Cyprus-Forum.com

[Cliff]

This article appeared freely on the Internet on June 16, 2006 at http://www.radioislam.org/islam/english ... kjew-1.htm and is archived here only for scholarship, research, education, and personal use by those previously requesting it in accordance with the "fair use" provision in Title 17 Section 107 of the copyright law.

From
FORWARD
Jewish Newspaper Published in New York.
January 28, 1994
(www.forward.com)
When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Recited Shema Yisrael

"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed

By Hillel Halkin


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask, I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday, Jan. 24, on the first visit ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.
Ms. Kenan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of their arrival, and asked what my second question was.
"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"
"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's national hero.

Excited and Distressed
I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so glad you called again," said Ms. Kenan, who now sounded excited and a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"
Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it too?
Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up," she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"
I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one.
Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:
"Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and founder of the modern Turkish state.
"Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military academy."


Secular Father
The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name. The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers:
"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a * lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science.
"In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ...
"Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."
Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."


Learning Hebrew
Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor: " '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."
Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided:
"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."
During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:"
'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "
And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."
Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith:
"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.
Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it reflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, in his book on lost Jewish communities, "The Exiled and the Redeemed":
'Saintly Offspring'
"Once a year [during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday'] the candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional bithday. ... It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as saintly."
Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-21, and its descendants, many of whom are said to be wealthy businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have assimilated totally into Turkish life.
After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the father of the 'Father of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept.

[BirKibrisli]

Kemal Atatürk has been called many things (Dictator,Drunkard,Womeniser,Homosexual,Athiest etc) but this is the first time I have heard of this allegation...It is almost certainly not true...
Though it would please the AKP greatly if it had some truth in it...He is public enemy number one for Erdoğan and Co,though they are doing their best to keep that a secret...

[EPSILON]

Kemal Atatürk has been called many things (Dictator,Drunkard,Womeniser,Homosexual,Athiest etc) but this is the first time I have heard of this allegation...It is almost certainly not true...
Though it would please the AKP greatly if it had some truth in it...He is public enemy number one for Erdoğan and Co,though they are doing their best to keep that a secret...

And here you can read much more- Like Kemal was organised his mind and his ideas with the help of many Greeks friends. He was born here in Greece, he went to school here, he was a frequent visitor of Salonica port area (rose area) and he had many Greeks as close friends.

One day i will find he courage to write in this forum many strange but real info about Kemal's life before 1922.

[BirKibrisli]

Kemal Atatürk has been called many things (Dictator,Drunkard,Womeniser,Homosexual,Athiest etc) but this is the first time I have heard of this allegation...It is almost certainly not true...
Though it would please the AKP greatly if it had some truth in it...He is public enemy number one for Erdoğan and Co,though they are doing their best to keep that a secret...

And here you can read much more- Like Kemal was organised his mind and his ideas with the help of many Greeks friends. He was born here in Greece, he went to school here, he was a frequent visitor of Salonica port area (rose area) and he had many Greeks as close friends.

One day i will find he courage to write in this forum many strange but real info about Kemal's life before 1922.

What are you afraid of Epsilon???? If you have any "strange but real" info about Atatürk let us have it...I for one would be thankful,provided you can prove it is really "real"...

[EPSILON]

Kemal Atatürk has been called many things (Dictator,Drunkard,Womeniser,Homosexual,Athiest etc) but this is the first time I have heard of this allegation...It is almost certainly not true...
Though it would please the AKP greatly if it had some truth in it...He is public enemy number one for Erdoğan and Co,though they are doing their best to keep that a secret...

And here you can read much more- Like Kemal was organised his mind and his ideas with the help of many Greeks friends. He was born here in Greece, he went to school here, he was a frequent visitor of Salonica port area (rose area) and he had many Greeks as close friends.

One day i will find he courage to write in this forum many strange but real info about Kemal's life before 1922.

What are you afraid of Epsilon???? If you have any "strange but real" info about Atatürk let us have it...I for one would be thankful,provided you can prove it is really "real"...

My friend do not misunderstood the word courage- i am not intenting to write any negative info about Kemal. - INSTEAD-The word courage related to the time and clear mind to write what i know.

For the time have a good night since i had a very difficult day and tomorrow its seems to be worst.

[irresistible]

US papers from 1920's...

Subject: Mustafa Kemal and Enver Pasha's Jewishness written in American Newspapers
Source : The Literary Digest (a journal published in USA)

October 14, 1922, page: 50

A Spanish Jew by ancestry, an orthodox Moslem by birth and breeding, trained in a German war college, a patriot, a student of the campaigns of the world's great generals, including Napoleon, Grant and Lee - these are said to be a few outstanding characteristics in the personality of the new "Man on Horseback" who has appeared in the Near East. He is a real dictator, the correspondents testify, a man of the type which is at once the hope and fear of nations torn to pieces by unsuccessful wars. Unity and power have come back to Turkey largely through the will of Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

............

There was the pasha himself, tall, still young, good-looking, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, with gray, rather sad eyes that spoke eloquently of his Spanish-Jewish ancestry - for Kemal, like Enver Pasha, tho an orthodox Moslem, is descended from those Spanish-Jewish families that, given by Christianity the tolerant choice between death, conversion and exile, found asylum and happiness in the Sultan's domains - and with strong, high-veined hands, broad and flat across the wrist - the hands of an artist, a dreamer, yet, too, those of a doer, a man who knows how to clout his dreams into facts.

Source: M-Kemal.blogspot.com

[Cliff]

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/CyprusProblem/

[bg_turk]

And here you can read much more- Like Kemal was organised his mind and his ideas with the help of many Greeks friends. He was born here in Greece, he went to school here, he was a frequent visitor of Salonica port area (rose area) and he had many Greeks as close friends.

Atatürk was not born in Greece. He was born in Salonika which at the time was a very multi-ethnic city and a major port of the Ottoman Empire.

However, it may very well be possible that he was influenced by Greek ideas of nationalism. Greeks were the first people in the empire to form a state around the ideas of ethnic nationalism. People did not think in these terms until then. Atatürk used the same ideas in order to unite the Muslims in the empire around the notion of Turkish nationhood.

As for the notion that Atatürk was a Jew, I think it is yet another plot by Islamic to discredit him because of his role in destroying the Islamic caliphate and imposing secularism.

[irresistible]

Atatürk was not born in Greece. He was born in Salonika which at the time was a very multi-ethnic city and a major port of the Ottoman Empire.

by saying greece, you should understand what literally he means.

Salonika was a multi-ethnic city but the great majority of the city consisted of Jews. More than %75 of the population was Jewish. And with that at hand, it was the Jewish Center of Europe at the time Jewish Mustafa Kemal was born.

Mustafa Kemal used the same ideas in order to unite the Muslims in the empire around the notion of Turkish nationhood.

ottoman empire was by then a huge land spanning over 3 continents. Mustafa Kemal's only mission was to destroy ottoman empire and become the dictator of one the smaller nation states. he wanted to divide the empire and the Muslims in particular, but not unite them. absolutely not, the whole world knows that.

As for the notion that Atatürk was a Jew, I think it is yet another plot by Islamic to discredit him because of his role in destroying the Islamic caliphate and imposing secularism.

NO, you are wrong. dictator Mustafa Kemal's Jewishness has nothing to do with islamists as you falsely allege. ..but his Jewishness comes from his birth and Jewish ancestry..

read the above article..

truth just hurts!

http://m-kemal.blogspot.com

[BC Numismatics]

Ataturk was married,but he never had any children,so he could not have passed on any anti-Muslim sentiments.

Aidan.