Ottoman Salonika
placed in the latter category. Although not stated, it is assumed that Şemsi
Efendi’s school was not religious, although it was. But what happens to
Atatürk’s narrative when we realize that what was at stake was not a strug-
gle between Islam and an implied secularism, but between two interpreta-
tions of how to live ostensibly as Muslims?
Şemsi Efendi and the First Dönme Schools
The key features of all Dönme schools established in Salonika at the
end of the nineteenth century—morals and ethics, foreign languages, pro-
gressive values—are succinctly stated in a 1904 graduation speech by the
Feyziye school’s founder, Mustafa Tevfik, who said that “next year more at-
tention will be paid to students’ moral development. Classes in morals and
ethics are being added and increased in primary and middle school. More-
over, in implementing the decision of the Primary and Middle School
Teachers Congress in Paris, a classroom teacher has been added to every
class, which is very important for discipline and morals.” The classroom
teacher, who always stayed with the students, unlike the usual “roaming”
teachers, was to “explain moral and ethical subjects and always observe
the students closely.” Although they focused on the mind and morals, “it
would be a mistake to forget about the body: we plan to hire a teacher of
gymnastics. While in the past we thought it was essential to focus only
on teaching French to the best of our abilities, without other foreign lan-
guages detracting from it, now we have decided to add German, an impor-
tant language of commerce. We also plan to develop our girls school.”^3
The outlook of the Dönme merchant families was especially evident
in their schools, where foreign and local languages, modern sciences, and
business skills were taught together with religion, ethics, morals, and
Dönme social bonds and boundaries. All were purposely combined in
meaningful ways allowing Dönme youth to perpetuate the local and inter-
national networks of which the Dönme were a part. Prior to the late nine-
teenth century, Dönme schooling occurred behind closed doors, mainly in
the central buildings of the head of the group’s compound. Religious lead-
ers were trained by their predecessors and studied the precepts of Shab-
batai Tzevi and his successors, whether Yakubi, Karakaş, or Kapancı. In
the late nineteenth century, at the outset of a wave of educational reform
and change in the empire that affected all religious communities, Dönme
educators began to emerge into the open, adding modern conceptions of