Jews in Asia Minor

A short while ago we visited an exhibition held in the old Zülfaris synagogue, showing us the places where Jews lived in today's Turkey, formerly called Asia Minor. After the Babylonian exile, certain Jews, instead of staying in the Holy Land, had preferred to go to other lands and settle in other countries. So Asia Minor was a land much appreciated by many Jews of that period, and they became part of the local population while keeping their own Jewish culture, and probably kept the Hebrew, the Aramaic or the Greek of that time.

The oldest writing we have of the Jewish presence in Asia Minor is what Saul wrote 2,000 years ago. Saul was born in Tarsus, a town of the city of Mersin in the south of Turkey, on the Mediterranean. In that city Antony met Cleopatra, the famous queen of Egypt, with whom he had a great love story. So this Saul, born of a purely Jewish family of the tribe of Benjamin (he introduces himself with these words), studied in Jerusalem under Rabbi Gamaliel, worked as a tailor sewing tents with black goat-hair thread, and one day changed his name from Saul to Paul and, after the death of Jesus, became his most ardent missionary without ever having known him. Being the good Jew he was, and to make his ideas about his mission understood, he travelled almost all over Turkey going to the synagogues to preach his ideas. When we say synagogues we mean the kehilot, the Jewish communities.

All this we know from the letters he wrote to the communities. He also wrote that they beat him in the synagogues for his strange ideas. In the end the Romans imprisoned him and he was beheaded in Rome, even though he was a Roman citizen. I am telling this story of Saul because it lets us understand that Jews were living in these regions of Turkey more than 2,000 years ago. Today archaeologists have found many proofs of the existence of Jews, in tombstones, in the Menorah, in remains of the typical architecture of the mikveh; and the splendid Museum of the Quincentennial Foundation of Turkish Jews has printed a very successful book about these places where Jews lived. The book, entitled 'Jewish Identity Engraved in Stone', dedicated to Beki Kumru, contains detailed studies by the academics Siren Bora and İnci Türkoğlu, and by Professors Nicholas D. Cahill, Nevzat Çevik, Martin Seyer, Christof Berns and Nadin Burkhardt.