Forgetting to Forget, 1923–1944 tions, including Sufi ones. The Dönme were foreign, having arrived from
Greece. For this group at least, the limits of Turkishness stopped at the
newly drawn Turkish border. They were not of the Turkish race, since
they had until recently only intermarried among themselves, descendants
of Jewish converts. Thus by blood and lineage, they could not be consid-
ered Turks, who did not include non-Muslims.
In other words, the two main road blocks to acceptance of the Dönme
were racialized nationalism and ethnicized religion. A belief in biological
race, not merely ethnicity,^128 made the boundaries separating groups far
more rigid in the republic than they had been in the empire. With the in-
troduction of the idea of racial difference in the latter years of the empire,
the possibility of cultural conversion became far more difficult for groups
considered racially different than the core group that was to constitute
the nation in the republic. Whereas in the empire, the religious convert
was able to reap the benefits of conversion—individual transformation, a
new identity, joining another community—in the republic, the cultural
convert faced social and political constraints that hindered his or her abil-
ity to be fully of the community he or she desired to leave and the one he
or she desired to join.^129 Turkey applied an ethno-national model to those
considered non-Muslims and non-Turks. Yet even if the nation-state had
employed a civic model of nationness for these groups, because of the
deployment of racial thinking, in the Turkish case there are great simi-
larities between the secular and communal ideas of nationhood. Neither
tolerates the multiple identities that had existed in the plural society of
the empire they replaced nor allows for any exit strategies such as cultural
separateness.
The problem the Dönme faced was that pluralism based upon ac-
cepting and maintaining cultural difference, religious identity, corporate
autonomy, and non-ethnically homogeneous communities was replaced
by an attempt to create a nation based upon ideas of race that excluded
formerly integral components of the whole. The nation that was the di-
rect successor of the empire was unwilling in its first decades to sustain
the pluralism that had accommodated separateness and multiple identi-
ties. The end of empire spelled the end of the tolerance of difference.
The modern nation-state requires transparency to rule. As we see in the
implementation of the wealth tax, no matter what approach the Dönme
pursued, their identity could no longer be an open secret. The logic of
Turkish racialized nationalism ensured that the Dönme had to become