Forgetting to Forget, 1923–1944 would later defend the motivation behind the levying of the tax, writing:
“It was true that huge amounts of illicit money had accumulated during
the war in the hands of a few at the expense of the general public.... It
was also true that much of this money was in the hands of minorities and
foreigners, who predominated in certain commercial fields. Many of these
people, not entrusted to share in the defense of the country in armed
military service, were not proving themselves loyal citizens.”^64
What was so shocking about what the prime minister had said was that
he lumped him together with Christians, Jews, foreigners, and traitors to
the nation. But Yalman saw himself as none of these! This was precisely
what he had written against. It was unjust that innocent, patriotic people,
such as himself, were considered non-Turks. And in that era, to be a non-
Turk was to be an enemy of the race, an enemy of the nation. According
to the xenophobic Cumhuriyet, the government’s Nazi-sympathizing
mouthpiece, the tax was meant to punish those of “alien blood” and those
who were “Turks only in name.” And that included the Dönme.For purposes of administering the tax, Faik Ökte, director of finance
for the Province of Istanbul, divided society into four categories, Muslim,
non-Muslim, foreigner, and Dönme.^65 The Dönme category was reserved
for descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam in the wake of the
movement of Shabbatai Tzevi. Contrary to popular view, it did not in-
clude all descendants of converts to Islam or recent converts.^66 Prominent
Turks denounced Dönme in general and Yalman in particular. The Brit-
ish ambassador in Ankara was told that Dönme “were worse than Jews
because they pretended to be Turks and wanted to have the best of both
worlds. Denunciation fits in very well with imposition of tax on wealth
since wealthiest men in Istanbul (Constantinople) and particularly Izmir
(Smyrna) are Dönmes [sic].” He informed the Foreign Office in Lon-
don: “These Islamised Jews played a very prominent part in young Turks
revolution and in subsequent activities of the Committee of Union and
Progress. Although in 1926 two of their leading personalities Dr. Nazim
and Javid Bey, were executed on specific instructions of Mustafa Kemal,
other Dönmes continued to play important part in Kemalist movement
and M. Yalman in particular was always a leading Kemalist publicist.”^67
The imposition of the tax and Turkish and foreign musings about the
Jewish nature of the Dönme twenty years after their arrival in the republic
demonstrate how unsuccessful Dönme efforts to integrate, or appear to
integrate were. It has been argued that the Dönme “remembered to for-