Between Empire and Nation-State
Karakaş Dönme Galip Pasha, Şemsi Efendi’s former pupil, approached. A
unit of Jewish volunteers also joined the march on Istanbul.^133 This in-
cluded the labor leader Benaroya.^134 As Leon Sciaky notes, “Jews of the city
who had never before handled a rifle joined with the warriors of the hinter-
land.”^135 This fact, coupled with Mehmet Cavid’s and Emmanuel Carasso’s
role in the sultan’s deposition, helped drive rumors that the revolution was
nothing less than an anti-Muslim plot serving Dönme and Jews.
Vahdetî was caught in Izmir and then hanged on July 19 , 1909. In 1913 ,
Hakkı Efendi, son of Hasan, one of the participants of an attempted
countercoup against the CUP, claimed during his trial that its aim had
been to regain power from the Jews and Freemasons.^136
Secret Jews and World Revolution
The Dönme played a substantial role in Freemasonry, the CUP, the
Constitutional Revolution of 1908 , and Ottoman politics following
the revolution. Many have noted that decisions by the CUP and actions
taken by Mehmet Cavid and others set in motion a chain of events that
led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by the
Republic of Turkey. Because people have assumed that the Dönme were
simply Jews, many conspiracy theories have been hatched about this role.
Because the Dönme were not the same as Jews, did not consider them-
selves Jews, and did not have close relations with Jews, who did not con-
sider them Jews, however, it seems obvious, yet necessary to assert, that
they were not part of or behind a Jewish plot. Yet facts mean little to those
who see a Jewish enemy everywhere and behind everything they oppose.
A useful comparison can be made with the real and imagined role
of people of Jewish origin in a roughly contemporary event, the Bol-
shevik Revolution of 1917. Despite his atheism and apparent lack of
any Jewish ancestry, Lenin (formerly Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) was
dubbed “the Jew Lenin” by antisemites and the Bolshevik Revolution
was labeled “the Jew Bolshevik Revolution.”^137 The fact that Karl Marx
(who identified capitalism with Judaism) and Lenin’s collaborator Leon
Trotsky (formerly Lev Davidovich Bronstein) were Jews contributed
to this view. Jews did in fact participate in the Russian revolutionary
movement in numbers proportionately greater than their share in the
overall population, and their role in it was prominent. Jews, who were
well represented among party leaders, theoreticians, and journalists,