Prelude to a Turkish Anomaly: Eastern Thrace Before the 1934 Attacks on Jews

Abstract

Abstract:In the summer of 1934, acting on signals from certain Turkish government officials, groups of Muslims in Turkish Thrace attacked their Jewish neighbors. This article investigates why Turkish Muslims chose to act on those signals and break a long-standing Ottoman tradition of respecting the physical safety of Jews. Three broad factors are discussed: 1) a nationalist discourse on the economy that portrayed non-Muslims as foreigners; 2) a history of Christians being expelled from Thrace while Muslims streamed in from the Balkans; and, 3) the clustering of Jews in certain occupations together with changing perceptions of that phenomenon. This article emphasizes economic and social developments in the region as well as Turkish nationalist discourse on the economy to argue that the antisemitic violence of 1934 had more to do with local history than with antisemitic ideas imported from Europe. Regional factors that individually were not antisemitic combined to create a social climate hospitable to antisemitism in 1934.