Cheskel wi Klotzel, In Saloniki (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920 ), 40.
The author of this book taught at the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in
Salonika.
Approximately a century before Shabbatai Tzevi’s movement, Salonika
had witnessed the messianic fervor of Portuguese converso prophet and pur-
ported messiah Solomon Molkho, whose sermons appealed to Christians as well
as Jews. Lenowitz, Jewish Messiahs, 93 – 123.
Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica ( 1946 ; repr., Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000 ),
24 – 26.
Gershom Scholem, “Doenmeh (Dönme),” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusa-
lem: Keter Publishing House, 1972 ), 6 : 151. The greatest difference between the
two movements as they evolved was, however, that Dönme religion remained
secret and ethnically defined, whereas Christianity eventually replaced the ethnic
nature of Judaism with universal membership.
Moshe Perlmann, “Dönme,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 2 , pt. 2
(Leiden, 1965 ), 615 – 16.
Howard Clark Kee, “From the Jesus Movement Toward Institutional
Church,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert Hefner (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993 ), 63. Comparing the Dönme to early Christians becomes difficult
after the first few generations, for unlike the Dönme, Christians married outsid-
ers and accepted converts.
See Fred Donner, “From Believers to Muslims: Confessional Self-Identity
in the Early Islamic Community,” Al-Abhath 50–51 (2002–2003): 9–53.
Hope had been placed in Shabbatai Tzevi’s son, Ishmael, but he studied
in a yeshivah and became a Salonikan rabbi, not his father’s successor. For wide-
spread Jewish belief in transmigration of souls, see Spirit Possession in Judaism:
Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Matt Goldish (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2003 ).
Danon, “Une secte judéo-musulmane en Turquie,” and Gershom Scho-
lem, “The Sprouting of the Horn of the Son of David: A New Source From the
Beginnings of the Doenme Sect in Salonica,” in In the Time of Harvest: Essays
in Honor of Abba Hillel Silver, ed. Daniel Jeremy Silver (New York: Macmillan,
1963 ), 370.
