Conclusion
all those minorities who oppose Turks and Turkism.”^19 During another
Kurdish uprising, in 1930 , Mahmut Esat argued: “All, friends, enemies,
and the mountains shall know that the Turk is the master of this coun-
try. All those who are not pure Turks have only one right in the Turkish
homeland: the right to be servants, the right to be slaves.”^20 In this view
of nationalism, minorities were to be purified from the body politic, and
extraneous elements were to become parasites. Kurds were not the only
problem. To Esat, “For me a Turk has more value than all the Jews of
this world, not to say the whole world.”^21 And for many Muslims in the
early republic, as well as today, there is no difference between Jews and
Dönme.^22
The secular Turkish state sought to undermine transnational loyalties
constructed on the basis of shared religious identity—Jewish, or Dönme,
for example—so that citizens would cultivate loyalty exclusively to the
nation. The rise of the secular Turkish Republic and the emergence of a
public sphere where “unifying sets of rituals and ideas” served to “define
new political communities” made “new, modern forms of freedom and
unfreedom, tolerance and intolerance, possible.”^23 Religious minorities
were tolerated only to the extent that they dropped their former com-
mitments and loyalties. If they did not in fact do so, they had at least
publicly to appear to be non-religious, which reflects the adoption of the
privatization component of the secularization thesis by the architects of
the Turkish Republic. They believed that where religion survives in the
modern world, it should do so only in the protected space of the home
and not in the public sphere.
No matter what approach the Dönme pursued, their identity could
no longer be an open secret. In order to avoid public attacks, the Dönme
could claim that although others might label them Dönme, they did not
adopt that identity themselves. They could deny having any knowledge
of the group, or refuse to talk about it. They could claim that their own
sect was defunct, although another one was still active. They could use
the term “Salonikan” either to claim social capital as cultivated, progres-
sive Europeans, or as a geographical label, making them indistinguishable
from other Muslims who originated in Greece.^24 They could tell others
they were sincere Muslims. All of these options were available to them.
Ahmet Emin Yalman’s sophisticated defense of the group used many
of these strategies. He called members of the group “Salonikans.” He
claimed that only members of another sect still engaged in Dönme prac-