In Istanbul, if you follow the tramlined boulevard downhill into Galata, and walk toward the 14th century Genoese Tower, you have already stepped into an enclave dense with history. Here the aged lanes striate, as if geologically, in tight rows of narrow Levantine houses. A rooftop Orthodox church serves the last of its White Russian congregants somewhere up above. Niched amid hidden courtyards is a millennium-old Byzantine church still in use, and the Anglican Chapel nearby dates from the Crimean War. At the Dervish Lodge, with its carved and turbaned headstones, the mystical sect still whirls away. Concentrated here are memories sacred to so many faiths and ethnicities that, perhaps, only Jerusalem can rival it.

Past the tower itself, built in Byzantine times by Genoese traders, streets fan out in a labyrinth down to where the sea once lapped, in pre-landfill days, some centuries ago. It was that way when Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain found haven in the Ottoman Empire of the 1490s. Ultimately, tens of thousands settled into Galata's thick urban weave.

They were followed by other Jewish communities, in flight from other dangers at later times. Of the synagogues they built and rebuilt, four still nestle in this timeless Turkish warren, two as museums. In one such narrow street sits the most modern, consecrated in the 1950s: Neve Shalom, which was at- tacked by al Qaeda-trained suicide-bombers on Nov. 14 last year [2003] with a fertilizer-bomb in a pickup truck. Almost simultaneously was launched a similar attack against the concrete-and-glass Beit Israel synagogue in another part of Istanbul called Sisli, where most remaining members of Istanbul's ancient minorities moved to from Galata after World War II.

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Fewer than 30,000 Jews now live in Istanbul -- more than in any other Muslim country -- and Sisli's Beit Israel is their main synagogue. In Sisli, during my early childhood in the 1960s, my grand- mother had a dark old wooden house. She used to park me with the venerable Armenian cobbler downstairs or her Jewish neighbors next door almost daily. The antiquated weft of Sisli, in those days, could still compare to Galata. Now, though, as in much of Istanbul's outer sprawl, Sisli's wooden houses are gone, replaced by the white glow of apartment blocks.

Over the decades, as the local Galata community dwindled, Neve Shalom became a locus for ceremonials -- during Rosh Hashanah, which is now upon us, and at bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and the like. It was where kids first danced with their future partners, and first absorbed the rituals of mortality. Beit Israel took over as the daily site of worship, of enduring routine. Both synagogues phys- ically survived last year's assaults. Although five old buildings around Neve Shalom ultimately collapsed, the synagogue itself withstood the blast, having been redesigned for greater security after being attack- ed by armed Arab terrorists in 1986. But the outer damage was still extensive, and a plastic sheet hides a façade still under serious repair. It may not reopen anytime soon.

There are other, non-architectural obstacles to Neve Shalom's full recovery. As so few Jews live locally now, it may not be considered worth the added security expense. Beit Israel, however, reopen- ed for use almost immediately after the bombing. It too had been reinforced in recent years and the detonation failed to penetrate into the main congregation hall. Of the death toll of 60 in both blasts, six were from the Jewish community. The attacks killed mostly non-Jews near the blast sites. As one community member, whose family had originally escaped to Istanbul from the Nazis, told me, "This was
different from 1986, when the terrorists targeted the people inside -- this time they attacked our neigh- bors too, our bonds to others outside the community. They wanted to sever those bonds. The message from al Qaeda was, 'If you live and work next to Jews you too will be hurt'. They were focusing on our long integration into Turkish society, something which you can imagine drives them crazy".

Istanbul's chief rabbi, Isak Halevi, who hails from old Sephardic stock, works out of the large Levantine building that houses Istanbul's rabbinate in Galata. Amid his quiet high-windowed walls, he introduced me to friends around his desk, older gentlemen with affectionate smiles and a warmth of manner that bought back my boyhood memories of ancient courtesy.

"Prime Minister Erdogan", said Isak-bey (to use the Turkish honorific by which he is always ad- dressed), "called me several times personally immediately after the bombs. I'd been in Neve Shalom myself. The explosion covered me in dust and glass. But the prime minister kept reassuring us in the days after and that has helped a lot. We are, after all, Turks like anyone else. I always say, we consider ourselves a religious rather than ethnic minority".

The symbiosis of Jews and Turks has a long pedigree. Ottoman Sultans traditionally chose Se- phardim as personal physicians, as did Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Republic. Jews served as palace financiers, court composers, military pashas, and diplomats and ministers. Jews set up the first printing press in Ottoman times and printed the first book. In return, Turks effectively helped save an entire branch of Jewry from dissolution. Besides hosting the Sephardic diaspora, the sultans ac- tively protected them over the centuries. Several fatwas remain extant in which the palace forbids and deplores "blood libels".

