Conclusion
The dissimilar experiences of the Alevi and Dönme point to their essen-
tial difference in the modern period. “Service nomads” are seen as internal
enemies during the nation-state era. The rise of the nation-state highlights
their anomalous position. Such “internal strangers were potential traitors.
They might, or might not, be allowed to assimilate, but they had ever
fewer legitimate arguments for continued difference and specialization. In
a nation-state, citizenship and nationality (‘culture’) became inseparable;
nonnationals were aliens and thus not true citizens.”^37 “Parasitic” groups
such as Dönme became victims. The restless pursuit of wealth and learn-
ing for the tribe, and filling occupational niches as merchants, bankers,
doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and journalists made them vulnerable to
nationalisms that sought to obtain their capital—economic and social—
and put suitable nationals in these leading positions shaping society.^38
From Racism to Antisemitism
Janet Jacobs has found that the genocide of European Jews during
World War II renewed a desire for secrecy and denial among “crypto-
Jews” in New Mexico. “Whatever might have been more out in the open
went underground after the war,” one of her interviewees said. His father
realized that “it was bad to be a Jew in 1945 , so he probably decided better
to erase any connections with Judaism until this whole thing clears up.”^39
Jacobs argues that the Holocaust led to a fear of antisemitism and bodily
violence, which in turn caused the re-creation of a culture of secrecy. In
this construction, antisemitism (both medieval and in modern Mexico)
is the lens for understanding crypto-Jewish behavior, both violence and
the internalization of antisemitic ideologies, for it is the trauma of Jew-
ishness that shapes them: “As a consequence of the persistent threat of
violence against the Jews, a deep-seated ethnic anxiety appears to have
survived among modern descendants of the crypto-Jews.”^40 This found
its expression in “the creation and maintenance of family cultures that,
through silence and secrecy, conveyed a sense of difference, isolation, and
danger to succeeding generations.” Thus “crypto-Jews” in the American
Southwest were secret about Jewishness for reasons of self and group-
preservation. They feared exposure, which could cause ostracism at best,
death at worst. Instead, they choose to use protective assimilation, ethnic
deidentification.^41 Similarly, Hilda Nissimi finds that the trauma of an
initial forced conversion, the fear of being caught and punished by death,