Postscript ern, secular Turkey he personified.^10 In 1953 , the year after Üzmez shot
Yalman, Vatan criticized a series from Moscow published in the paper
Yeni Sabah (New Morning), which responded by calling him a kike and
a traitor, not a Turk, and asking: “Don’t twenty-two million Turks know
what nation this Jew is from?”^11
Despite a lifetime of dedication to Turkey, Yalman is remembered pri-
marily as a Dönme by many rightists and Islamists, in this respect resem-
bling his contemporary and fellow CUP member Tekinalp, who was also
from Salonika. Tekinalp was a dedicated superpatriot of Jewish origin who
devoted his life to the Turkish cause, penning a “ten commandments” of
Turkishness for Jews. Regardless of a passionate life devoted to this aim,
he is rarely remembered for his role in helping form secular Turkish na-
tionalism. This broken man—stripped of his wealth by the wealth tax of
1942 – 44 —died in exile in France and is often considered to be, not the
Turk Tekinalp, but the Jew Moiz Kohen.^12
Notwithstanding the revival of fear of the secret Jews in the 1950 s, and
its resurgence in the past decade, Dönme religion has become a foi de
souvenir, a faith of memory. Religion was transformed into a culture of
memory.^13 Long after their religion disappeared, some Dönme and others
still maintained the memory of their being Dönme, which became a term
without religious meaning, instead having social meaning, knowing with
whom one could socialize. As with the conversos in Brazil and Mexico
analyzed by Nathan Wachtel, the “forgetting” of the Dönme first effaced
the beliefs, the significance of the rites and the rules, and then affected the
customs themselves. Although “the significance of certain customs is lost,”
they can still be transmitted as family traditions, even though no one re-
members exactly where they came from. Their justification “becomes like
that of all tradition: it is done this way because it has always been done
this way.” In the interplay between continuity and forgetting, what per-
sists is “the obscure sentiment of a duty and the halo of a secret.”^14
Duty and secrecy: “I hid my burden, I did not tell it to anyone, I se-
cretly put it to rest” reads an undated inscription on the back of a family
grave used between 1938 and 1992 in the Karakaş section of the Dönme
Bülbüldere Cemetery in Istanbul.^15 Despite all that has happened, one can
still identify the Dönme today. Yet when descendants of the now global
Dönme diaspora come to pay respects to their ancestors, their cemetery
is the only place where the existence of the Dönme is really manifested as
a distinct group.^16