TURKEY AND THE RESCUE OF JEWS DURING THE NAZI ERA: A REAPPRAISAL OF TWO CASES; GERMAN-JEWISH SCIENTISTS IN TURKEY & TURKISH JEWS IN OCCUPIED FRANCE

The study aims to investigate in depth two incidents that have been widely presented in literature as examples of the humanitarian and compassionate Turkish Republic lending her helping hand to Jewish people who had fallen into difficult, even life threatening, conditions under the racist policies of the Nazi German regime. The first incident involved recruiting more than one hundred Jewish scientists and skilled technical personnel from German-controlled Europe for the purpose of reforming outdated academia in Turkey. The second incident is the rescue of Jews of Turkish origin as well as those of non-Turkish origin from France during WWII. Both events were vociferously introduced for the first time in the early 1990s, within the discourse of the Quincentennial Foundation founded to commemorate the five hundreth year of immigration of Jews to the Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Our study shows that behind the Turkish recruitment of German-Jewish scholars, it was not humanitarian motives, but the interest of the Turkish state was the main and only motivation and the Jewishness of those scientists did not play any role in the decision of their employment. The study also shows that the Turkish government did not appear to have shown any concrete intention to rescue its Jewish citizens in France who were under the threat of deportations, particularly in the last months of 1942. On the contrary, with mass denaturalization policies, the government was reluctant to take back a sizable portion of its Jewish citizens in France. Only in December 1943, with the obvious defeat of Germany on the horizon and with the realization that only a small number of Jewish citizens would return, did the government give consent to their transportation to Turkey. The sources analyzed also do not confirm an unconventional or special altruistic act of the Turkish diplomats in France in relation to protecting or saving Jewish victims at that time