Reinscribing the Dönme in the Secular Nation-State gether in several neighborhoods in Istanbul such as Nişantaşı, where some
continued to faithfully observe the feasts, fasts, and festivals that Shab-
batai Tzevi had established, and buried their dead in distinct cemeteries.^2
Şemsi Efendi, members of the Kapancı family, and teachers and graduates
of the Terakki and Feyziye were buried in the main Dönme cemetery
of Bülbüldere in Üsküdar, Istanbul. Dönme served on the board of and
sent their children to the originally Salonikan Dönme schools relocated
in Istanbul, resided in the neighborhood, which has at its center a mosque
that in some uncanny ways calls to mind the mosque they built in Salon-
ika, and most important, attempted to maintain their textile, timber, and
tobacco businesses. Yet the international financial ties of the Dönme be-
came a liability in the nation-state, which aimed to limit the boundaries
of the nation. The Turkish Republic attempted through expropriations
and exorbitant taxation to facilitate the rise of a Muslim Turkish bour-
geoisie at the expense of such “foreign” groups as the Dönme. Influential
Dönme faced state violence.
The Ottoman Finance Minister Mehmet Cavid, former head of a
Karakaş school, was an advisor to the Turkish delegation at Lausanne in
1923 , and in 1924 headed a committee preparing a report for the Istanbul
Chamber of Commerce. Mehmet Cavid was an economic liberal, inter-
ested in linking the Ottoman and later Turkish economies to the world
economy, to encourage and protect foreign investment. Such global think-
ing went against early Kemalism which sought to create a self-sustaining
domestic economy.
Atatürk had little tolerance of economic liberalism, or his critics. He
acted swiftly to rid himself of rivals. In 1926 , Mehmet Cavid and the
other key Dönme figure in the CUP, Dr. Nâzım, were executed in Ankara
on charges of trying to resurrect the CUP and involvement in a plot to
assassinate Atatürk in Izmir.^3 Ironically, Dr. Nâzım had been allowed back
to Turkey by Atatürk from exile in Berlin, where he had escaped an as-
sassination attempt by an Armenian on account of his role in the 1915 – 17
deportations and massacres of that people. Dr. Nâzım and Mehmet Cavid
were accused of having met with another Dönme doctor, Tevfik Rüştü
Aras, to plot a return of the CUP to power. Again ironically, their enemy
Rıza Nur fled to France, and then Egypt, for fear that Atatürk would have
him killed, and only returned to Turkey after Atatürk died in 1938.^4
After this purge of surviving CUP leaders, Atatürk moved to downplay
his past, membership in the CUP, and the connection between the CUP