russia and kick off the Bolshevist take-over.

To this day Ottoman historigraphy in the West is strongly shaped by Jewish authors, who mostly take a pro-Ottoman, pro-Turkish stance.

This won’t go down well with many here: the most prominent deniers of the Genocide of Armenians (Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, Guenter Lewy, Norman Itzkovitz etc.) or apologists of other Ottoman-Turkish atrocities (Mark Mazower) are indeed Jewish authors/historians.
It was also for decades the pro-Israel forces in the US (i.e. Tom Lantos, Joe Lieberman, the ADL etc.) which supported the denial of the Genocide of Armenians.
The reason was mostly political - Turkey was deemed an important ally of Israel (since the Cold War, Kemalist Turkey was Israel’s chief regional ally).

However I don’t suggest that there is an uniform Jewish bias towards the Turkish side. I’d like to point out that also among the critics of the Turkish denialists were prominent Jewish/Israeli historians and scientists, such as Elie Wiesel and Irving Horowitz.

But yes... there is a Jewish-Turkish connection that can’t be ignored.

If to some this all is “surprising”... please go ahead and read up. The names mentioned above are a good starting point. History is full of surprises and sometimes doesn’t fit neat ideological shibboleths.

A lot of Jews were pro-German prior to WWI both in the Middle East and in the U.S. Got that.

Today there are but 18,000 Jews in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul. There were once large though persecuted Jewish populations in most of the Arab World. Then look up what happened to the Jews of Egypt after the Six Day War.

Jews wielding influence in Ottoman Turkey go back to the reign of Sultan Sulieman who decreed that competence trumped religion & even a Jew could be appointed Grand Vizier.

Linking modern Realpolitik between Turkey & Israel with machinations in Asia Minor more than a century ago is problematic; denying the Armenian Genocide nowadays is little different from denying the Holocaust. Nationalist-minded Turks see that differently, got that too.

Lastly, is Recip Tayip (SwelledHead) Erdogan a real Islamist or just a cynical exploiter of that hateful ideology? ISIS isn’t used to being told “I’m more Muslim than you!”

Thanks for the history tour. Just finished reading “Birds Without Wings,” a novel by Louis de Bernieres about the life and expulsion of Greeks from Turkey in the time of WW1. Chapter 50, The Exchange, catalogs the many brutalities committed including the Balkan war. I will quote randomly from particularly compelling sentences. After reading this book and what I will quote below, it is clear why the Greek expulsion from Turkey went so badly, and why there is so much bitterness between Greece and Turkey. Also where ISIS learned its many evils.

“Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what happens next...” Around 1912 is described, “The main tactic was for irregular shock troops...guerrillas, bandits, brigands or liberating heroes, motivated by hatred and the desire for loot (otherwise known as patriotism) to attack villages and force inhabitants on to the roads. Montenegrins devastated Albania. The Turkish refugees of Thrace were driven eastwards by the Greeks, and driven back again by the Bulgarians marching south, and back once more....The Bulgarian army left behind it 80 miles of ruined villages.” Then “Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbians all claimed Macedonia” the later 2 fighting the former and Romania joining the fight. The Ottomans retook Edirne and eastern Thrace while the Christians squabbled. The refugees helped ruin the Ottoman economy, and ruined “the Ottoman Empire’s greatest achievement...which guaranteed religious liberty for all.” “the hell’s broth of religious and nationalist hatred” caused the Balkins to be “irreparably changed for the worse.”

A memory by a novel character (undoubtedly a true type of occurrence and sounding just like ISIS). “It was of a field of stupendous carnage in Thrace in which only one building remained partially intact, and on the wooden door of the building hung a naked little girl who had been crucified and disemboweled.” “this crucifixion of children by Christians was quite a common thing in his experience...”

Some miscellaneous facts. “There were between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing.” In Easter season 1821 “in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings....In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed...” “During the 1820s...20,000 Muslims were expelled from Serbia. In 1875, Orthodox Bosnian Serb Christians began a campaign of assassination against Muslims in general and Ottoman officials in particular. In 1876, Bulgarian Christians massacred an unknown number of peasants of Turkish origin.” In 1877 when the Ottomans refused humiliating concessions imposed by Russia, war was declared. “Using tactics invented for use against Muslims in the Caucasus, Cossacks assisted by Bulgarian revolutionaries and peasants seized all the property of Muslims.” Cossacks would disarm villages, send Bulgarians to slaughter them, obliterate villages with artillery, or sell inhabitants into slavery. “European diplomats recorded that this episode was remarkable for the systematic manner in which new ways were invented to torture women to death as slowly as possible.” A half million Muslim refugees by of all ethnic backgrounds took to the roads driven to and fro by bandits, guerrillas and soldiers. “among these Muslims, almost unnoticed by history, suffered and died the Jews, because the common cry of the liberating heroes...was ‘Jews and Turks Out!’” In 1912 an added technique was “herding Muslims into coffeehouses and barns and then burning them down.” The fact that England and France were allied with enemy Russia explains why Turkey was in WW1 allied with Germany. This also may help explain the current alliance between Turkey and Israel.

And so it continues, but I hope this grim portrayal makes it abundantly clear how and why the horrors of warfare continue in this region today. War is never pretty, and I seem to recall a scene (not knowing if historical or not) in which British troops burned a village in a church in the Revolutionary war. Movie “The Patriot?”