Dönmeh

The Turkish word dönmeh ("apostates") Ḥaberim "Associates", or because of the prophecy that Sabbatai Zevi would deliver the Jews under the zodiacal sign of the fish. ==History==

in Thessalonika, built by the Dönmeh community towards the end of the Ottoman Empire. , Istanbul When Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) converted to Islam in Ottoman Court possibly in exchange for amnesty in 1666, some of his followers followed him into Islam whiles others gave esoteric explanations and dismissals of his conversion. This group was followed by about 3,000 other Sabbateans in 1683, shortly after the death of Nathan of Gaza, which occurred in 1680. 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. 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. One of the leaders of the supposed İzmir plot to assassinate President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in İzmir after the establishment of the Turkish Republic was a Dönme named Mehmed Cavid, a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the former Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire. 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. 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. ==Religious beliefs and practices==

As far as ritual was concerned, the Dönmeh followed both Jewish and Muslim traditions, shifting between them as necessary for integration into Ottoman society. Outwardly Muslims and secretly Sabbatean Jews, the Dönme observed Muslim holidays like Ramadan but also kept Shabbat, practiced brit milah, and celebrated Jewish holidays. The most basic of these rules of interaction was to prefer relations within the sect rather than with those outside of it, and to avoid marriage with either Jews or Muslims. In spite of this, they maintained ties with rabbinic Jews who were secretly Sabbateans and had not formally converted to Islam, and even with Jewish rabbis, who secretly settled disputes concerning Jewish law. 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, Dönmeh are not recognized as Jews by the Israeli nationality law and are not eligible for the Law of Return. The Dönme's situation is similar to that of the Falash Mura. == Antisemitism and alleged political entanglements ==

Turkish antisemitism and the canards upon which it relies are centred on the Dönmeh. 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. 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 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. == See also ==