Istanbul
“I don’t like Jews at all,” the outspoken politician later records
thinking. “Jews are very contemptible and despicable things.” They have
a habit of deception, and one must be wary of falling for the Jew’s trick.
The CUP was in the palm of the hand of the Jews and Dönme.^4
Suddenly the importance of the “Turkish Muslim of Macedonia”’s
request dawns upon him: Although the man asked for the exemption, not
because the Dönme were Jews, but because as Muslims they could serve
“Turkish” interests in Salonika, Nur believes “This means the Dönme
form a group in Turkey that thinks differently and has opposite interests
than Turks. The disaster for us is that they appear as Turks. Greeks and
Armenians are better than they, if for no other reason than we know
they are Greeks and Armenians. This foreign element, this parasite, hides
in our blood. They dye their faces and eyes with our blood so they can
appear like us.”^5 How many of them were there now among us? Nur was
terrified of recognizing the Other, the Jew, in the self.
It was as if the Dönme were cross-dressers, or transvestites. They
lived not only under a Muslim name, but appeared in Muslim dress.^6
The main reason for their being despised was their double life, which
their outward profession of one creed and secret profession of another
compelled them to lead.^7 The problem with the Dönme was that they
were not what they appeared to be. It was time for them to come out of
the closet, to be exposed for what they wore. The new male citizen could
not be a cross-dresser. He would have to be stripped naked, revealing his
true, inner, biological core. Then he could be disentangled, separated
from true Turks.
Fears of the Dönme also reflected fears of being taken for a Dönme.
Turks not only feared the Jew within, but feared being identified as Jews,
or being like Jews without. The unsettled nature of Dönme identity—
Jew or Muslim, foreigner or Turk?—rendered the relation between
majority and minority, dominant and subordinate, uncertain, unstable,
and unpredictable.^8 It made the dominant group—secular Turkish
Muslims—doubt their own strength. They had a sense of self-disgust,
and self-loathing, even a fear of the self, due in part to the knowledge of
their actual history and complex mixed origins, which were whitewashed
by an official or public discourse of purity, calling themselves Turks.The Unmixing of Peoples
“Excellency! We have the honor to bring to your attention that the
last convoy of exchangeable Muslims from this city left for Turkey on
26 December and that the evacuation of the city of Salonika of all Mus-