Istanbul
get” their identity, and believing that others had forgotten their origins,
too, imagined they had become indistinguishable from other citizens
of Turkey.^68 That may have been the case for many Dönme, who were
utilizing what Michael Taussig calls public secrecy. But the government
and Muslims forgot to forget that the Dönme formed a separate ethno-
religious group. Instead, they remembered that their ancestors were con-
verts from Judaism. Unlike the Dönme themselves or people who actually
were Jews, Muslims considered the Dönme simply as Jews.
When Dönme, people who were descendants of Jews but did not con-
sider themselves Jews, arrived in the early Turkish Republic, they made a
public commitment to become Turks and Kemalists. Two decades of ef-
forts to assimilate turned to smoke overnight when the wealth tax was an-
nounced. Neither their neighbors nor the state recognized them as Turks
(i.e., ethnicized Muslims). Political loyalty, service to the nation, public
Turkishness, nothing seemed to matter when compared with the unfor-
giving truth of racial origins. Seen as internal enemies, the Dönme were
placed nearly in the same position as Jews in Turkey, who, after the mas-
sacres and deportations of Armenians and Orthodox Christians remained
the largest non-Muslim community in the country.
In the early republic of the 1930 s and 1940 s, Jews felt the full brunt of
Turkish racialized nationalism. Measures promoting the speaking of Turk-
ish in public sometimes led to violent encounters between Muslims and
Jews, and there was a pogrom in Thrace in 1934 , part of a long-term gov-
ernment plan to discourage Jews, viewed as a potential fifth column, from
living in the sensitive border region. According to the Statute of Reloca-
tion, passed in parliament two weeks before the pogrom, the government
planned to deport Jews from Thrace and replace them with Turks.^69 There
was little sympathy for Jews, foreign or local, in Turkey. In the spring
of 1941 , non-Muslim men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, es-
pecially those who owned businesses in Istanbul, were conscripted into
special army reserve units, but not given any weapon training, instead
assigned to road repair work in the interior.^70 Conscription lasted one
year. Then soon after the conscription ended, the wealth tax was imple-
mented. In 1942 , German Embassy reports from Ankara to the Foreign
Office in Berlin noted the increase in antisemitism in Turkey evidenced
by the tax and the prime minister’s response to the pleas of Jewish refugees
in Nazi-occupied Europe.^71 In response to their plight, the prime minister
declared: “Turkey cannot be a homeland for those who are unwanted else-