Ankara – Turkey has strongly rejected media reports that it had launched a probe into some of the country’s Jewish citizens on the grounds that they had collaborated with Israel in the deadly 2012 raid on the Mavi Marmara flotilla which killed nine Turkish citizens.
“There has never been anti-Semitism in any part of our history and there will never be. Racism does not exist in the culture and the tradition of the Turkish nation. Turkey has repeatedly said it considers anti-Semitism and racism as crimes against humanity, ” Selcuk Unal, a spokeperson with the Turkish Foreign Ministry, said in response to a question on Saturday.
Unal said legal procedures had been underway to identify possible perpetrators of the Mavi Marmara incident, adding that those legal procedures had nothing to do with Turkey’s “Jewish community who are equal citizens and an integral part of our society.”
On July 2, 1934 pro-Nazi group headed by James R. Atilhanom (Cevat Rifat Atilhan) organized pogroms against Jews in several cities in eastern Thrace. Authorities decisively stopped the anti-Jewish riots, announced a state of emergency in Eastern Thrace and brought looters to justice.[12] At the same time, some sources mention there was a forcible eviction of Jews from Eastern Thrace, based on the Law on Resettlement »(№ 2510).[25] Under this law, the Interior Minister had the right to relocate national minorities to other parts of the country depending on the level of their “adapted to Turkish culture”. In particular, the Jews were expelled by Turkish authorities of the city of Edirne.[26]
In 1939-1942 the Turkey again saw antisemitic propaganda spreading that had seen a support from the Nazi Germany, in which the Turkish government did not intervene. In July 1942 the power in Turkey was taken by the right-wing political parties. On 11 November 1942 a law on tax on property (Varlik Vergisi) was ratified by Turkish Parliament. The amount of tax for the Jews and Christians were 5 times greater than for Muslims. As a result about 1,500 Jews were sent to labor camps for nonpayment of heavy taxes. The Act was repealed on 15 March 1944.[12][27][28] However, in the period of 1933 to 1945, Turkey has accepted many Jewish refugees, and Turkish diplomats in Europe helped them to escape the Holocaust.[29]