Loyal Turks or Fake Muslims? even darker than they are. And when he furrows his brow, which he does
often, the effect is even greater. The series published in Vatan makes him
furrow his brow. He has read it with great interest. This native of Istanbul
is the principal of a Karakaş Dönme school and knows that the author of
“A Mysterious Page of History,” a close friend, like him at the time in his
mid-thirties, had attended the original Karakaş school in Salonika. But
there is something deeply wrong with the argument. Yalman must have
known better. In 1939 , İbrahim Alâettin Gövsa ( 1889 – 1949 ) would write a
book that offers a point-by-point rebuttal of Yalman’s claims, saying:
I am one who knows intimately that Shabbatai Tzevi’s traditions are not
merely superstitions that are a thing of the past. Although the series in
Vatan entitled “A Mysterious Page of History” claims that other than
mutual assistance among members of the group, nothing else remains to
distinguish [the Dönme], and that their former traditions and superstitions
are a thing of the past, I am the director of a school established by this
group, and having been among them for a year and a half, I have personally
witnessed how traditions and customs of Shabbatai Tzevi still predominate
in their lives. In fact, I have found half-Hebrew, half-Spanish [Ladino]
prayers in the notebooks of seven and eight-year-old Shabbatean [Dönme]
children that their families had them memorize.^63Avram Galanté published his Nouveaux documents sur Sabbetaï Sevi:
Organisation et us et coutumes de ses adeptes (New Documents on Shab-
batai Tzevi: The Organization and Customs of His Followers) in French
in 1935 , reclaiming the Dönme for Judaism and the Jewish community,
and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died three years later, in 1938. Only then
did Gövsa decide to add his personal knowledge to Galanté’s account
and present it in Turkish. The abandonment of Dönme belief—a fait
accompli, according to Yalman’s series in Vatan—would mean the con-
version of the group. But Gövsa’s observation of the Dönme provided
evidence of the persistence of their unique beliefs, disproving his close
friend Yalman.^64
Gövsa first published Sabatay Sevi: İzmirli meşhur sahte mesih hakkında
tarihî ve içtimaî tetkik tecrübesi (Sabbatai Sevi: A Historical and Sociologi-
cal Study of the Famous False Messiah of Izmir), based on his experience
with Dönme youth in the early 1920 s,^65 as a series in the weekly Yedi Gün
(Seven Days).^66 I find evidence suggesting that Gövsa was a member of
the Karakaş. Rüştü and Yalman had both attended a Karakaş school in
Salonika, and Gövsa was principal of a Karakaş school in Istanbul. The