Loyal Turks or Fake Muslims? based on the majority culture and religion?^77 If they did not renounce
their identity, minorities were branded separatists and perceived as a “fifth
column,” an internal danger to the majority. Even when they attempted
to play their part, minorities were not always accepted as equal citizens in
practice. Accordingly, minority groups sought other strategies for main-
taining their corporate identities, such as dissimulation, which allowed
them to act as the majority while maintaining beliefs and rites in private.
Some Dönme saw the possibility inherent in secularism to ostensibly
become secular Turks in public, just as once they had manifested them-
selves as normal Muslims in order to continue their religious rituals and
practices in private. By donning the mask of acceptable Sunni Islam, their
ancestors had managed to flourish for over two centuries. It might seem
difficult for readers to accept that the Dönme would want to integrate.
Perhaps, it might be suggested, they were maintaining their duplicity.
If that had been the case, however, why would Rüştü go to such great
lengths to attract attention to the Dönme and ultimately himself, and
how could Yalman, a well-known journalist, afford to risk exposing his
secret rituals if he practiced any? Yalman’s strategy may have been more
successful. Rather than pointing out the group’s racial difference, distinct
belief system, and economic strength, the series in Yalman’s newspaper
presented the group as a relic of the past, which would soon completely
disappear, just as republicans believed all traces of the Ottoman Empire
had vanished.
How much did the debate among Rüştü, Yalman, and Gövsa reflect the
Dönme lived experience? Attacked for their racial origins, religious beliefs
and practices, and international commercial ties, and stripped of their
wealth and capital, how could Dönme set up a new life in Turkey? Were
they able to maintain practices and institutions of boundary maintaining
such as self-segregation and their own schools as in Salonika? Did they
continue to practice endogamy? Did they find it necessary? How did the
Dönme and their leaders, particularly those visible in politics, fare during
the first two decades of the Turkish Republic?