The history of the Romaniotes —that ancient Jewish community of Anatolia— is among the least explored chapters of Jewish history. In this article, I combine my own discovery of my Jewish roots with a historical investigation into the arrival of this community in Anatolia —and hope to take a first step toward filling this gap.

Unfortunately, Cohen’s Smartfood at the main train station no longer exists and has now moved to the café in the Jewish Museum at Dorotheergasse 11, 1010 Vienna. It is highly recommended! Image: Cohen’s Smartfood

Vienna, main station. I keep gawking at a young chef: his face is the face of my cousin.

I am sitting in the Cohen’s Restaurant and this guy looks as if he were cut out of my own family. Same bones. Same eyes. Even the same lips. A mirror reflecting a story that was never told in my family.

My parents come from Yukarıçağlar, a small village near Ermenek, deep in the anatolian Taurus mountains of the Karaman region. They are workers, immigrants, vaguely socialist. There were no Rituals with us, no Bible, no Torah, not the slightest glimmer of Judaism. Nothing that pointed to a hidden identity. And yet, since that noon in Vienna a question has gripped me, forcing me again and again to ask:

Wow, am I really a Jew?

The minister’s neighboring village

Taşkent is a small village, perhaps an hour from Yukarıçağlar. That is where Ahmet Davutoğlu comes from —Davidson in Turkish. He was Turkey’s foreign minister, later prime minister, architect of the AKP’s foreign policy, and then founder of his own party.

I make no claims about Davutoğlu. That would be unfair and speculative. Yet his origin in this region is the starting point of a far larger question: What do people from these mountains know about their own ancestry? And what have centuries of assimilation, silence, and political pressure erased?

The Karaman region —the historical Karamanid realm— was a melting pot for centuries. Hittites, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and finally Ottomans. Every civilization left its traces. And right in the middle, for at least 2,500 years: Jews.

In the 2nd century before Christ, Jews lived in more than fifty cities of Anatolia. Before the Ottoman period, before 1492, before the Sephardim, the original Jewish population of Anatolia —the Romaniote Jews— came directly from Israel.

Then came the waves of assimilation:

-Byzantine forced conversions (6th–11th c.)

-Seljuk pressure (from 11th c.)

-The Karamanid period in our region (13th–15th c.)

-Ottoman “uniformisation” (15th–16th c.)

-The Turkish Surname Law of 1934 —the final erasure

Each wave concealed more. What remained were families without memory.

Pamphylia —not Spain

When people in Turkey think of Jews, they think of the Sephardim: those expelled from Spain in 1492, who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, the Ladino‑speaking merchants of Istanbul and Izmir. That is the familiar story.

Yet it is not our story.

Our story probably begins with the Babylonian exile around 586 before Christ —the first great Jewish Diaspora towards Anatolia. Jeremiah was the Prophet who warned us, unfortunately in vain.

The region south of the Taurus, where my parents grew up, was in antiquity part of Pamphylia —a region stretching along the Mediterranean coast from Lycia to Cilicia and northwards into the mountains. The ancient city of Side lies on this coast. Perge. Attalia —the present‑day Antalya.

According to a Roman decree of 142 before Christ, quoted in the first book of Maccabees, Pamphylia was one of the regions where the Roman consul Lucius announced the renewed friendship treaty between the Roman Senate and the Jewish nation. Historians infer from this that there existed a Jewish community in Pamphylia. There are also mentions of Jews in Pamphylia in the city of Side, as well as in Philo’s accounts and in the story of the apostles.

By the hellenistic period, in the 2nd century before Christ, Jews lived in more than fifty cities of Anatolia. In Antalya itself a Menorah fragment was unearthed in 2013, dating to the 4th or 5th century —a direct archaeological proof for Jewish life in the city that forms the hinterland of my parents’ homeland.

These Jews did not come from Spain. They had already been there —since the time of Alexander the Great, perhaps earlier. They were the natives of this coast and these mountains.

When the Seljuks overran Anatolia in the 11th century and the Karamanids took over my parents’ village region from 1228 onward, the Jewish communities did not vanish. They dissolved into the sunni majority, generation upon generation, until nothing remained except the faces.

Altınışık. Köfün. Goldlight. Basket. Or Priest.

The Turkish Surname Law of 1934 was Atatürk’s decree to all citizens: adopt Turkish surnames. Many minorities —Jews, Armenians, Greeks— translated or disguised their surnames. Cohen became Tekinalp. Abraham became İbrahim. Names disappeared. Identities were buried.

My paternal surname is Altınışık. In Turkish it means “Goldlight.” A beautiful surname —yet also one that fits Jewish naming patterns and symbolisms and that is widespread among European and American Jews. Coincidence?

