The welcoming of Sephardic Jews (expelled from Spain and Portugal) by Ottoman authorities during the Inquisition along with Turkish authorities’ various actions throughout history to protect European Jews have been promoted since the beginning of the 1990s in the West and in Turkey as proof of five centuries of harmonious relations and tolerance between the Ottoman (and afterwards Turkish) state and its Jewish minority- in contrast to European states. Contrary to other Turkish ethno-religious minorities, the lack of public and legal complaints both in national and international arenas from Turkish Jewish citizens against Turkish state's discrimination seems to confirm this idea. While this discourse has strengthened relations and highlighted a common interest between the Turkish state and Turkish Jewish elites, it has omitted traumatic events endured by the Turkish Jewish community as well as everyday acts and discourses of antisemitism in Turkey. It does not explain either several past massive waves of immigration of Turkish Jews to new homelands and, significantly, the recent massive applications (circa half) of Turkey’s 20,000 Jews for Portuguese and Spanish nationality, following the 2015 decree laws passed by those countries granting nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews. In order to make sense of these events we need to both challenge the theoretical frontiers of area studies within which Turkish Jews have until now been studied and overcome its political instrumentalisation. Using an original combination of Gramscian “hegemony” to better contextualize discourses within power relations, Hirschman’s "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" theory and Tilly’s research on the ambivalence of state protection of citizens, we argue that this search for a second nationality reflects a potential “exit strategy”. In other words an apolitical and non-confrontational strategy to enable escape from growing Turkish authoritarianism without challenging Turkish state's hegemonic discourse of minority tolerance while ensuring the safety of the remaining Turkish Jewish community. Contrary to Hirschman’s theory, for whom “loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice”, we aim at proving that it is paradoxically Turkish Jews’ double loyalty towards the Turkish state and the Turkish Jewish community that pushes them towards (potential) “exit” and prevents them from opting for “voice”. This article draws from 20 semi-structured interviews and two participant-observations in Portugal and in Turkey, official statistics and legal documents, Turkish and European reports on hate speech in Turkey, a press review of the only Turkish Jewish newspaper Salom, and an analysis of three websites dedicated to Turkish Jews.