TURKEY'S TOLERATION

The synagogue massacre breaks the peace which Turkish Jews have

Ankara `JEWS have always felt very safe in Istan- bul. We have had absolutely no problems here,' an Istanbul Jewish friend said to me this week. The murder of 21 members of the congregation at the Neve Shalom synagogue last week by Arab terrorists, so far unidentified, may have shocked the world. It is unlikely to affect the relatively cordial Jewish-Turkish relationship which is a curious, if minor feature of eastern Mediterranean politics.

Anti-semitism may be rampant in may of Turkey's neighbours, but here it is a marginal political phenomenon and not only because the number of Jews in Turkey is so small — a total of 35,000 among 51 million Muslims, two-thirds of them living in the still highly cosmopolitan environ- ment of Istanbul.

Jews feel safe in Istanbul because they, unlike Greeks and Americans, have been beneficiaries rather than casualties of the centuries of military contest between the Ottoman Empire and the West. They arrived in Turkey at the end of the 15th century as refugees from the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, fleeing from an intolerant Christendom. As a result, whenever the Turks have been challenged on their treatment of their minorities, they have usually responded by pointing to the example of the Jews.

The Spanish legacy persists in the Ladi- no language spoken by almost all Istanbul Jews — a kind of mediaeval Spanish. `Everyone knows it to some extent,' my friend said, tut increasingly it is the sort of language one speaks to one's grandmother. I talk to my father in Turkish.'

Even so, the centuries have not wholly assimilated Istanbul's Jews. When the chief rabbi appeared on Turkish television on Sunday night to read a carefully prepared statement, he spoke in a heavy foreign accent (presumably Ladino) which must have distanced him to some extent from the watching millions in Anatolian villages. Few Turks, however, have many criticisms to make of the Jews, largely because the nationalisms of the two peoples have never been in collision. 'The Jews are a produc- tive people, the only one of the non- Muslim races to do no harm to the Otto- man Empire,' was how an elderly Turkish retired army officer summed up his feelings after the synagogue attack.

This must be the only country in the Middle East, apart from Israel itself, where florists or restaurants, Writing messages such as 'welcome' in all the languages of the world, include a greeting in Hebrew. For most Turks, the Arab-Israeli dispute is not their fight — and there is more than a sneaking hint of admiration for Israel's military prowess. That at least was the picture till the middle Seventies when Turkey, feeling itself rebuffed by the West after the invasion of Cyprus, began to seek new friends in the Middle East.

Since then, the official policy line of the foreign ministry in Ankara has been to support the Palestinians. The Israeli lega- tion in Ankara has been made something of a diplomatic pariah — though Ankara has always rejected pressure from its Saudi and Libyan friends to sever diplomatic relations with Israel outright. The need to maintain good relations with the USA, and above all not to offend the Jewish lobby in Congress, is privately cited as the reason for this reticence. Turkey is the third largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt, but feels itself hard done by.

Critics of the government sometimes claim that the relationship with Israel is a good deal more friendly than it looks on the surface. If you walk through the streets of Tel Aviv, you will encounter the occa- sional Muslim Turkish Gastarbeiter who can hardly have got into the country without either government being aware of it. More darkly, it is hinted that the Turkish foreign ministry, when it has a suitable candidate, loves to select an envoy to Israel who is a Donme — one of the country's community of Muslims of Jewish descent. This is naturally impossible to verify, but the Donmes perhaps help ex- plain some of the warmth in Turkish- Jewish relations.

They are the descendants of the follow- ers of Sabatai Zvi, a self-proclaimed mes- siah, who appeared among the Jews of Thessalonica at the end of the 17th cen- tury. When the Ottoman government in- tervened, he renounced his messianic sta- tus. His followers were thus left in an unenviable position, caught between the orthodox rabbinical authorities and the Ottomans. Most chose to convert to Islam rather than accept punishment by death. But though they became Muslims, the Donmes always remained a distinct com- munity until around the first world war.

Even so, it is no secret that many of Turkey's ablest intellectuals and several of its newspaper proprietors are of Donme background. Almost all Turkey's greatest journalists this century, including Abdi Ipeckci — the moderate newspaper editor who was shot dead one night in 1979 on his way home from work by Mehrnet Ali Agca, the neo-fascist now serving a jail sentence for shooting Pope John Paul II were Donmes.

Liberal westernising opinion in Turkey is thus more deeply intertwined with Judaism than might appear from the outside. In fact Tekin Alp, one of the first theorists of Turkish nationalism, was actually an Istan- bul Jew writing under an assumed name.

But Liberalism has been having a tough time in Turkey for the last quarter of a century. Turkey's relations with Israel and attitudes towards the Jews have not gone unaffected. When Turkish students began to turn towards Marxism in the 1960s, they quickly came under the influence of radical Palestinian groups. So in 1971, the then Israeli consul-general in Istanbul was selected by the Turkish People's Libera- tion Party as a kidnap victim, and killed.

It was a fatal mistake for the Turkish, Left, for it cut them off from Jewish intellectuals outside the country who might otherwise have been their allies and goes some of the way to explain the West's great indifference to human rights in Turkey. Real anti-semitism, however, is chiefly to be found on the far Right. The magazines of the 'Grey Wolves' in the early 1970s found it impossible to resist adding the epithet 'the Jew' when they mentioned Dr Henry Kissinger.

The Islamic Right, a phenomenon to which many middle-class Turks and espe- cially those in the upper echelons of the civil service steadfastly.close their eyes, is if anything more hostile. This week the main Islamic daily in the country reported the Neve Shalom attack with the crisp head- line: 'Raid on synagogue. 23 Dead.' In 1980, followers of Dr Necmettin Erbakan, a former deputy prime minister whose cultural preferences are avowedly Arabic, marched in Konya with placards inscribed `Death to the Jew'.

Most Turks did not bother much. Tur- kish Jews such as Mr Jak Kamhi, one of Istanbul's wealthiest industrialists, are taken for granted. An attack by a leftist daily on Mr Kamhi some years back produced growls of indignation from the ultra-conservative (and somewhat Islamic) daily Tercuman. There are plenty of other Jews in fairly prominent positions in Tur key, and their religious background is seldom or never mentioned. The same cannot be said for the Greeks or Armenians, or indeed for Turkey's other semitic minority, the Aramaic- speaking Syriacs, all of whom are of course Christian. It is striking that Ankara has a synagogue, but not — apart from the chapels of embassies — a single Christian church. If, therefore, Turkey intends to converge with its former cultural and poli- tical enemies in Christendom by joining the European Community it may have to do some hard thinking.

But the Neve Shalom massacre may provoke that in any case. 'Turks didn't think very much about the consequences of their rapprochement with the Middle East. Now we have seen that an infusion of Arabs can bring problems of terrorism with it,' said my Istanbul Jewish friend this week. `No one had really foreseen that.'

David Barchard is the Ankara correspon- dent of the Financial Times.