Abraham Galante

Origins and early life

Abraham Galante — Avram Galanti in Turkish — was born in 1873 in Bodrum, into a Turkish Jewish family.

Work and career

A teacher and journalist in his youth, in Rhodes, Izmir and then Cairo, he became in 1914 a professor at the university of Istanbul, holding chairs in Semitic languages and the history of the ancient Orient. His life's work was to write the history of his own people in its Ottoman home: across some sixty books and monographs — Histoire des Juifs d'Istanbul, histories of the Jews of Anatolia and of Rhodes, studies of documents and inscriptions — he became the principal historian of Ottoman and Turkish Jewry, and much of what is known of those communities passes through his pages.

A fervent advocate of the integration of Jews into the Turkish nation and of their adoption of the Turkish language, he was elected in 1943 a deputy of the Grand National Assembly, sitting until 1946 — a Jewish professor in the parliament of the young republic. He died in Istanbul in 1961.