Dönmeh

The Turkish word dönmeh ("apostates")^[1][4] derives from the verbal root dön- (Ottoman Turkish: دون) that means "to turn", i.e., "to convert", but in the pejorative sense of "turncoat".

The independent scholar Rıfat Bali [tr] defines the term dönmeh as follows:

The term Donme is a Turkish gerund meaning 'to turn, revolve or return' and, by extension, "to betray" (i.e., 'go back on') and 'to convert' to another religion. It has come in popular parlance to refer to religious converts in general, and, more specifically, to the seventeenth century followers of the Jewish false messiah Sabbatai Sevi and their descendants, who outwardly converted to Islam but retained their secretive religious practices over the next several centuries, maintaining close communal and blood ties and practicing strict endogamy. While the great majority of the community's members abandoned their practices during the first quarter century, their past identity has continued to haunt them within Turkish society, and the term Dönme itself remains one of opprobrium.^[8]

The Dönmeh were sometimes called Selânikli ("person from Thessalonika") or avdetî (Ottoman Turkish: عودتی, "religious convert"). Members of the group referred to themselves as "the Believers" (Hebrew: המאמינים, romanized: ha-Maʾminim),^[2][4][9] Ḥaberim "Associates",^[4] or Baʿlē Milḥāmā "Warriors",^[4] while in the town of Adrianople (now Edirne) they were known as sazanikos, Judaeo-Spanish for "little carps",^[4] perhaps about the changing outward nature of the fish^[10] or because of the prophecy that Sabbatai Zevi would deliver the Jews under the zodiacal sign of the fish.^[4]

When Shabbetai Tzevi (1626–1676) was forcibly converted to Islam in 1666, the vast majority of his followers returned to the normative Jewish fold but some followed him into Islam.^[1][3][4][6] This groups was followed by about 3,000 more other Sabbateans in 1683, shortly after the death of Nathan of Gaza, which occurred in 1680.^[11] Despite their outward conversion to Islam, the Sabbateans secretly remained faithful to Judaism and continued to hold their Kabbalistic theology, along with Jewish beliefs and rituals.^[1][2][11] These included: recognizing Shabbetai Tzevi as the Jewish Messiah, observing certain Jewish commandments with similarities to those in Rabbinic Judaism,^[1][2] and Jewish prayers in Hebrew and Judaeo-Spanish. They also observed rituals celebrating important events in Tzevi's life and interpreted his conversion in accordance with their own interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah.^[1][2]

The Dönmeh divided into several branches. The first, the İzmirli, was formed in İzmir (Smyrna) and was the original sect, from which two others eventually split. The first schism created the Jacobite (Turkish: Yakubi) sect, founded by Jacob Querido (c. 1650–1690), the brother of Tzevi's last wife.^[10] Querido claimed to be Tzevi's reincarnation and proclaimed himself as a Messiah in his own right. The second split from the İzmirli was the result of Beruchiah Russo (1677–1720), which claimed to be Tzevi's successor. These allegations gained attention and gave rise to the Karakashi (Turkish: Karakaşi; Ladino: Konioso), branch, the most numerous and strictest branch of the Dönmeh.^[12]

Some commentators have suggested that several leading members of the Young Turks, an anti-absolutist movement of constitutional monarchist revolutionaries who in 1908 forced the Ottoman sultan to grant a constitution to the Ottoman Empire, were actually Dönmeh.^[13] One of the leaders of the İzmir plot to assassinate President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in İzmir after the establishment of the Turkish Republic was a Dönme named Mehmed Cavid,^[14] a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the former Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire.^{[15][16][17][18]} Convicted after a government investigation, Cavid Bey was hanged on 26 August 1926 in Ankara.^[19] After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Atatürk's Turkish nationalist policies, which had left ethnic and religious minorities in the lurch, were accompanied by antisemitic propaganda by nationalist publishers in the 1930s and 1940s.^[20]

As far as ritual was concerned, the Dönme followed both Jewish and Muslim traditions, shifting between them as necessary for integration into Ottoman society.^[21] Outwardly Muslims and secretly Sabbatean Jews, the Dönme observed Muslim holidays like Ramadan but also kept Shabbat, practiced brit milah, and celebrated Jewish holidays.^[4] Much of Dönme ritual was a combination of various elements of Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Jewish traditional law and Sufism.^[22] The most basic of these rules of interaction was to prefer relations within the sect to those outside it and to avoid marriage with either Jews or Muslims. In spite of this, they maintained ties with Sabbateans who had not converted and even with Jewish rabbis, who secretly settled disputes concerning Jewish law.^[12]

