He was one of the four signatories of the stillborn Treaty of Sèvres, being included in the delegation to the Paris Peace Conference by the grand vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, although he occupied no official position at the time of the negotiations, simply being a professor in Istanbul University. He was also appointed to the Senate (the upper house of the Ottoman Parliament) by the sultan, of which he became President twice (24 May – 18 June 1919 and 31 July – 21 October 1920). Rıza Tevfik was named the Minister of Education of the Ottoman Empire ( Turkish: Maarif Nazırı) in several cabinets (11 November 1918 – 12 January 1919) formed after the fall of the CUP and the Ottoman Empire's defeat in World War I. Rıza Tevfik ( far left) with the three other representatives at the Treaty of Sèvres the grand vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, the Ottoman education minister Mehmed Hâdî Pasha, and the ambassador Reşad Halis on board an Allied warship taking them to the Paris Peace Conference He split with the CUP in 1911, joining for a short while the newly founded opposition Freedom and Accord Party (Liberal Entente), and was vehemently opposed to its entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I. In 1907, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and was one of that party's deputies for Edirne in the Chamber of Deputies (the popularly elected lower house of the re-established Ottoman Parliament) of 1908. He could graduate at the age thirty and became a doctor.

He was remarked as a restless personality during his student years, first in the famed Galatasaray High School, and then in the Imperial School of Medicine ( Tıbbiye), and he was arrested and incarcerated several times, not falling short of inciting fellow inmates to revolt during his prison months.

Placed in a Jewish school in Constantinople by his father, who was a prefect, Rıza Tevfik learned Spanish and French at an early age. He had a brother Besim, who would later commit suicide in Edirne.

Rıza Tevfik was born in 1869 in Mustafapaşa, today Svilengrad in Bulgaria, to an Albanian father originally from Dibra and Circassian mother, who died when he was young.

Pdf tevfik fikret