WHEN NEIGHBORS BECOME AGGRESSORS: LOCAL TENSIONS AND THE ROLE OF CIVILIANS IN THE EXPULSION OF JEWS FROM THRACE IN 1934 Approximately a decade after the foundation of Turkish Republic, thousands of Jews were forced to migrate from Thrace as a result of increasing Turkish nationalist fervor in the region. Although it was not the Turkish state that initiated the expulsion of Jews, it did not take any tangible steps to stop the attacks toward Jews. Relatively few studies focusing on this incident explained this silence of the Turkish state with reference to the Turkification policies, which either aimed to assimilate the non-Turkish citizens or to exile them altogether in various ways. In other words, they established a direct link between the state-sponsored Turkification policies and the expulsion of Jews even though the aggressors were composed of civilian people in Thrace. Given that the Turkification policies have been underway since—at least—the foundation of the Republic in 1923, the aforementioned accounts not only dismiss the temporal and spatial conditions of the period but also portray the civilian aggressors as passive subjects who were simply manipulated by the state. Analyzing local newspapers, memoirs, petitions as well as the provincial congress reports of CHP (Republican People’s Party), this research places its emphasis on the local tensions, scrutinizing the intersection of these tensions with the global and national developments during 1930s. It demonstrates that at a time when the agricultural production faced a swift decline in Thrace as a result of the Great Depression, the state-controlled Agricultural Bank was unable to respond to the local demands in Thrace for opening new banks as well as providing financial support and credits to sustain agricultural production. Under these circumstances, Turkish-Muslim producers scapegoated Jewish money lenders for providing them credits with high-interest rates, assuming that Jewish creditors posed a threat to the sustainability of the production. Disturbed by the possibility of a further breakdown in the economy, the Turkish state apparently paid close attention to the voices of local producers, turning a blind eye to the aggressors whose attacks towards Jews complied with the nationalist agenda of the Turkish state.