Moris Gabbay, born into a Sephardic family in Istanbul in 1922, is a Turkish Jewish left-wing political activist, writer, and public intellectual. In his childhood and youth, he witnessed the transformation of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, a period during which non-Muslims were expected to give up their religious autonomy and linguistic traditions and become “new citizens” of a homogeneous nation-state.

Gabbay received his religious and elementary school education in the Jewish Primary School, and then moved on …