Munis Tekinalp

Munis Tekinalp

Moiz Cohen (1883 Serres, Ottoman Empire–1961 Nice, France) was a Turkish writer and philosopher of Pan-Turkism movement. Born to a Jewish family, he changed later his name to Munis Tekinalp.

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 Istanbul after Salonica fell to Greece.

In 1905, he bagan to write for the newspapers Asır, where he worked for five years and was promoted to its editor-in-chief. While he has teaching law and economics at Istanbul University he 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.

Following World War I, he was much disappointed. He put his heart to Kemalism and changed his name to Munis Tekinalp. He taught in the community schools, and entered active politics in the Republican People's Party (CHP). 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.

He would later became one of the founding fathers of Turkish nationalism and an ideologue of Pan-Turkism, then of Kemalism, after 1923. He was a proponent of minorities within the Turkish Republic Turk-ifying themselves, and wrote such in his pamphlet Türkleştirme (1928). He presented the principles of Kemalism in a book published in Istanbul in 1936, then updated and translated into French one year later, with a preface by Édouard Herriot (Le Kémalisme, Paris: Félix Alcan Publisher, 1937).

Following his retirement from the Turkish Language Association in 1956, he moved to Nice, France, where he died 1961.