Notes to Pages 165–167
commander there, Atatürk often visited him. Chief rabbi during the crucial first
years of the republic, from 1920 to 1930 , Becerano did his best to keep alive a
community suffering financial ruin and legal constraints on its institutions; the
chief rabbinate itself was stripped of secular powers in 1926. Becerano died in
1931 , and the lay leadership found it unnecessary to select a new chief rabbi. Turk-
ish Jewry remained without a spiritual leader until 1960. See Bali, Cumhuriyet
yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, 38 , 91 , 241.
23. Sebîlürreşat 23 , no. 584 (January 24 , 1924 ): 190.
24. Ibid., no. 583 (January 24 , 1924 ): 172.
25. Ibid.: 174. Not all reports were negative. Köprülülü Şerif, writing in Akşam
(Evening), says that because Dönme youth played a progressive and revolution-
ary role in Salonika and elsewhere in Macedonia and Kosovo, they should not
be called “Dönme” (regarded as a derogatory term) but embraced as part of the
Turkish community. Ibid.: 172. Akşam also reported how Dönme Receb Kay-
mak, who was the owner of the Islam Library in Karşıkaya in Izmir, responded
to Rüştü’s claims. Sebîlürreşat 23 , no. 585 (January 24 , 1924 ): 205. The immigrant
Hacı Mehmet sent a telegram to Akşam from Rhodes asserting that everything
said about the sect was incorrect; they were Turks and Muslims, not secret Jews.
Gordlevsky, “Zur Frage über die ‘Dönme,’ ” 201. According to Sebîlürreşat, Ta -
nin, the CUP organ, and Akşam also defended the Dönme. Ibid., no. 583 (Janu-
ary 24 , 1924 ): 175.
26. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(New York: Routledge, 1995 ), 4.
27. Ibid., 1 – 28.
28. Ibid., 7 – 10.
29. Alexandris, Greek Minority of Istanbul, 106.
30. Bali, Cumhuriyet yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri, 82.
31. Rıfat Bali, personal communication, spring 2006.
32. Sentiment and policy that promoted Muslim merchants and later Turks
over traders from other ethno-religious groups was not new, but an inheritance
of late Ottoman thinking and practice. See Haniogˇlu, Preparation for a Revolu-
tion, 299 ; Erik Zürcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims, and Turkish Nation-
alists: Identity Politics, 1908 – 38 ,” in The Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed.
Kemal Karpat (Brill: Boston, 2000 ), 150 – 79 ; Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica, 147 ;
Zafer Toprak, “Osmanlı donanması, Averof zırhlısı ve ulusal kimlik,” Toplumsal
Tarih 113 ( 2003 ): 10 – 19 ; Ginio, “Port Cities as an Imagined Battlefield”; Toprak,
Türkiye’de “milli iktisat” ( 1908 – 1918 ) (Ankara: Yurt Yayınları, 1982 ), 60 – 68 , 98 ,
170 – 73 ; and Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, 61 – 62.
33. Gordlevsky, “Zur Frage über die ‘Dönme,’ ” 201.
34. Jean Brunhes and Camille Vallaux, La géographie de l’histoire: Géographie