Conclusion and the anxiety of remembrance combined to impel the Mashhadis to
maintain endogamy and an identity as crypto-Jews in modern Iran.
Jews who had accommodated or assimilated and passed as non-Jews in
western Europe and the United States had a great deal of internalized eth-
nic anxiety, which they projected onto eastern European Jews, who em-
bodied all the characteristics they feared the discovery of in themselves,
Sander Gilman contends.^42 This argument may also be applicable to Iran,
which has a sorrier record concerning tolerance of Christians and Jews
than the Ottoman Empire. But this was not the case in the Ottoman Em-
pire, where unlike in Spain, there had been no mass forced conversion,
no Inquisition, no burning at the stake for secretly practicing Judaism
after converting, no expulsion, no taking refuge disguised as Christians
halfway around the world in a new land. The voluntary converts known
as Dönme did not have a history of religious victimization because they
were Jews. They faced the trauma of exile from their homeland of Salon-
ika, but this was not based on their racial identity. The antisemitism they
faced in Turkey was not part of Christian cultures that blamed Jews for
the crucifixion of Jesus and the murder of God. But it was antisemitism
nonetheless. In the 1930 s in Turkey, the extreme rightists Cevat Rıfat
Atilhan and Nihal Atsız, publishers of the rabidly antisemitic newspapers
Orhun and Millî İnkilâp, respectively, publicly called for those who were
not Muslims to be expelled, since they could not be assimilated. Atsız
argued “just as we never expect Jews to be Turkified, nor do we want it.
For just as no matter how long you bake mud, it will never turn into iron,
a Jew can never become a Turk, no matter how much he struggles.”^43
Atsız also attacked Yalman, the most visible Dönme in the early Republic,
claiming although he carried a Turkish passport as a Turkish citizen, he
was “not a Turk and not a Muslim,” but a Jew.^44
Unlike the conversos, the Dönme were never accepted as Jews by Jews,
nor accused of having close relations with Jews. They were not charged
with judaizing, of believing in Judaism and secretly fulfilling its com-
mands, rituals, and customs. Their crime lay less in their actions, and
more in their inherited genes. In the end, they were attacked, not for
acting like Jews, but for being Jews, for their racial identity, which alleg-
edly caused them to spread bad morals. This was similar to the situation
in fifteenth-century Spain, where “the mere presence of Jewish blood in
that individual [the New Christian] was seen as creating a proclivity to
undermine the Church.”^45