Loyal Turks or Fake Muslims? shortly after that they would not say to us, “No, we are not Jews”? Judaism
hates the Dönme religion. A Jew is the foe of a Dönme, because a Jew does
not apostatize. Jews were slaughtered in Spain, but did not turn from their
religion. In Russia, the tsar and Bolsheviks alike slaughtered them, but again,
they did not apostatize, and do not apostatize. These Dönme form a wily
group. To us Jews, everyone says, “You love money.” But it is the Dönme who
in fact worship it. Their worship does not resemble yours, nor does it resem-
ble Jewish worship. To you Turks and Muslims, their special characteristics
may make them appear like us, as Jews. However, in truth, they are far from
both religions. They are a very different tribe and surely a strange family.^23İleri sent its reporters to the Bahçekapı and Sultan Hamam neighbor-
hoods of Istanbul, which were associated with Jewish businesses in the
popular mind, to find Jewish or Dönme (the author mixes the two) stor-
eowners to help explain the issue.^24 The reporters made fun of the accents
of those they found and criticized their knowledge of proper Turkish,
using anti-Jewish stereotypes.
Jews disassociated themselves from Dönme, while Muslims expressed
biological fears. A sociologist, who began by stating that the Dönme had
played an important role in the Constitutional Revolution and the social
advancement of Turkish society, nonetheless feared that if they integrated
with Turks and adopted Muslim names, Turkish Muslims would not be
able to tell the two groups apart.^25 A doctor interviewed in Vakit stated
that with few exceptions, this generation of Dönme all had tuberculosis.
He argued that “mixing our blood with theirs” would thus be detrimental
to Turks. Such fears were based on the racial idea of hybridity popular in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which emerged from
the biological and botanical sciences. Hybridity was defined as “the graft-
ing or forcing of incompatible entities to grow together (or not).”^26 In bi-
ological terms, whereas a species is that which can reproduce, the hybrid
is the infertile offspring of two different species.^27 From this the idea de-
veloped that since when different species of animals mated the offspring
were infertile, when different races of humans had children together, their
fertility would diminish over time and they would degenerate,^28 a senti-
ment voiced in the anonymous 1919 tract Dönmeler: Hunyos, Kavayeros,
Sazan. The contamination of the pure race would lead to its decline and
eventual extinction. The Dönme, of course, were neither hybrid nor cre-
ole; for centuries they had steadfastly guarded their biological separation
from other groups. In fact, racialized Turkish nationalism shared the same