Religious and Moral Education analysis are the subjects of religion and morality, which are assumed to
be anti-modern and reactionary. This is an important oversight, and it is
even more surprising when the historical evidence shows that Dönme at
the time emphasized morals in their schools and journals, illustrating how
Dönme were both religious and progressive.
The relation between tradition and modernity was very complicated
for the Dönme. They clung to some of their oldest beliefs and ritu-
als, while engaging in entirely new ways of being. The struggle was not
simply between the traditional and the new, as Atatürk and others later
claimed; rather, it was an effort to maintain traditions in a new age, to be
externally connected and internally isolated at the same time, using the
traditional as a means of buttressing their identity, demonstrating that
neither had to clash with religion and morality, which were central to
the Dönme way of being in the world in turn-of-the-twentieth-century
Salonika. It was only after the community faced insurmountable pres-
sures to dissolve in the early Turkish Republic that they were eventually
transformed into secularists. The Dönme were not proponents of cultural
or political nationalism either. In an era in which the subject peoples of
the Ottoman Empire began to imagine themselves as members of nations
that had a right to rule themselves within bounded territories, the Dönme
promoted a society that reflected their identity of a cultural multiplicity
antithetical to nationalism, combining elements of western European and
Ottoman culture instilled with Dönme religious meaning. Their schools,
for example, transmitted, not only what was new and modern, but also
their heritage and what was old.
Dönme religious meaning was imparted in the schools when religious
precepts were taught by Şemsi Efendi. The second most important name
after Şemsi Efendi in the history of Dönme education is Mehmet Cavid.
He was one of the leaders of the Karakaş and belonged to the most im-
portant family of the group, descendants of Osman Baba.^95 This econo-
mist and Feyziye graduate was administrator of the Feyziye school from
1902 to 1908.^96 Among the changes he introduced were closely monitor-
ing the morals and ethics of teachers and students, and opening a busi-
ness school in 1904. He required frequent reports of student performance,
successes, and morals, comparing them with others students, students in
other classes, and students in previous years.^97
Mert Sandalcı’s 2005 official school history takes a very Kemalist ap-
proach, in which modernity and the West are contrasted with tradition,