Istanbul
author labels “Salonikans.” It adopted a civic understanding of national
identity, advocating an idea of the nation as a cultural identity to which
people could choose to ascribe, and presents a historical and sociological
narrative of the origins and history of the group. Ahmet Emin Yalman, the
newspaper’s founder and owner, was not only the editor-in-chief, but also
a Yakubi Dönme who had received a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia
University. Most of the series—nine of the eleven articles—is devoted to
a Yakubi narrative of Dönme history, the most assimilated and Muslim
of the Dönme. The terminology, point of view, depth of knowledge, and
methodology of the articles all suggest that the author was Yalman, a for-
mer student of Şemsi Efendi’s at the Feyziye, like Rüştü.^45
The author says he will seek to establish the truth from the material he
has collected. This includes history books, namely, Naima’s eighteenth
century Ottoman-language history (which contains not a word about
Shabbatai Tzevi and the Dönme) and a compilation of history (which
I could not locate), and partly from oral history conducted with various
men, clearly Dönme informers, most likely Karakaş, the only group he
asserts is still thriving. The value of these articles thus lies less in their
verifiable factual accuracy than in their being an articulation of Dönme
history and the Dönme experience from a Dönme perspective in the cru-
cial year 1924 , containing information unavailable elsewhere.
The author makes his position clear in the first article. Like Rüştü, Yal-
man begins by anachronistically castigating Ottoman society and its plural
nature. Since no unifying melting pot was to be found, a cultural mosaic
prevailed. He asserts the problem of the Salonikans, the term he uses for the
Dönme, who formed an insignificant part of the mosaic, “partly liquidated
itself. It is necessary to liquidate its remaining debris.” He attacks the Ot-
toman Empire’s political system, which he considers strange. Rather than
tolerance, it should be regarded as “indifference, ignorance, and the absence
of the links of social solidarity.” He bemoans what he sees as the fact that
“while all over the world people engaged in a fusion movement with the
weapon of nationalism, and naturally had recourse to every means of pres-
sure in order to mold the distinct types of the country’s people into one,
the Ottoman sultan left everyone to his fate. In place of acts that would
produce homogeneity, acts that would produce difference and variety pre-
vailed.” The Ottoman Empire lagged behind every other country in its
zeal for assimilation and interest in producing a homogeneous population,
breaking its medieval chains, and making progress. Yalman argues that the