Conclusion
The Dönme are similar to conversos in that viewed from the group
they left and, eventually, the group they joined, they were outsiders
“whose origins deprived [them] of full membership in the commu-
nity.”^46 Tomas Atencio uses the theory of estrangement to describe how
conversos had an ambiguous place on the border between Catholics
and Jews; to Jews, they were Jewish apostates practicing Catholicism,
to Catholics they were heretical Christians practicing Judaism.^47 Like
the early modern crypto-Jews, Dönme were considered “a ship with
two rudders,” a group willing to trim its sails to the prevailing religious
and political winds.^48 Others could not fathom their background or
what they truly believed. They imagined the worst. The similarity to the
perception of the Dönme by Jews and Turks beginning after 1908 and
Greeks after 1912 is clear.
The Dönme emerged with the promise of a new messiah and the end
of days, saw its members, their religious identity unquestioned, become
the leaders of a cosmopolitan city in a crucial era, and offered the pos-
sibility of non-nationalist, international belonging. The group eventually
dissolved with the fall of the plural religious empire and rise of the ho-
mogeneous secular nation-state that preferred to see them as Jews. The
wealth tax imposed in 1942 – 44 was a reminder that others saw through
their Turkish veneer to the Jewish blood that ran in their veins. When
considering the situation of the Dönme in Turkey during World War II,
it is helpful to bear in mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation: “It is not the
Jewish character that provokes anti-Semitism, on the contrary, it is the
Anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”^49
The Holocaust and treatment of Jews in Turkey may have also led to
Dönme fearing the discovery of their Jewish origins and blood. Jews in
Balat, the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Istanbul, panicked in
1942 when rumors about the grim ends to which a giant oven being built
in the neighborhood was to be put to use, causing many to panic and
think they were going to be murdered, as in Nazi-occupied Europe. The
newspapers were filled with veiled threats about what would befall Jews
if they failed to Turkify and grotesque antisemitic cartoons during the
building of the giant oven (which in fact turned out to be for a new bread
factory).^50 That same year, the wealth tax, three of whose four categories
targeted those considered Jews, began to be imposed, and those (espe-
cially Jews) who could not pay sent to faraway Aşkale. Jewish men had
been sent on road-digging crews as well, reviving memories of how Arme-