October 7 & today · Turkey · 2023–present
Religious-nationalist politics and communist anti-imperialism found common language around Hamas, while local Jews inherited the blame.
Explore TurkeyPublished by WTJPublication updated
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Religious-nationalist politics and communist anti-imperialism found common language around Hamas, while local Jews inherited the blame.
A bookstore bars Jewish customers
On October 26, 2023, an Istanbul bookstore excluded Jews. Two days later, graffiti targeted a synagogue in Izmir. Religious-freedom reporting also recorded an assault on a rabbi on October 7 and a later protest outside a Jewish hospital.
These were places and people in Turkey. Excluding a customer for being Jewish made no inquiry into that person’s beliefs or actions. The war had supplied a reason to treat a local minority as responsible for events beyond its control.
A liberation story bridges opposing camps
Erdoğan praised Hamas as a liberation movement in October 2023. Turkey’s Communist Party later endorsed the October 7 action despite rejecting Islamist dominance. The shared anti-imperialist resistance story allowed religious conservatives and secular communists to legitimate the same armed movement without sharing its theology.
The party’s report rejected antisemitism yet called for Turkish Jews to escape Zionist ideology and moral responsibility for Israeli aggression. The contradiction reveals how a political mask works: local Jews acquire a collective obligation before their individual views are heard. Alongside religious media’s conspiracy and nationalist minority-loyalty tests, that demand made Jewish insecurity easier to dismiss. The exclusion of Jews from an Istanbul bookstore showed where abstract solidarity could end: at the door of an ordinary business in Turkey.
An old uncertainty about belonging
Turkey’s 1942 wealth tax had shown how minority participation in national life could be withdrawn through state policy. Jewish and other non-Muslim businesses suffered disproportionately. That earlier history remained part of what made new exclusion frightening.
After October 7, the government’s claim that Turkey had never experienced antisemitism sat uneasily beside reported assaults, vandalism and exclusion. For Turkish Jews, the difficulty was therefore also one of recognition: how could insecurity be addressed if the history and present existence of the problem were denied?