Bali Lectures on Myth of Turkish Toerance

"The Armenian Weekly", Volume 74, No. 46, November 22, 2008

WORCESTER, Mass. (A.W.)—On Nov. 18, a lecture by Rifat Bali titled “The Myth of Tolerance: Turkish Policy towards the Jews before and during the Second World War” was held at Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A group of academics, writers and graduate students were invited to the lecture.

Rifat Bali, a Turkish-Jewish scholar, is the author of several books on non-Muslim minorities (especially Jews) in Turkey, Anti-Semitism, the social and cultural transformation of the Turkish society and the Doenmes (Crypto Jews). He was introduced by Armenian Genocide studies chair at Clark Dr. Taner Akcam, who highlighted Bali’s groundbreaking research on a topic that has been little studied both by scholars of Ottoman/Turkish Studies and Jewish Studies.

Bali provided a historic overview of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting the fact that although the community did not face the horrors that the Armenians, Greeks and other minorities faced especially in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, their situation was far from being ideal. He then described how the situation of the Jewish community went from bad to worse during the first decades of the Turkish Republic, and discussed issues like anti-Semitism and oppression of minorities in Turkey ever since.

Bali concluded that although the situation of the Jewish community in Turkey never was ideal, the official narrative of the Turkish government, the Jewish American lobbies and the Jewish-Turkish leadership portray it as such, each for their own reasons.

A lengthy Q&A session followed.