Dönme liturgy evolved as the sect grew and spread. At first, much of their literature was written in Hebrew but, as the group developed, Ladino replaced Hebrew and became not only the vernacular but also the liturgical language. Though the Dönme had divided into several sects, all of them believed that Zevi was the messiah and that he had revealed the true "spiritual Torah"^[12] which was superior to the practical earthly Torah. The Dönme celebrated holidays associated with various points in Zevi's life and their history of conversion. Based at least partially on the Kabbalistic understanding of divinity, the Dönme believed that there was a three-way connection between the emanations of the divine, which engendered many conflicts with Muslim and Jewish communities alike. The most notable source of opposition from other contemporary religions was the common practice of exchanging wives between members of the Dönme.^[12]

Dönme hierarchy was based on the branch divisions. The İzmirli, made up of the merchant classes and the intelligentsia, topped the hierarchy. Artisans tended to be mostly Karakashi while the lower classes were mostly Yakubi. Each branch had its prayer community, organised into a kahal or congregation.^[12] An extensive internal economic network provided support for lower-class Dönme despite ideological differences between the different branches.^[23]

After the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, only a few Dönme families migrated to Israel.^[24] In 1994, Ilgaz Zorlu, an accountant who claimed to be of Dönme origin on his mother's side, started publishing articles in history journals in which he revealed his self-proclaimed Dönme identity and presented the Dönme and their beliefs.^[25] As the Hakham Bashi of Turkey and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel did not accept the Dönme as Jews without a lengthy conversion to Judaism,^[26][27] Zorlu applied to the Istanbul 9th Court of First Instance in July 2000. He requested that his religious affiliation in his Turkish identity card to be changed from "Islam" to "Jew" and won his case. Soon after, the Turkish Beth Din accepted him as a Jew.^[28]

However, since Dönmeh are not recognized as Jews by the Israeli nationality law, their offspring are not eligible for the Law of Return.^[26] For the Portuguese law of return, the decision to recognize dönme as Jews or not is outsourced to local Jewish communities.^[29] The Dönme's situation is similar to that of the Falash Mura.

Turkish antisemitism and the canards upon which it relies are centred on the Dönmeh.^[30] According to historian Marc David Baer, the phenomenon has deep roots in late-Ottoman history, and its legacy of conspiratorial accusations persisted throughout the history of the Turkish Republic and is kept alive there today. Modern antisemitism tends to present Jews as a ubiquitous, homogenous unit acting undercover via diverse global groups in pursuit of global political and economic control via secretive channels. As a crypto-Sabbatean sect, the Dönme always made an easy target for claims about secret, crypto-Jewish political control and social influence, whether charged with setting in motion political upheaval against the status quo, or accused of shaping an oppressive regime's grip on the status quo.^[30]

The Dönme history of Sabbatean theological and ritual secrecy grounded in Jewish tradition, coupled with public observance of Islam, make accusations of secret Jewish control convenient, according to Baer.^[30] "Secret Jew", then, takes on a double meaning of being both secretly Jewish and Jews who act secretively to exert control; their secret religious identity in the first place is compatible, for conspiracy theorists, with their secretive influence, especially when they cannot be distinguished from ordinary Turkish Muslims who reside everywhere, and, as Baer argues, when the modern antisemite sees the Jew as necessarily "everywhere". The Dönme's manoeuverings were said to have lain at the heart of the Young Turk Revolution and its overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the dissolution of the Ottoman religious establishment, and the founding of a secular republic. Pro-sultan, religious Muslim political opponents painted these events as a global Jewish and Freemasonic plot carried out by Turkey's Dönme. Islamists put forward a conspiracy theory claiming Atatürk was a Dönme in order to defame him as they have been opposed his reforms, and they created many other conspiracy theories about him.^[30]

• Allahdad
• Banu Israil
• Chala
• Converso
• Disputation of Barcelona (1263)
• Disputation of Tortosa (1413–1414)
• Falash Mura
• Frankism
• History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire
• History of the Jews in Turkey
• Neofiti
• Subbotniks
• Zera Yisrael