Between Empire and Nation-State
He summons his longtime ally Moshe Halévi, who has been acting chief
rabbi even longer than the sultan has been in power, to appear before him.
The sultan warmly welcomes the conservative rabbi, with whom he is
on intimate terms. He regards the rabbi, who opposes the progressives in
his own community, highly.^2
“Tell me about the various Jewish sects.”^3
“There are two, your excellency, my emperor. One, the Rabbinite,
maintains what is enjoined by the Torah and the Talmud. The other, the
Karaite, only maintains what is prescribed by the Torah.” The Dönme are
noticeably absent from his presentation.
“And who is Shabbatai?”
“He was a false messiah. His followers had no relation with the two
Jewish sects. May I beseech his excellency to allow me time to correspond
with the chief rabbi of Salonika so that I may obtain more complete
information on this subject?”
By order of the sultan, Halévi writes in Hebrew to Jacob Hanania Covo,
chief rabbi of Salonika, asking for details on the life and machinations
of Shabbatai Tzevi. Covo promptly carries out the order, responding to
Halévi with a biography of Shabbatai Tzevi in Hebrew. Halévi’s grandson
translates the biography into Ottoman, and Halévi presents it to the sultan.
A few days later, the sultan again invites Moshe Halévi to the palace.
“I have read about the personality of Shabbatai Tzevi. That man was a
saint, a person close to God [veli].”
He reimburses the rabbi for his expenses in gold and decides no longer
to concern himself with the Dönme.
Perhaps he should have. Both he and Halévi would lose their positions
following the 1908 revolution, in which Dönme played a significant role.The Dönme Enter Local Politics
The first step in making the revolution was to enter local politics. The
Dönme intellectual and bourgeois elites who contributed to the new
schools and literary journals of Salonika entered municipal politics, where
they had an even greater transformative role. One can explain the rise of
the Dönme in local politics in the late nineteenth century in the context
of the changes accompanying economic growth and urban reform. First,
it is difficult to measure their place in the ancien régime or to find men-
tion of Dönme prior to the sweeping reforms of the Tanzimat era ( 1839 –
76 ). This era was marked by the creation of a new class of bureaucrats
who aimed to guide the empire through a period of administrative and