Corry Guttstadt states in her introduction that she intends to “let the perspective of Turkish Jews guide” (p. 2) her investigation of the fate of Turkish Jews during the Holocaust, in the context of Turkish policies concerning “its own” Jews, living both inside and outside Turkey, and not in the context of the Holocaust. This approach has the potential of providing a most comprehensive account. Guttstadt successfully meets her goals in this fine piece of scholarship. She anchors her study in Turkey's history, describing the distinct characteristics of Turkish nationalism that shaped the country's policies toward Jews and other minorities since independence, and particularly from 1933 to 1945. She shows how the Turkification policy, one of the major tenets of the new republic that aimed at the homogenization of the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous Turkish population, and Islam, as a key criterion of belonging to the Turkish nation, affected the attitude toward the Jews, and led to the creation of chauvinistic and xenophobic sentiments among Turks.

Guttstadt identifies three groups of Jews for which Turkey's policy during the war was crucial: the roughly 75,000 Jews living in Turkey; the approximately 100,000 Jews from Eastern and Southeastern Europe; and the 20,000 to 30,000 Jews of Turkish origin living in Central and Western Europe during the Nazi occupation. While discussing the fate of each of these groups during the period under review, she debunks several myths, crystallized in the wake of the commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Spanish Sephardic Jewry to Ottoman lands in 1992, and the publication of new studies, such as Stanford Shaw's Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933–1945 (New York: New York University Press, 1993). The arguments that Turkey opened its doors to persecuted Jews and that Turkish diplomats all over Europe did their utmost to save Turkish Jews from persecution, “struck a chord in Turkey's politics,” she contends, “and their constant repetition and exaggeration in official rhetoric has turned them into an ossified, self-perpetuating myth,” (p. 1) used “as an argument for denying the genocide of the Armenians” (p. 317).

The issue of Muslims who were involved in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has attracted the attention of researchers, filmmakers, and political activists in recent years. In view of the crisis in Jewish–Muslim relations, especially since the eruption of the Arab–Israeli conflict, it is instrumental as a pedagogical tool for improving these relations, encouraging interfaith dialogue, combating Holocaust denial, or immunizing anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli rhetoric from accusations of antisemitism. The “rescue myth” was introduced in Turkish films, such as Desperate Hours (2000) and Turkish Passport (2011), and novels such as Last Train to Istanbul and The Ambassador (p. 149). Similar rescue stories had appeared in an Iranian TV series Zero Degree Turn, Fariborz Mokhtari's book In the Lion's Shadow: The Iranian Schindler and his Homeland in the Second World War (Gloucestershire: History Press Limited, 2012), which brought to the fore the unverified rescue efforts of the Iranian Consul in Paris, and Mohammed Aïssaoui's L’Étoile jaune et le Croissant (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2012), which highlighted the efforts of Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, to provide a haven for Jews, blurring fiction with historical facts.

Turkey, the Jews and the Holocaust is a translation of the German edition of Guttstadt's study, published in 2009, with a new epilogue. It is based on meticulous work in German, Turkish, American, and Israeli state archives, as well as Jewish documentation centers in Europe and the United States and private archives. The author also conducted interviews with Turkish Jews, descendants of those persecuted or rescued during the Holocaust. The book is divided into two parts: the first part consists of five chapters and deals with Turkey and its Jews between 1933 and 1945, while the second part consists of seven chapters and deals with the fate of Jews of Turkish origin in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Guttstadt's treatment of the fate of the Jews is compassionate but balanced. In her view, Turkey, as a neutral state during the war, could have responded to the plight of its own Jews but failed to do so. The rigidity in the interpretation of laws and instructions, heavy and slow bureaucracy, and at times antisemitism, as well as occasional German intervention, were among the causes of this failure. However, Guttstadt does not overlook the circumstances that contributed to the formation of Turkish policies, and differentiates between antisemitism and antiminority nationalism. She points to the pro-German tendencies in the Turkish foreign and domestic policies during the interwar period and during World War II, and to the rise of antisemitism and anti-Jewish representations, but stresses that National Socialists’ racist hatred for Jews “was unambiguously rejected by the Turkish public” (p. 59).

Guttstadt is at her best in the second part of the book, dealing with the 20,000 to 25,000 Jews of Turkish origins scattered in Europe. Through an original, credible use of archival sources as well as personal documentation and testimony, she weaves the story of groups and individuals in a country-by-country account, revealing how those national policies that affected Jews in Turkey before and during the war had a crucial impact on the lives of Turkish Jews outside Turkey. Turkish diplomats were for the most part inattentive, even when they were given the chance by Germany to repatriate Turkish Jews, despite their knowledge of the latter's fate. Guttstadt does not ignore those who broke the rules and risked their lives and positions to save Jews. One of them was Selahattin Ülkümen, the consul in Rhodes, who saved more than forty-eight Jews and was bestowed the honor of the righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem in 1989 (pp. 296–97). However, she shatters the myth around the consul of Marseilles, Necdet Kent, known as the “Turkish Schindler,” for allegedly saving eighty Jews, a story never verified by witnesses (pp. 219–20).

The issues raised in the first part of the book seem less innovative, albeit thoroughly detailed and documented. They have been discussed by historians, such as Rifat Bali, who wrote several studies on Turkish Jewry, and recent works such as the article by Şakir Dinçşahin and Stephen R. Goodwin (“Towards an Encompassing Perspective on Nationalisms: The Case of Jews in Turkey during the Second World War, 1939–45,” Nations and Nationalism 17 [2011]: 843–62), which analyze these issues through theories of nationalism. The exclusive nationalism that designated a special role to religion as a mobilizing force and led to problematic relations between the nation-state and its minorities not only characterizes Turkey. Most other Middle Eastern states grappled with similar dilemmas after their independence, and opted for this kind of nationalism, leading to a general distrust toward non-Muslim minorities, and in some cases to their mass dislocation.

Guttstadt's book is an invaluable contribution to recent publications focusing on North African and Sephardic Jews during World War II. Although victims of the Holocaust, these groups have received little attention in the field of Holocaust studies. The book is also a contribution to the literature on the complex responses of Middle Eastern and North African societies to Nazism and fascism as well as their attitudes toward “their” Jews. It sheds light not only on a missing piece in the history of the Holocaust, but also on the history of Turkish Jews and of Turkey.