Domestic and overseas mass migration of Jews from the Turkish Republic

When the Turkish Republic was founded in 29 October 1923, there was no offical goverment statistics on the Jewish population in Turkey. According to the first offical census conducted in 1927, the Jewish population residing in Turkey has been identifed as 81.872 people in total. This population declined to 78.730 in 1935 and to 76.965 in 1945. The main event that caused the Jewish population to decrease in the following period was the establishment of state of Israel in 1948. A large part of the Jewish people in the next years from this date, emigrated from Turkey to Israel. By the and of 1955, the Jewish population was reduce to 45.995 people. Therefore, the Jewish population has decreased by 30.970 in the ten-year period between the 1945 and 1955 censuses. After this first big wawe of immigration, immigration to Israel continued intermittently untill today. İn this study, it was focused on how and for what reasons the migration process occured in the provinces with dense Jewish population. Also in this process, there were some of the Jews living in small cities and towns who migrated to big cities like İstanbul, İzmir and Adana. We tried to explain these internal immigrations in line with information we could obtain. The study focused mainly on local and general scale social, political and historical events that can be directly link to immigration. Since the archive documents were insufficent, Turkish and Jewish press is used as main source.