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The Dönmeh (, , ) were a group of Sabbateans Crypto-Judaism in the Ottoman Empire who were forced to convert to Islam, but retained their Judaism and Kabbalah in secret.
The Sabbatean movement was centered mainly in Thessalonika.Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express p.75 It originated during and soon after the era of Sabbatai Zevi, a 17th-century Sephardi Jews rabbi and Kabbalah who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and eventually feigned conversion to Islam under threat of capital punishment from the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV. After Zevi's forced conversion to Islam, a number of Sabbatean Jews purportedly converted to Islam Crypto-Judaism after their leader, and became known as the "Dönmeh". Some Sabbateans lived on into 21st-century Turkey as descendants of the Dönmeh.
The independent scholar Rıfat Bali defines the term dönmeh as follows:
The Dönmeh were sometimes called Selânikli ("person from Thessalonika") or avdetî (, "religious convert"). Members of the group referred to themselves as "the Believers" (), Ḥaberim "Associates", or Baʿlē Milḥāmā "Warriors", while in the town of Adrianople (now Edirne) they were known as sazanikos, Judaeo-Spanish for "little ", perhaps about the changing outward nature of the fishMaciejko, Pavel (2011). The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. or because of the prophecy that Sabbatai Zevi would deliver the Jews under the zodiacal sign of the fish.
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 language: Yakubi) sect, founded by Jacob Querido (c. 1650–1690), the brother of Tzevi's last wife. 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; Judaeo-Spanish: Konioso), branch, the most numerous and strictest branch of the Dönmeh.Scholem, Gershom (1974). Kabbalah. New York City: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company.
Despite lingering suspicions throughout the 19th century that the Thessaloniki's Dönmeh were secretly Jewish, the group gradually evolved into a distinct heterodox Muslim sect, shaped in part by Sufi influences as their connection to Judaism faded. Wealthier Dönmeh families increasingly intermarried with mainstream Muslims and became integrated into Ottoman urban society. By the late 19th century, the Dönmeh were active in expanding Muslim education in Thessaloniki and played a significant role in the city's commercial, administrative, and intellectual life. Some became prosperous merchants, building European-style villas along the seafront and entering municipal governance, while others worked in skilled trades such as barbering, coppersmithing, and butchery. Their embrace of European education and reformist ideas helped turn Thessaloniki into one of the most progressive and politically dynamic cities in the Ottoman Empire.
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. One of the leaders of the İzmir plot to assassinate President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in İzmir after the establishment of the Turkey was a Dönme named Mehmed Cavid,Andrew Mango, Atatürk, John Murray, 1999, pp. 448–453 a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the former Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire.Ilgaz Zorlu, Evet, Ben Selânikliyim: Türkiye Sabetaycılığı, Belge Yayınları, 1999, p. 223.Yusuf Besalel, Osmanlı ve Türk Yahudileri, Gözlem Kitabevi, 1999, p. 210.Rıfat N. Bali, Musa'nın Evlatları, Cumhuriyet'in Yurttaşları, İletişim Yayınları, 2001, p. 54. Convicted after a government investigation, Cavid Bey was hanged on 26 August 1926 in Ankara. 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.Alexandros Lamprou (2002), "The journal İnkılâp and the appeal of antisemitism in interwar Turkey" Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 58, pp. 32–47
In 1923, during the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the Dönme of Thessaloniki were classified as Muslims and relocated to Istanbul. There, a smaller but influential community emerged, including businessmen, newspaper publishers, industrialists, and diplomats, many of whom continued to thrive in Turkish society.
Dönme Jewish liturgy evolved as the sect grew and spread. At first, much of their literature was written in Hebrew language but, as the group developed, Judaeo-Spanish replaced Hebrew and became not only the vernacular but also the liturgical language. Although the Dönmeh had divided into several sects, all of them believed that Sabbatai Zevi was the Jewish Messiah and that he had revealed the true "spiritual Torah", which was superior to the practical, earthly Torah. The Dönmeh celebrated holidays associated with various points in Tzevi's life and their history of conversion. Based at least partially on the Kabbalistic understanding of divinity, the Dönmeh believed that there was a three-way connection between the Sefirot, 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 Dönmeh.
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. An extensive internal economic network provided support for lower-class Dönmeh, despite ideological differences between the different branches.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, only a few Dönme families migrated from Muslim-majority countries to Israel. 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 Dönmeh and their religious beliefs. As the Hakham Bashi of Turkey and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel did not accept the Dönmeh as Jews without a lengthy conversion to Judaism, 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.
However, since Dönmeh are not recognized as Jews by the Israeli nationality law, their offspring are not eligible for the Law of Return. For the Portuguese law of return, the decision to recognize dönme as Jews or not is outsourced to local Jewish communities. The Dönme's situation is similar to that of the Falash Mura.
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. "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 state republic. Reactionary, Islamism painted these events as a global Jewish and Freemasonic plot carried out by Turkey's Dönme. Islamism 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.
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