The maternal surname is Köfün —so rare that it cannot be found in public name databases. Phonetically, it lies strikingly close to Kohen —the Hebrew name of the Jewish priestly clan, one of the oldest and most widespread Jewish family terms. The connection is hardly accidental. And yet —no one in my family chose them.

Idly browsing Facebook, I suddenly came across the surname Köfün in Cyprus. It wouldn’t let me go. Cyprus is less than a flight‑hour from the southern Anatolian coast. In antiquity, the link between the Pamphylian coast and Cyprus was a trading route, a migration route, an escape route. A priestly line that withdrew into the mountain land, using Cyprus as a stopover and leaving a branch there: this is not fantasy, yet a plausible historical hypothesis.

What the soil beneath the village reveals

In Yukarıçağlar —the village of my parents— lies the ancient city of Sibide. Archaeologists have unearthed rock‑cut tombs and a marble sarcophagus from the 3rd century before Christ there. The inscriptions have not yet been fully deciphered. Nearby, in Gökçeseki, eight roman‑period marble sarcophagi were found on a platform, together with nine busts of emperors and senators in limestone.

Who was buried in this region? Who lived here? Archaeology’s answer so far: unknown. The question whether Jewish communities belonged to these burials has never been systematically asked. Hatred of Jews is a commandment of the sunnah of sunnis and shiites.

Ermenek itself still carries its ancient name: Germanicopolis. A Byzantine bishop’s town. The Byzantines built Churches and Monasteries into the rock faces there. They ruled over a population layered from many peoples and faiths —including, as we know, Jews.

The Byzantines repeatedly tried to forcibly Christianize Anatolia’s Jews. Some converted. Others withdrew into the mountain regions. And others assimilated so completely that even the memory of their conversion faded.

Vienna: The face of the other

Upon the chef at the main station came more moments. I saw a photo of Anne Frank in a certain smile —and recognized the face of another cousin. I saw a photo of the Israeli general Gal Hirsch from a certain angle —and recognized my father. I saw a photo of the French‑Mexican musician Orión Hernández Radoux, a victim of october 7, and saw my sister’s face. At the dentist’s I met a Hungarian refugee and recognized my passed uncle.

This is not a hallucination. It is the genetics of the twelve sons of Jacob/grandchildren of Abraham/tribes of Israel.

The Sephardim, expelled from Spain in 1492 and finding refuge in the Ottoman Empire, carried a face with them— a Mediterranean‑Levantine face that was preserved over centuries in isolated communities. Yet this face is not an exclusively Sephardic trait. It is the face of the Romaniotes —the Greek‑speaking Jews of Anatolia who had lived there for thousands of years before the spanish Jews. It is the face of the Diaspora Jews who came directly from Israel and Babylon and had settled in Asia Minor since the 6th century before Christ.

When I encountered faces which looked like my relatives —without any direct connection, without shared language or history— that was not coincidence. It was a genetic memory that outlived collective forgetting. And that I met so many of them, so accurately, amazing me over and over again, was rather an Act of divine Mercy.

Silence has a name: Assimilation

Why does no one know about this? The answer is as simple as brutal: because forgetting was actively pursued —by political pressure, by fear, by the rational calculus of survival.

In 1942, the Turkish government imposed the “Varlık Vergisi” —a wealth tax that hit minorities disproportionately hard. Jews, Armenians, and Greeks were taxed up to ten times more heavily than sunni or shia Turks. Those who could not pay were deported to labor camps. The message was clear: living as a member of a minority means ruin.

Anyone who, at that time, still knew what his or her grandparents had been became silent. And the children of the silent never learned.

Assimilation in the Karaman region began much earlier —at the latest in the 13th century, when the Seljuks and then the Karamanids took over the region. A Jewish community in a remote mountain village had no Synagogue, no rabbi, no community left— only its own family. And over generations even that eroded.

The most complete form of assimilation is that in which the assimilated no longer know they have been assimilated.

The question of numbers

How many people like me might there be? An exact number is impossible —and that is precisely the problem. What is not counted does not exist. What does not exist is not remembered.

For the known crypto‑Jews of Turkey —the “Dönme”, followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th century— estimates speak of about 80,000 people, of whom only a fraction still know of their origin. These are the consciously hidden ones.

The unconsciously forgotten —people like me, whose Jewish ancestry faded into invisibility through millennia‑long assimilation rather than through a relatively recent conversion— have never been systematically studied.

The Portuguese example is instructive: There, the crypto‑Jews of Belmonte remained entirely hidden for 500 years, until they were accidentally discovered in 1917. When research began, further communities were found. Today, demographers estimate that up to 1.9 million Portuguese people have Jewish ancestors —out of a total population of ten million. Anatolia has a far longer Jewish history than Portugal, a much larger area of isolated mountain villages —and so far no comparable research.

