Conclusion
From Cosmopolitanism to Nationalism
Turkish historiography is dominated by a history of becoming, from the
point of view imagining how the Turkish Republic was established and how
secular nationalist Turks became who they are. The past is reread in terms
of the present, and events and personalities are highlighted only when they
are considered stepping-stones to what happened later. Aspects of those
people and events that do not fit the teleology are ignored, or only given
value when it is assumed that they contributed to the future. Adopting this
way of thinking, one might suppose that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reform
efforts built upon the foundation previously forged by the Dönme in Salo-
nika, and in which he was instructed as a young boy while a student of the
Dönme religious leader Şemsi Efendi. Yet Atatürk and other founders of
the Turkish Republic emphasized radical secularism (laicism) and national-
ism in the new nation-state, whereas the Dönme incorporated religion into
their way of being and expressed no manifestations of nationalism.
It is hard to imagine the earlier, very different world the Dönme in-
habited from our nation-state or post-nation-state vantage point. Much
is lost in narratives that cannot without suspicion or omission conceive
of the mode of being, role, or aims of a group such as the Dönme. They
are seen as either simply Jews or secular nationalists, not who they were,
religious cosmopolitans who forged an ethno-religious identity syncretiz-
ing Jewish (Kabbalah) and Islamic (Sufism) mysticism.
Religion and religious people played a crucial role in the modernizing of
the Ottoman Empire, culture, and society and in making it cosmopolitan.