Was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Jewish?

It is not infrequently alleged that the 'Young Turk' movement that more or less created the modern Turkish state was predominately jewish. Good examples are this can be found all over the internet and the more conspiratorially-minded segments of the extant anti-Semitic literature. (1) I will examine the claim that the Young Turks were largely jewish, or more specifically Donmeh, (2) in a separate article.

I did however want to briefly address the idea that the most famous leader of the Young Turks - Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - was jewish. Now this has been done before in 2012 by the 'Eye for Knowledge' blog, (3) but said article was written without reference to the academic literature. Therefore I feel that there is a need for something of an update.

Before I get into the claims and evidence used to assert that Ataturk was of jewish origin. It is important to lay out what the literature says on this subject.

Ataturk's father was one Ali Riza; who was a junior civil servant working for the Ottoman government. Riza's father and Ataturk's paternal grandfather was one Hafiz Ahmet Efendi who seems to have been involved with a Islamist lynch mob who had murdered the French and German consuls in Salonika for preventing a Bulgarian girl from converting to Islam. (4)

His mother Zubeyde Feyzullah was the daughter of Sofuzade Feyzullah Aga who was a minor landowner in the town of Langaza, east of Salonika. (5)

This clearly isn't conclusive in regards to Ataturk's father and mother not being jewish, but we do know from the family names that both sides of Ataturk's family were probably not Turkish. (6) Instead the likelihood is that they were of mixed Slavic and Albanian origin, (7) which is the general view of the academic literature. (8) Although, for political expediency later in life, Ataturk claimed to actually be descended from Turkish nomads. (9)

Also supporting the claim of an Albano-Slavic ethnic origin is that – like Ataturk – his mother Zubeyde had blonde hair and blue eyes. (10)

I will also note for the sake of completeness that Ataturk's wife Latife Hanim wasn't jewish but rather Turkish with a Circassian grandmother. (11)

Given this information we can therefore see that there is no indication of Ataturk's alleged jewish origin in the academic literature. This may or may not be justified, but let's examine what evidence those who propose a jewish origin for him have.

The answer is: not much.

The main bit of evidence usually presented is an article from the 'Jewish Daily Forward' from 1994 by Hillel Halkin. (12) In it Halkin claims to have found evidence that Ataturk had jewish ancestors.

Halkin's evidence for this assertion?

The obscure out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi; the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda the pioneer of reviving spoken Hebrew in Palestine in the nineteenth century. Even then it is just an anecdote written decades after the alleged event.

To wit:

''Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one with the bottle of arrack?'

'Yes.'

''He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.'

'What's his name?'

'Mustafa Kemal.'

'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes.'' (13)

This is hardly evidence as Steve Sailer among others have noted. (14) However it also contains a startling inaccuracy: Ataturk's eyes were blue like his mother's not green as Ben-Avi claims.

The fact that Ben-Avi manages to get that wrong severely impacts the little credibility he has as a witness and undermines any faith we can place in his anecdotal claims.

After all how we can we believe an unsupported claim when they get descriptive details about their subject wrong?

It would be different if we had some sort of corroborative evidence of Ben-Avi's assertion, but the simple fact is that we don't. We also know that Halkin has previous form in turning myths about people and tribes being descended from jews into 'facts' in order to make a fast buck out of the gullible. (15)

Another piece of evidence cited by the Daily Stormer article is that the 'Literary Digest' published an article on the 14th October 1922 claiming that Ataturk was 'a Spanish Jew by birth'. (16)

The problem with this is that it is pure hearsay. The 'Literary Digest' wasn't in a position to definitively know one way or the other, but rather is recycling claims made about Ataturk at the time. It isn't in and of itself evidence of anything other than that the 'Literary Digest' thought Ataturk was born into a family with jewish ancestry.