However, a rough AI‑based estimate would distinguish three levels:

-Narrow definition: People like me, where surname, geography, and recognizable physiognomic continuity coincide, in the Taurus/Karaman region —perhaps several thousand families, i.e. maybe 20,000–50,000 people.

-Medium definition: All Anatolians with significant Romaniote or early Jewish ancestry who do not know it —genetic studies suggest that Levantine DNA markers are widespread in the Turkish population. Presence of Jews in what is now Turkey is mentioned already in the 3rd century before Christ. Upon 2,500 years of mixing and assimilation, there could be hundreds of thousands.

-Broad definition: People with some Jewish ancestors in the last 2,000 years, without awareness —some demographers speak of millions across Turkey. Genetically, however, this is hardly separable from general Levantine ancestry.

What a DNA test could show

Modern genetic tests can identify Levantine and Near Eastern markers that differ from the general Anatolian population structure. In people with Romaniote or early Jewish ancestry, elevated portions of the genetic cluster “Levant” or “Near East Jewish” are often found, which cannot be explained by purely Turkish or Kurdish descent.

I have not done this test myself, because I have no doubt. Jehovah showed me all these faces because He had Mercy on me. I grew up among Catholics in Tyrol, a yahoo among yahoos. From one mountain village to the next. That was our fate. Yet this article is an invitation to others —from Yukarıçağlar, from Taşkent, from Ermenek, from the entire Taurus‑region hinterland, from Anatolia —to do it. There is no greater gift than belonging to God’s People, to know that one was created for Him; to know that one shares something with the Angels, something essential. Everyone knows the Bible, the Holy Quran: Hatred of Jews is nothing except sheer envy!

Forgotten —and surrounded by hatred

There is a bitter irony in this story. The descendants of Jewish communities that have lived in Anatolia for two and a half millennia —assimilated, forgotten, invisible— today live in a country permeated by one of the most virulent forms of contemporary antisemitism. Turkish press regularly prints caricatures reminiscent of the worst European examples of the 20th century. In social‑media in Turkish, mockery, conspiracy theories about “Jewish world domination,” about “Dönme” (converts) in politics, and about Israel as the mastermind behind every social ill circulate on a daily basis. Antisemitic hashtags reach millions of users —without resistance, with tacit tolerance, confidently ignoring the Holocaust, because as long as the Armenian genocide is vehemently denied, it did not exist. This article is also written for that reason: as a counter‑voice. A reminder that the people being targeted may be one’s own neighbors, one’s own family, oneself. The hatred strikes shadows —shadows of people who have long forgotten who they are. That is the true scale of the tragedy.

What this article is not

This article is neither a criticism of Islam, which itself has been assimilated by sunnism and shiism —as I myself live, without the assimilation of the fabricated sunnah, according to the Holy Quran, and as far as possible according to the Torah— nor is it a criticism of Turkish identity. It is neither a political accusation nor a conspiracy narrative. It contains no uncorroborated claims about living persons.

Nor is it an attempt to impose an identity on people who do not want it. Whoever knows that their ancestors were Jews and yet defines themselves as a Turkish sunni —that is their right.

This article is something else: It is the first public testimony of someone with roots in this region who voices the question. It is an invitation to research, to DNA tests, to conversations among families, to archival work in Ottoman and Byzantine sources. Yet it is also an invitation, especially to those who have been able to confirm their Jewish blood, to read the Torah —our eternal reason for existence.

What remains

The Jews of the Taurus were not newcomers. They had been there for 2,500 years. They may still be there —visible in faces, in bones, in names that would have vanished had Allah not shown Mercy on us, as He promised in the Bible.

Methodology and Sources

The historical facts in this text are based on: the Book of Maccabees (1 Maccabees 15:16 ff.) concerning the Jewish presence in Pamphylia; the excavation reports of the Karaman Museum at Sibide/Yukarıçağlar and Gökçeseki; the archaeological findings of the Menorah fragment in Antalya/Attalia (2013); Wikipedia entries and academic literature on the history of Jews in Turkey and on Crypto-Judaism; demographic research on Portuguese Crypto-Jews (Nogueiro et al., Frontiers in Genetics, 2015); and the current state of research on the “Dönme” (Marc David Baer, ​​Moshe Dayan Center, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). The figure for the number of Anatolians with Jewish roots is based on an estimate by the Anthropic AI agent. The personal encounters and observations are authentic experiences of the author. The author is willing to contact historians, geneticists, journalists, and affected families (oaltinisik@mail.com).

By Okay Altinisik | 28-5-2026, 14:41:29