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by Burak Bekdil
• November 29, 2014 at 5:00 am
"It
is shameful for a public official to make such remarks. Hate-speech and
anti-Semitism have seized the state. The hate-speech often exhibited by
the ruling politicians encourages public officials to follow suit."
— Aykan Erdemir, lawmaker, Republican People's Party.
"This
governor has a lot to learn from Sultan Abdulhamid... They [Jews] are our
people. This is Turkey's synagogue, not Israel's." — Young Civilians
group.
The
governor has probably scored good points to get a future promotion for
the "huge hatred inside" him.
Once
again, hate-speech in Turkey will not be prosecuted because it targets
people who are not Sunni Muslim Turks.
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A view of the Great Synagogue" of Edirne, from
2010. (Image source: Wikipedia Commons/Yabancı)
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At the beginning of the 20th century, Edirne, a Turkish
province in Thrace, hosted a prominent community of some 20,000 Jews – a
larger community than the entire Jewish population of about 17,000 in Turkey
today. Most of the Jews of Edirne were forced to leave the city after the
pogroms of 1934. In 2000, the Jewish population in Edirne had dropped to
2 (no typo: two) people.
Earlier, in the Ottoman Turkey of 1907, Sultan Abdulhamid had
ordered the construction of what would become one of the world's two
biggest synagogues (and Europe's biggest), known in Turkish as
"Buyuk Sinagog," or the "Great Synagogue", in Edirne.
As the Jews left the town, the Great Synagogue turned into a sorrowful
wreck.
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