After meeting with President Bush today, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will visit New York, where, among other things, he will stop by the Anti-Defamation League’s national headquarters to receive an award. On Friday, the national director of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, will present Mr. Erdogan with the Courage To Care Award in recognition of efforts by the Turkish diplomatic corps to rescue Jews during World War II.

There’s no doubting the heroic role of Turkey in saving Jews from the death camps – and, indeed, even from European pogroms during Ottoman times. But Mr. Erdogan was not a leader of Turkey during World War II. He is prime minister of today’s Turkey, a country where rising anti-Semitism is an alarming trend. As historian Paul Johnson writes in the current issue of Commentary, “Turkey, once a bastion of moderation, is now a theater of anti-Semitism, where hatred of Israel breeds varieties of anti-Semitism.”

The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that such books as “Mein Kampf,” “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and “The International Jew” are high on Turkish best-seller lists. “While Turkey’s rigorous free press reflects a range of views on the Turkish-Israeli relationship, a sudden surge in the publication of anti-Semitic literature in the country is troublesome,” writes the director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Soner Cagaptay. “Anti-Semitism, formerly a peripheral phenomenon in Turkey, now seems to be reaching out to the wider public through apparently subsidized literature.”

Last year, a columnist at the Islamic Turkish newspaper Vakit, Abdurrahim Karakoc, praised Hitler as “a man of foresight” who “cleansed off these swindler Jews.” Mr. Karakoc added, “The second man with foresight is evidently Osama bin Laden.” As a recent Memri report, “Antisemitism in the Turkish Media,” notes, members of Mr. Erdogan’s own party, the Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, defended Mr. Karakoc. One AKP member of parliament, Atilla Maras, said it was a crime for Turkey’s chief rabbi to protest the article.

In February, columnist Yusuf Kaplan wrote in the newspaper Yeni Safak that Jews “shape and direct the politics, economies and cultures of especially the Western countries” and “Jews also rule the Western universities and world media.” He asserts there is a “Jewish desire to dominate everything in the Western countries” and goes on in that fashion. According to Memri, Yeni Safak is known to be an unofficial mouthpiece of the AKP government. The newspaper’s owner and Mr. Erdogan have recently become in-laws, following the marriage of their children.

Some Turkish intellectuals have called upon the prime minister to condemn the rising anti-Semitism in Turkey. “Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan and the AKP government must publicly denounce [both] the antisemitic discourse of political Islam, from which he emerged and which he declared later to have abandoned, and those who insist on perpetuating such discourse,” scholar Rifat Bali has written.

We asked Mr. Foxman whether anti-Semitism in Turkey will be addressed at Friday’s award ceremony. “I don’t foresee this issue being raised,” he told us. He noted that there is anti-Semitism in Turkey just as there is in France and America. He regards Mr. Erdogan as sensitive to these issues, noting especially his response to the bombings of synagogues in Istanbul. “This prime minister declared that an attack on the Jewish community is an attack on Turkey,” said Mr. Foxman. “He did it at the moment of the tragedy.”

We don’t want to take credit away from this honorable conduct of Mr. Erdogan, or that of Turkish leaders during World War II. But the fact remains that anti-Semitism in Turkey is not of the same character as that in America. As Daniel Pipes noted in these pages yesterday, there is reason to believe that Mr. Erdogan himself never abandoned his earlier Islamist agenda but just became more savvy about it. Whatever strategy the ADL pursues to encourage Mr. Erdogan to do the right thing, the American government will need to keep a careful eye on the dramatic resurgence of anti-Semitism within his borders.