The journal İnkılâp and the appeal of antisemitism in interwar Turkey

Abstract

The article is a study of the reception of antisemitism, and its appeal among Turkish nationalists and state elites in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a closed reading of the investigation of İnkılâp, the first antisemitic journal published in Turkey, by state bureaucrats in 1933, the article argues that antisemitism in the 1930s offered Turkish nationalist actors of competing convictions a tool to legitimize contending versions of Turkish nationalism, as well as a novel language to legitimize already existing antiminority practices explicitly against local Jews. Nationalist actors could thus discriminate against Turkish Jews without reference to religious difference. Finally, this study has detected an increased input of European post-First World War European antisemitism, especially the German post-Versailles conspiratorial ‘stab-in-the-back’ antisemitic theme and argues that this association had been facilitated by the increased relations between the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and Germany since the late nineteenth century.