Introduction
need for separate law courts.^57 This unexpected revelation of an unrecog-
nized, alternate, autonomous space was a shock. Why would these Mus-
lims have a separate court and jail? At a time marked by centralization
and reform, how could another disciplining power be allowed to chal-
lenge that of the state?
Dönme Religion and Identity:
Not Simply Jews, Not Merely Muslims
By the late nineteenth century, Ottoman officials and others were be-
ginning to recognize that the Dönme were not quite like other Muslims.
They were labeled “Avdeti,” “one who returns to his origins,” that is, “one
who apostatizes.” In the 1820 s, Benjamin Barker and other missionaries
asserted that these “Jewish Turks” continued to maintain Jewish rituals
and customs and wanted to obtain the missionaries’ publications and a
Turkish-language Bible.^58 For Christian missionaries, it was important
to depict the Dönme as secret Jews, for it allowed them to proselytize
to them; spreading the Gospel among Muslims was illegal. To German-
Jewish scholars beginning in the 1860 s, and culminating in the opinion
of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century encyclopaedia entry synthesizing cur-
rent scholarship, the Dönme were simply a “sect of crypto-Jews.”^59 The
“Maaminim [Believers] are Jews by birth, but not by religion,” a Jewish
social scientist explained in 1891. “They live in sets of houses which are
contiguous, or which are secretly connected; and for each block of houses
there is a secret meeting-place,” where the leader conducted prayers.^60
Writing in 1923 , the Yakubi Dönme Ahmet Emin Yalman also discusses
the iron discipline of the Yakubi and the functioning of their communal
life, saying that the leader of the Yakubi ruled as a tyrant. Any Yakubi
traveling, circumcising a son, marrying, choosing a profession, or even
undergoing a medical procedure had to consult with him and get his
permission. The leader collected alms from everyone, which were used to
assist those who were needy or ill. There were several types of alms, one
of which was mandatory, like a tax collected either by the leader or by the
male and female keepers of the purse. Along with conducting circumci-
sion, marriages, and funerals according to the rules of Islam, the leader
would also read a prayer according to the Yakubi customs. Since they
were so assimilated into Islam, Yakubi women “were fanatics in the mat-
ter of veiling” and would not be seen with any male other than their chil-