When Kemal proclaimed his state in 1923 there were c. 200,000 Jews there. 100,000 lived in Constantinople, 30,000 in Smyrna, 15,000 in Adrianople, some 3,000 in Brusa and Gallipoli and in other towns. Today there are only 23,000 left which is a dramatic decline of 88,5% within two generations. The obvious explanation might be that the emigration of Turkish Jews to Israel after 1949 is responsible for the decline. Yet, this is not the case. According to the population census of 1927, i.e. four years after the establishment of Kemal’s Republic, there were only 81,454 Jews left in Turkey, including 47,035 in Constantinople. So the worst decline happened long before the creation of Israel which Turkey -as we will see- vehemently opposed. Was it “happiness” that drove so many Jews out of Kemal’s Turkey or rather its lack ? Let’s see!

Iauus.  Reader comment: “Turkey . . . a model of modernity for other Muslims to follow.”  Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, September 8, 2011.

While I ask the zealous of the anti-Jihad whether any have a transition for what they may perceive as 1.2 billion Jihadists, I have also to acknowledge — and encouragement acknowledgement of — uncomfortable truths in the form of factual data, valid and reliable, well analyzed.

A bit Hillelian perhaps, I would like to leave possibility for the greater development and strength of Islamic humanists (of the sort intending to separate mosque and state and pursue a course around compassionate progress.  As “no good deed goes unpunished,” I may have to be suspect of my own idealism.

Nonetheless, whatever the evil, the injustice, the buried and shameful history, and so on, drag it out into the sun.

Bring light to it.

Let’s have a look together.

With regard to the Jews of the Spanish Expulsion, I informally recall seeing numbers above 250,000 migrating to Turkey.  That the 15th Century figure diminished to fewer than 100,000 in IAUUS’s account of 20th Century history tells of the program in force and the necessity today of either rejecting its ruthlessly discriminating features out of hand or continuing with the suffering inspired by them, a situation in which the so-called “believers” would seem as damned as those “submitting” to their impositions by way of intimidation and violence.