Turkey and Israel: Motherlands of Two Collapsed Diasporas and One Lost Kinship

• In Event: Jewish Perspectives on the Republic of Turkey: Past and Present

Abstract

Turkey and Israel are often discussed either in the context of their complex diplomatic and economic relations or in the context of constitutional questions such as religion-state relations. In some cases, the two dominant movements that built these states, Kemalism and Labor-Zionism, are compared, specifically David Ben-Gurion’s inspiration from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Still, the joint circumstances that led to the establishment of both countries remain addressed separately, each within its national or post-imperial history. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of universal kinship are the sources of this division that began under it and continues to shape national legacies tacitly.
The expansionism and consolidation of power in Tsarist Russia from the mid-nineteenth century until WWI caused massive deportation and immigration of Muslims, mostly Adiga (known as Circassians), to the Ottoman Empire. In the Empire’s Ministry of Interior, the Committee of Immigrants (Muhacirun Komisyonu) operated to absorb the refugees, treating them differently than regular immigrants. Closer to the end of that century, Jews from Russia started immigrating to Ottoman Palestine under similar circumstances. Unlike colonialist settlement movements, the central motive in both cases was not economic interests or opportunities but violence in the country they left. One of the titles foreign officials gave this phenomenon was “refugee colonialism.” Later on, in the Republic of Turkey, all these Muslim refugees were deemed Turks. The collapse of Jewish diasporas occurred in some places later but led to an akin consequence: a practical motherland (rather than an ideal or imagined one) born from the collapse of diasporas.

Author

• Omri Eilat, University of Haifa