Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk's Vision

  • Arnold Reisman
New Academia: 2006. 572 pp. $280977790886 | ISBN: 0-977-79088-6

Looking out of the window facing Prague's main railway station that evening, I saw a soldier in an unfamiliar uniform standing guard in the snow. The Germans had arrived. It was 15 March 1939, less than a week after my eighth birthday. By the end of the month, my parents, my sister and I were on a train to Istanbul. My father, whom the Germans had dismissed from his professorship at Charles University, had been offered the chair of biochemistry at Istanbul University. None of the Jewish members of our family who stayed behind survived the German occupation.

Our journey to Istanbul was not unique. Arnold Reisman's insightful book Turkey's Modernization documents how, starting in 1933, Turkey provided shelter to more than a hundred eminent European academics and their families, all victims of Nazi persecution. The task of the professors was to initiate the country's first modern university and train a generation of young Turkish scholars able to further expand higher education.

Open-door policy: in the Second World War, Istanbul University welcomed foreign academics fleeing Nazi persecution. Credit: M. BOURKE-WHITE/TIME & LIFE/GETTY IMAGES

Two men spearheaded the drive to establish Istanbul University. The vision was provided by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the modern Turkish Republic on the shards of a crumbled Ottoman empire. As a young military officer in the First World War, Mustafa Kemal had become a hero to his countrymen, first for repulsing the Allies at the Dardanelles, and later for recapturing the territories that define modern Turkey today. Once in power, he decreed that Turkey would discard its Ottoman past and become a modern state modelled on European lines. A new constitution and newly enacted laws affected every aspect of life.

Men were prohibited from wearing the traditional fez. Women were forbidden from hiding their faces behind veils. Polygamy was abolished. Everyone had to adopt a family name; for himself, Mustafa Kemal chose 'Atatürk' — father of the Turks. To eradicate widespread illiteracy, every child now had to be schooled. Arabic script was outlawed and replaced by a Roman alphabet. The caliphate — the office of the head of the Muslim religion — was dismissed to make Turkey secular. And on 31 July 1933, to complete the transformation, Atatürk closed down Istanbul's institution of traditional higher learning, the darülfünun, dismissing the entire faculty. On the same premises, the very next day, he installed a new Western-style university with a distinguished faculty.

Assembling this faculty required a second, quite different architect, one cognizant of scholarship and competence. That man was Philipp Schwartz, a Hungarian-born pathologist who had been dismissed by the Nazis from his position in Frankfurt and had fled to Switzerland. There he had founded the Notgemeinschaft Deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland, which compiled and maintained a roster of leading scholars seeking to escape Nazi oppression. Schwartz persuaded the Turkish government that his organization could staff an entire university — so many outstanding academics were being persecuted that they could select the very best.

As Reisman recounts, Istanbul University embraced a wide range of disciplines, although the heart of the university was the medical faculty. Foreign academics had to start at the most elementary level. Before medicine could be taught, a Turkish medical vocabulary had to be devised. Only then could the first modern texts be written in Turkish and medical students taught in their own language. The nation was in dire need of physicians, especially in remote regions of Anatolia. The university trained thousands of young doctors who, in exchange for free schooling, were obliged to provide medical services in understaffed parts of the country for several years after graduation.

The book captures the spirit of the times, the resistance the foreign scholars faced as they sought to modernize Turkey's institutions of higher education, the worries brought on by the war, and the family outings in which foreigners often compared notes and tried to laugh at the sometimes ludicrous problems they faced. What remains with me from these outings, so many years later, is the interest the professors took in us children. Reisman's richly illustrated book recalls this aspect of family life in the community.

Looking back, some seventy years later, how should we judge the impact of the European academics? The draconian measure of closing the darülfünun to create Istanbul University left deep wounds. The 2006 Nobel laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk, remarks in his book Istanbul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) on the unjust dismissal of traditional Ottoman scholars. His concern is the loss of the nation's identity in the Atatürk reforms. Although distancing Turkey from its Ottoman past, the modernization has not yet led to Turkey's full acceptance as a Western nation.

Nevertheless, as Reisman notes, Istanbul University became established almost overnight and the foreign professors continued to educate Turkish students from 1933 until about 1948. By then a strong academic community had been built with talented young Turks. Dozens of new universities began springing up across the country, and the assistance of the foreign professors, many of whom went on to productive careers elsewhere, was no longer needed.

Today, Turkish names appear on articles in leading international journals, showing how the vision of one man and the organizational acumen of another laid a foundation on which Turkey has continued to build.