Oh and I should probably add that this can be seen in the fact that being a Sephardi by birth (i.e., 'a Spanish Jew') does equate being a member of the Donmeh. The Donmeh could and did come from all over Europe and the Middle East. (17) Therefore they wouldn't have automatically been a Sephardi jew, but rather could have also been an Ashkenazi or Mizrahi jew.

That the 'Literary Digest' appears to have assumed that if Ataturk was of jewish origin; he would have therefore been a member of the Sephardim is suggestive that they really didn't know what they were talking about.

The next and last piece of evidence for the thesis - also from the Daily Stormer article - is a statement from Rabbi Joachim Prinz in his 1973 history of the Donmeh:

'The revolt of the Young Turks in 1908 against the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid began among the intellectuals of Salonika. It was from there that the demand for a constitutional regime originated. Among the leaders of the revolution which resulted in a more modern government in Turkey were Djavid Bey and Mustafa Kemal. Both were ardent doenmehs. Djavid Bey became minister of finance; Mustafa Kemal became the leader of the new regime and he adopted the name of Atatürk. His opponents tried to use his doenmeh background to unseat him, but without success. Too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had as their real prophet Shabtai Zvi, the Messiah of Smyrna.' (18)

The quote is correct. (19) However I will note that once again it isn't actually evidence itself, but rather Prinz's opinion. The author of the cited article does not state on what basis Prinz makes this rather broad claim, but what it certainly isn't is proof positive of Ataturk's alleged jewish origin because we don't know what Prinz's evidence for it was.

It is however something approaching evidence, which the Halkin and 'Literary Digest' citations are most certainly not.

We have to take the evidence of Prinz more seriously, but at the same time: no biographer of Ataturk has found anything to validate this claim of a Donmeh origin. I would rather think if there was some basis to it then there would have been many individuals, other than Prinz, who would have taken this up as evidence of the jewish contribution to civilization. A good example of where this has occurred is the case of Christopher Columbus as I have detailed elsewhere. (20)

Therefore we can see that there is no actual evidence that Ataturk was jewish, but rather a lot of speculation that isn't credited in the slightest by his biographers.

Thus we have to conclude that Ataturk didn't have any jewish ancestry and nor was he descended from the Donmeh based on the evidence available at this time.

References

(1) http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=95; http://www.dailystormer.com/jewish-young-turks-and-the-armenian-genocide/

(2) Former jews who followed the most famous and successful of jewish Messiahs, Shabbatai Tzevi, from Europe to the Ottoman Empire. Where they converted to Islam while secretly practising Judaism awaiting for their Messiah to return.

(3) https://eyeforknowledge.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/was-mustafa-kemal-ataturk-jewish-andor-subservient-to-jewish-world-agenda/

(4) Andrew Mango, 1999, 'Ataturk', 1st Edition, John Murray: London, p. 26

(5) Ibid., pp. 26-27

(6) Ibid., p. 27

(7) Ibid., pp. 26-27

(8) Ibid., p. 27; James Pettifer, 2008, 'The Turkish Labyrinth: Ataturk and the New Islam', 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. xxxi

(9) Mango, Op. Cit., p. 27

(10) Ibid.

(11) Ipek Calislar, 2013, 'Madam Ataturk: The First Lady of Modern Turkey', 1st Edition, Saqi: London, pp. 26-28

(12) http://radioislam.org/ataturk/jewish.htm; http://www.atajew.com/

(13) Ibid.

(14) https://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/was-mustafa-kemal-ataturk-founder-of.html?m=1

(15) Ibid.; https://www.jewishworldreview.com/1204/halkin_madman.php3

(16) http://www.dailystormer.com/jewish-young-turks-and-the-armenian-genocide/

(17) Anna Foa, 2000, 'The Jews of Europe after the Black Death', 1st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley, pp. 190-191

(18) Quoted by: http://www.dailystormer.com/jewish-young-turks-and-the-armenian-genocide/

(19) Joachim Prinz, 1973, ‘The Secret Jews’, 1st Edition, Random House: New York, p. 122

(20) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-christopher-columbus-jewish