Munis Tekinalp

Moiz Cohen (1883 in Serres, Salonica Vilayet, Ottoman Empire – 1961 in Nice, France) was a Turkish writer, philosopher, and journalist of Jewish heritage. He became an ideologue of different movements at different times: Ottomanism, Pan-Turkism, and Kemalism. Born to a Jewish family, he later changed his name to Munis Tekinalp.

Biography

He was sent for schooling in the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Salonica, continuing for a rabbinical ordination (though he never practiced). He would later continue to legal studies in Salonica, completing them in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) after Salonica fell to Greece. In 1912 he left Salonica for Istanbul, where he began teaching law and economics at the Istanbul University and was engaged in tabac export. He published an economy magazine for the Association of Economy and served as a consultant for some companies until 1918.

He would later become one of the advocates of Turkish nationalism and an ideologue of Pan-Turkism. After 1923, he became a passionate ideologue of Kemalism and wrote a standard work about it. He taught in the community schools, and entered active politics in the Republican People's Party (CHP) for which he served in the city council. Tekinalp ran for the general elections in 1954 and 1957, however he could not enter the parliament. He served as the secretary general of the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce. He wrote for the newspapers Cumhuriyet, Vatan, Akşam, Hürriyet, and Son Posta. In 1934 he, and Marsel Franko, also Jews, founded the Turkish Culture Association (Türk Kültür Cemiyeti) for the promotion of the Turkish language. He presented the principles of Kemalism in a book published in Istanbul in 1936, then updated and translated them into French one year later, with a preface by Édouard Herriot (Le Kémalisme, Paris: Félix Alcan Publisher, 1937).

Works