Introduction
subsequent conversion. The yearly cycle was also rooted in the holidays
he instituted, such as making the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av
a day of celebration of the messiah’s birthday, rather than mourning the
destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem. In addition, each
Dönme sect added events to the yearly religious calendar and pilgrimage
sites that celebrated its leaders.
Religious syncretism is not permanent. Beginning at the end of the
nineteenth century, there was an increasing trend among Dönme to aban-
don Dönme religion for the paramount values of Islam. Some Dönme
became sincere, upstanding Muslims, and some even advanced to high
levels in the hierarchy of Ottoman Sufi orders in Salonika, especially the
Mevlevi. None, however, were faithful Jews.
While Dönme religion was constantly developing in new directions,
what remained constant was public Jewish denunciation of the group,
although it should not be discounted how in the first two centuries,
some of this was partly done for show by rabbis who were secret fol-
lowers of Shabbatai Tzevi. From the time of their apostasy in the seven-
teenth century to the end of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth
century, the Dönme were not considered Jews by Jewish leaders nor did
Jews believe that the followers of Shabbatai Tzevi practiced Judaism.
From the beginning, rabbis declared that those who followed Shabbatai
Tzevi into apostasy were not Jews but voluntary converts, defectors from
Judaism, who unlike forced converts could not easily accepted back into
the community; thus psychologically and juristically, the Dönme were
not Jews, no longer Jews, former Jews whose heretical practices out-
raged real Jews.
Concerning rabbinic debates about conversion and apostasy, the ma-
jority view held that a Jew cannot become a non-Jew. It was the minority
view that a Jew could fully convert to another religion. Even on the ques-
tion of voluntary conversion, legal authorities considered the heretics still
to be Jews—for example, allowing conversos back into the fold without
converting. This meant that they had never legally ceased being Jews. Suf-
fice it to say that the Dönme were not the converts of the usual type. The
upheaval they caused among Jews was considered so damaging to Judaism
and Jews that rabbis adopted harsh views of them and were unwilling to
overlook their consuming unclean foods, eating on fast days, celebrating
holidays not in the Jewish calendar, and rejecting the commandments of
the Torah.