Munis Tekinalp

Origins and early life

Munis Tekinalp was born Moiz Kohen in 1883 at Serres in Ottoman Macedonia, into an orthodox Jewish family, and was trained at the Jewish Teachers' College of Salonica, where he was ordained a rabbi though he never served as one; he did not formally convert to Islam, and remained a Jew by religion while taking a Turkish name and becoming the most articulate Jewish advocate of Turkish nationalism.

Work and career

He studied law, worked as an economist and journalist, and passed successively through the three doctrines of his age: Ottomanism before 1908, pan-Turkism during the First World War, and after 1923 Kemalism, of which he became the leading civilian theorist. This fiche states plainly the part of his work that is contested and that a directory of contributions must not soften: his pamphlet Türkleştirme (Turkification, 1928) set out ten commandments by which Turkey's minorities — including his own Jewish community — should abandon their languages, names and separate institutions and dissolve into the Turkish nation, and he campaigned for the Citizen, Speak Turkish drive that pressed Ladino-speaking Jews to give up their language.

He believed assimilation was the price of security and equal citizenship; many in his community disagreed then, and historians debate the effects now. His Le Kémalisme, published in French in 1936 with a preface by Édouard Herriot, was the first systematic account of the new Turkish state's ideology available to European readers, and he wrote extensively on economics and on the Turkish language reform. He had attended the World Zionist Congress in his youth, a paradox his biographer Jacob Landau explores at length. He left Turkey and died at Nice in 1961.