Conclusion
bookstore’s map “Sites of Jewish Interest” marks the city’s Jewish museum,
community center, Holocaust memorial, and Dönme mosque and villas
alike with Stars of David, erasing the difference between the Jewish and
Dönme past. The latest map still places a Star of David over Mehmet
Kapancı’s villa. The map produced by the Turkish Consulate (housed in
Atatürk’s first home), denotes the same Dönme buildings as “Turkish”
works, nationalizing the memory of the Dönme and blotting out the
Muslim nature of the group.
After spending so much effort maintaining their genealogical, moral
and ethical, social, economic, and spatial distinction in Salonika, the
Dönme had to expend even more effort to dissolve their religion and
social distinctions in the early Turkish Republic. The state and social pres-
sure assisted these efforts by ridding them of the wealth and power they
had had in Salonika.
It would seem that the Dönme could be very useful to the new Turk-
ish Republic. They had received educations at the best schools in Salo-
nika, spoke many foreign languages, and had many contacts in western
and central Europe. If one assumes that they were already proponents of
secularism in Salonika, then one can imagine that the transition to the
Turkish Republic would be a smooth one. It is often argued that the new
republic, in desperate need of personnel to fill government positions with
qualified people, turned to the Dönme.^13
The Dönme were suitable to the task, so the argument goes, and es-
pecially to positions in the Foreign Ministry, because they were secular,
had turned away from religion, thus becoming modern and “Western-
leaning.” In fact, one of the republic’s first ( 1925 – 38 ) foreign ministers
was Dr. Tevfik Rüştü (Aras), a descendant of the Karakaş. Some Dönme
were able to make the transition between Salonika and Istanbul better
than others. Despite having served the sultan in occupied Istanbul as the
last Ottoman finance minister, the taciturn Faik Nüzhet was considered
to have valuable financial knowledge and became an advisor to Atatürk.^14
Based on such examples, the above scenario supports a triumphalist, tele-
ological, presentist thesis that it was only in the Turkish Republic that the
Dönme, for the first time in their history of over two centuries, were able
to live without any major problems, free and unoppressed. It is claimed
only the new modern model of citizenship permitted this freedom, as a
result of which the Dönme became idealized, model, secular, nationalist
citizens and represented in their lives the basic principles of the secu-