Perspectives of Turkey's Jewish minority and Turkish-Jewish immigrants in Israel: the narratives of the mass-migration of Jews to Israel between 1945 and 1955

Abstract

This study scrutinizes the oral narratives of the mass migration of Turkey’s Jews to Israel in the late 1940s, both as memories of suppressed or ignored historical events and as traces of the contemporary identity issues of Jews. A detailed historical background of the migration and history of Ottoman and Turkey’s Jews are given according to two contradictory approaches. The memories and different ways of remembering the migration are analyzed with the aim of highlighting micro and macro factors of the migration such as individuals’ strategies and pull, push factors. The main discrepancies and similarities between narratives of the informants in Turkey and in Israel of the migration are also analyzed. It is argued that the age, class status of the informants and the political dynamics of the country where informants currently residing elucidate the discrepancies and similarities of narratives. The perceptions of the Turkish-Jewish identity of informants in Turkey and in Israel are also analyzed through the narrations of migration. The main sources of this thesis are oral narratives of elderly migrants who migrated from Turkey to Israel and Jews in Turkey who did not prefer to migrate in the years between 1945 and 1955 as well as written narratives of migrants.