Many further waves of Semitic refugees found shelter in Turkey from Slavic pogroms and, fa- mously, from the Nazis. My father, who got his medical degree in Istanbul just after WWII, always spoke in awed tones of his European Jewish émigré tutors. Turks also feature prominently as "Virtuous Gentiles" in Israel's Holocaust museum, having actively smuggled Jews into Turkey through various consulates.

Two postwar waves of immigration have sharply reduced Turkey's Jewish community. The first comprised poorer Jews who were drawn to the birth of Israel. They live in their own ghetto outside Tel Aviv, speak Turkish, celebrate Turkey's Republic Day, and often travel back. Then during the left- right street-fighting of the 1970s, wealthier Jews moved to the West, ultimately leaving a rump population to fill out a once-giant footprint of old synagogues, a hospital, an old folks home, and a dying language, derived from heraldic Spanish, called Ladino.

Jews still make a contribution to Turkish public life disproportionate to their numbers, but it has shrunk sharply from Ottoman times. According to Mario Levy -- a novelist whose recent 700-page saga in Turkish, entitled "Istanbul Was A Fable", critics hailed as Turkey's first Jewish identity novel -- "the Jews always had a modernizing effect on Turkish life. They always spoke and read in many languages so they supported Western ideas in politics, sexuality, literacy, medicine and so on".

To hear Mario-bey speak Turkish is a pleasure in itself, his cadenced sentences full of nuance and politesse. (Indeed, I have found that Turkish Jews on the whole speak beautifully, better than most Turks, which is itself a considerable contribution to a young language reinvented with the modernist Republic of the 1920s.) Some Jewish names still pop up in the contemporary national pantheon. Sami Kohen is a renowned journalist. Alaton and Vakko, an industrialist and fashion magnate respectively, are top business names. There are still musicians and professors.

But the light is palpably fading, and a sadness -- a helplessness, even -- has descended upon Turkey's Jews. Silvio Ovadia, a chronicler who helps publish the weekly "Shalom" newspaper in Turkish, told me: "Yes, we are helping ourselves and this country but we too definitely need help". The weekly prints a full page of news in Ladino, and works with several foundations and archives of oral history. One project is chronicling the legacy of Sephardic music from different medieval Spanish cities. Silvio-bey says, "We are stretched. We've always been self-sufficient but with the last terror, we need to make security decisions that border on financial triage".

It is something of a surprise and a scandal that world Jewry does not contribute more to coreli- gionists in a country that singlehandedly saved one of the two main branches of the faith. Every year, within the tourist season and without, Turkey is full of Christians who come on the "Seven Churches" tours, to see where St. Paul spoke to the Ephesians, where the early church grew out of Antioch, or where the Council of Nic[a]ea took place. A comparable roster of Jewish sites lies ne- glected for lack of funds or interest: ancient Anatolian synagogues, some still in use, with 2000-year- old Torahs; or in Istanbul itself, pre-Ottoman synagogues from the first millennium, long since closed and decaying to rubble.

Where, from abroad, are the Jewish tour groups and benefactors? Where are the outside contrib- utors to Neve Shalom's reconstruction funds? Where's the much-bruited solidarity of international Jewry? In 1992, Istanbul's largely Sephardic community launched a 500-year memorial festival of their migration, for which they restored Galata buildings and founded museums. Visitors flocked in droves from abroad, but the numbers have fallen away. Every year in September, a European Union day of Jewish festivities takes place in the neighborhood. One sees the luminously vertical Schneider Temple built by Galata tailors; the Ashkenazy synagogue which improbably backs on to the ancient and still functional red-light street; and that doesn't even include the Byzantine-era Ahrida synagogue with its Noah's Ark-shaped Tevah.

Ersin Alok, the prominent non-Jewish photographer who cataloged all these in his 1992 book "Anatolian synagogues", was astonished to find that he became the world's leading expert on such Jewish sites. Israeli scholars came to consult him on the revelations in his book, hitherto unknown to them. It is indeed astonishing that the commemoration and conservation of such an artery of humankind's history is still left to chance -- and to a dwindling community.

In the meantime, whether Neve Shalom will reopen for use, and how many more years Beit Israel will flourish, are questions being asked for the first time. And not for the first time the answer goes beyond the amity among Turks and Jews, to the struggle among powerful outside forces. From Inqui- sition to Pogroms to Nazis, Turks and endangered Jews have survived greater challenges together. This too is a tradition to be conserved, for the sake of both sides.

Mr. Kaylan, a writer in New York, is an editor at large at ReganBooks.

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