Conclusion tices, whereas the rest (including his own) were on the path to becoming
sincere Muslims, because old beliefs were dying out. Yet by acknowledg-
ing their differences, even if depicted as being mainly historical, Yalman
fed the flames of doubt about the group’s sincerity.
The logic of Turkish nationalism ensured that the Dönme had to be-
come a disappearing relic of the Ottoman past. To overcome this handi-
cap in the new republic, prominent Dönme publicly proclaimed their
Turkishness through words and deeds, even as some Dönme quietly per-
petuated their beliefs. Yalman disavowed their unique religion by redefin-
ing it as harmless culture, a matter of antiquarian interest, comparable to
the recently dissolved Sufi brotherhoods. Yet even minimal adherence to
prior communal identities was considered a threat to national integrity
that complicated the integration of the Dönme into the Turkish national
fabric. While the Dönme could publicly adopt the civic religion of secu-
larism, they could not be accepted as ethnic Muslims because of their
Jewish roots. What was acceptable in the Ottoman Empire appeared in
the Turkish Republic as a sinister form of dissimulation. The conversion
of the Dönme to secular Turkish nationalism involved engaging with di-
verse new visions of what religion and race are or ought to be, where con-
version serves to remake the categories that define identity.^25
Religious syncretism is a temporary phenomenon; eventually, one of
the competing paramount values comes to the fore. As Richard Eaton
argues, at first the new beliefs or practices can be included and accepted,
then over time they become identified with or merge with previous ones,
and finally, they displace or replace them.^26 The Ottoman authorities rec-
ognized this fact, and did not much concern themselves with apparent
groups of crypto-Jews or crypto-Christians, or at least the lax practices
of new converts over the last three centuries of the empire’s existence.
Would not the neophytes become Muslims in the long run anyway?^27
The Dönme bucked this trend. Although some Dönme had already made
mainstream Islamic values their own by the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, this defection was not enough to dissolve the group. Because they
were an ethnic as well as religious group, the Dönme lasted longer than
expected. Reversion to Islam and the pressure of secularization affected
them greatly. But it was the end of endogamy that made the Dönme way
of being no longer tenable. Dönme began to choose to dissolve through
intermarrying; Dönme interviewees estimate as many as 50 percent of
marriages were with non-Dönme following World War II. For such secret