Introduction
of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the Dönme were
compelled to abandon their ethno-religious identity and live in accor-
dance with their ancestors’ affirmation that God is one and Muhammad
is God’s messenger, not Shabbatai Tzevi.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “The Jew is the one whom other men consider a
Je w. ”^71 Sartre was not saying that those called Jews are Jews, rather, he was
focusing on the mentality of those who see Jews everywhere. Despite the
history I have just narrated, it is remarkable how, along with their Otto-
man and Turkish Muslim detractors, modern scholars writing within the
divergent paradigms of Greek, Jewish, and Turkish historiography often
tend to be unwilling to accept that the Dönme were not simply Jews. In
Greek historiography, making these people into Jews allows scholars to
claim that the only progressive elements of the Muslim Ottoman com-
munity were really Jews. Alternatively, the Dönme are depicted as the
allies of the Muslims, legitimizing their being deported from Greece in
1923 and subsequently written out of the Hellenic past. In Jewish histori-
ography, despite the fact that the Shabbatean movement emerged in the
Ottoman Empire and Shabbatai Tzevi’s followers lived as a distinct group
with a corporate identity and unique beliefs and practices after his death,
accounts of Shabbatai Tzevi and his movement, which especially focus
on its origins and earliest stage, and are mainly based on Hebrew and
European-language sources, consider his followers “secret” Jews, and ana-
lyze their religious practices and history within the framework of Jewish
history and Jewish thought alone.^72 “For over 250 years, the Sabbateans
existed as a secret Jewish sect garbed in a Muslim cloak,”^73 according to
this conventional wisdom; they attempted “to maintain secretly within
Islam as much as possible of Judaism, its lore and rites,” although modi-
fied by Shabbatean messianism.^74
Turkish historiography wears similar blinders. Although until the late
nineteenth century, the Ottoman state did not acknowledge Dönme dif-
ference and until the end of empire, the Dönme were considered Muslim
by both religious and secular Ottoman law, attention has always been
paid to their ancestral Jewishness. According to the influential study by
Abdurrahman Küçük, even after converting to Islam, intractable Jews
were zealous in guarding their unchanging Jewish core. Thus even if a Jew
appears in another guise, he can never escape his essential Jewishness.^75
In this sense, like medieval inquisitors, modern historians and Muslim
enemies of the Dönme hold that any trace of an apparently Jewish prac-