Introduction
Scholarship also assumes that crypto-Jews engage in accommodation
and resistance to cultural hegemony and assimilation by engaging in reli-
gious persistence to ensure the survival of Judaism after they are forced to
convert.^89 Such a paradigm may fit other groups who aimed to maintain
Judaism and a Jewish identity, but does not describe the Dönme. Unlike
many conversos, the Dönme neither participated in Ottoman Jewish life
nor fled the empire to become Jews in exile elsewhere. The Dönme were
not only allowed full membership, but also were able to rise in Ottoman
society despite their origins. Unlike most Mashhadis who openly became
Jews in Israel and the United States after emigrating from a Muslim soci-
ety where reversion to Judaism was punishable by death, only one Dönme
has become Jewish since freedom of religion was declared in the Ottoman
Empire in 1856. This occurred less than a decade ago and was not met
with enthusiasm by Turkish Jews.^90 There is no evidence of a mass desire
on the part of the Dönme to become Jews.
One might argue that the existence of distinct Dönme institutions at
the end of the nineteenth century means we are witnessing the moment
of creation of the Dönme religious community. Instead, we are witness-
ing the moment of creation of the Muslim community in the Ottoman
Empire, in the sense that the term “Muslim” was debated, defined, and
normalized during the reign of Abdülhamid II, a period when Ottoman
Muslims looked closely at the religion they practiced. This is not to say
that there were not self-recognized Muslims before, that believers in what
Muhammad revealed had not been debating since the seventh century
what it meant to be a Muslim, and had not formed communities of Mus-
lims. Rather, it is to point out that Islam, like Christianity and Hinduism
in the late nineteenth century, became a religion inasmuch as the category
of “religion” was invented and its beliefs and practices were understood as
comprising a faith, a belief system.^91 As Talal Asad has pointed out, what
was new was “the emphasis on belief,” which meant “that henceforth re-
ligion could be conceived as a set of propositions to which believers gave
assent, and which therefore could be judged.”^92
Once religion moved from primary emphasis upon communal belong-
ing to a belief system, an individual’s faith could be tested for the first
time. Religion was conceived as being private, interior, and exclusive. The
state, or the community, could look inside one’s mind and test to see
if what was there was correct, and acceptable. As an eighteenth-century
British observer notes, in Ottoman Salonika the Dönme were not ques-