Legend Of A Nationalist Antisemite Praised In Turkey

The Hitlerian rhetoric can easily be traced. Also, it should be noted that this letter was written in May 1941, when German armies had already swept western Europe and France, the glorious winner of the first war was kicked off the scene.

Prior to that, in June 1934, Jews of eastern Thrace [1] experienced the first-ever pogrom. There was an essential Jewish presence in the cities and villages of that region. Some records show 13.000 to 15.000 Jews, nearly all wealthy traders and artisans holding the region’s economic life in hand.

In February 1934, the Government appointed a General Inspector to the region. This was already showing the coming steps of bitterness. Eastern Thrace was a strategic location, next to the border Turkey has with Greece and Bulgaria. It was vastly populated with Greeks (Rums as it’s called in Turkey, coming from Eastern Roman) that were forced to leave their lands after the population exchange was done in 1923–1924. With no Greeks around, it was now the Jewish population that took the role of the “fifth column”. Thus, true or false, it was already a sense of despair reigning over the Jewish communities.

Then in mid-June of the same year, a new law, the Law of Resettlement, went into force. Though the focus of the law was the eastern and southeastern part of the country where an extensive Kurdish population was living, a direct implication was drawn somehow to the Jews of Thrace.

The pogrom during which a person was killed was marked by irresistible oppression, rapes of women, attacks to properties – synagogues, houses, shops etc. – committed by the general population towards their long-time Jewish neighbours. Unfortunately, neither the poliçe nor the military did anything to stop the incident.

Result: Nearly all the region’s communities had to abandon their past in the lands they were born in and left for Istanbul and foreign countries. It was the end of vibrant Jewish life. This has been the fate of the Jewish people for centuries, no matter which period or country they lived in.

Coming back to our story: Nihal Atsız, appointed as teacher of Turkish literature to Edirne Highschool, had the opportunity to brainwash the population there with his ardent antisemitic views. He and another Nazi sympathizer, fellow Cevat Rifat Atilhan, were the main conspirators of the pogrom, called ‘furtuna’ in Judeo Spanish, or storm.