PRESS RELEASE
ZORYAN INSTITUTE OF CANADA, INC.
255 Duncan Mill Rd., Suite 310 Toronto, ON, Canada M3B 3H9
Tel: 416-250-9807 E-mail:
[email protected]
CONTACT: Deborah Hay
DATE: November 25, 2013
TEL: 416-250-9807
Why the Armenian Genocide Impacts the Treatment of the Jewish
Community in Turkey
Toronto-Mr. Rifat Bali, a noted scholar and author of Model Citizens
of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period, deals
with the treatment of the Jewish community in Turkey since 1950.
His studies deal also with the period 1923-1949, an era that includes
the Varlik Vergisi (wealth tax law, November 1942), a law which ruined
many Jewish families financially. Bali details the process by which
the Jewish community strived to accommodate the demands of state and
society to become “model citizens.” Jews were pressured to speak
Turkish in public and Turkify their names. Yet, no matter how much
they strived, they were always subject to second-class rights,
intimidation, anti-Semitism, and violence.
Bali demonstrates that all the non-Muslim minorities in
Turkey-Armenians, Greeks and Jews-have faced similar challenges in
their relationship with the Turkish state and society. Greeks, for
example, underwent a terrible pogrom in 1955. They all had to deal
with issues of maintaining their language, religion, culture and
identity in a society that demands total conformity, but they
responded to the challenges in different ways. Thus, the book gives
insight into the challenges of all minorities in Turkey today.
The opportunity arose for the Jewish community to become “useful” to
the state by using their influence with Israel and the Jewish
political lobby in the US to advance Turkish interests. In particular,
they worked against Armenian and Greek interests in Washington,
particularly to thwart efforts at gaining recognition of the Armenian
Genocide in the US.
The Zoryan Institute’s interest in Bali’s work arose for three
reasons. First, its relevance to the Jewish community in Turkey and
the US, as the Turkish State denial of the Armenian Genocide has been
an important element in Turkish-Jewish and Turkish-Israeli
relations. It is also an important obstacle in relations between
Armenia and Israel. Even though many Jewish scholars affirm the
Armenian Genocide, the official position of the State of Israel is
that Armenians did not experience anything comparable to the
Holocaust, and therefore it is not a genocide.
Second, the human rights aspects of the minorities in Turkey,
particularly the treatment of the Jewish community, both before and
after their instrumentalization by the Turkish State in its denial of
the Armenian Genocide, as Zoryan is a human rights organization with
educational and publication programs in that area.
Third, to show a Diaspora could be used by a host state as an
instrument of its foreign policy, as Zoryan is also devoted to the
study of Diaspora and Diaspora-Homeland relations.
One may view Bali’s lecture on YouTube by clicking on the link above.
Rýfat N. Bali is a graduate of the distinguished École Pratique des
Hautes Études at the Sorbonne in Paris. Since 1996, he has been an
independent scholar specializing in the history of Turkish Jewry and
is an associate member of the Alberto-Benveniste Centre for Sephardic
Studies and the Sociocultural History of the Jews in Paris. Has
written or edited 28 books in English, French and Turkish, dealing
primarily with Jewish history and society within the Republic of
Turkey. He has also written numerous articles in newspapers and
scholarly journals, and contributed chapters to scholarly collections
and encyclopedias. He is the winner of the Alberto Benveniste Research
Award (Paris) for 2009 for his publications on Turkish Jewry and of
the Yunus Nadi award (Istanbul) in 2005 and 2008 for original research
in the social sciences.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
