The 1934 Thrace Pogrom, a Resettlement Law and a Flight

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A wave of anti-Jewish boycotts, threats, looting and mob attacks swept the Turkish province of Eastern Thrace in June and July 1934, in the weeks after the Turkish parliament passed the Resettlement Law of June 14, which authorized the state to move populations for reasons of Turkification. Jewish shops and homes in towns including Kirklareli, Edirne and Canakkale were looted and burned and Jewish residents were assaulted and threatened, driving thousands of Thracian Jews to flee, most to Istanbul, within days. The violence coincided with a broader antisemitic press campaign in the Turkish nationalist press earlier that year, one that had primed the towns' non-Jewish residents to read the new law as license rather than mere administrative reshuffling.

Most of Eastern Thrace's Jewish population fled within days, overwhelmingly to Istanbul, ending communities that had been settled in the region for centuries. The provincial governors and mayors of the towns most affected were removed from office. The episode is widely read as a turning point that accelerated the twentieth century decline of Turkish Jewry alongside the later Wealth Tax of 1942 and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom recorded separately on this atlas.