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
Constantinople (present-day
Istanbul) after Salonica fell to
Greece. In 1912 he left Salonica for Istanbul, where he began teaching law and economics at the
Istanbul University and 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. He would later become one of the advocates of
Turkish nationalism and an ideologue of
Pan-Turkism. After 1923, he became a passionate ideologue of
Kemalism and wrote a standard work about it. He taught in the community schools, and entered active politics in the
Republican People's Party (CHP) for which 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. In 1934 he, Hanri Soriano and Marsel Franko, also Jews, founded the Turkish Culture Association (
Türk Kültür Cemiyeti) for the promotion of the Turkish language. He presented the principles of Kemalism in a book published in Istanbul in 1936, then updated and translated them into French one year later, with a preface by
Édouard Herriot (
Le Kémalisme, Paris: Félix Alcan Publisher, 1937). ==Works==