Introduction
The Dönme did not develop a culture of secrecy because it was a key
to survival, or because they needed to avoid violent persecution by the
Ottoman authorities. Even their messiah did not in the end really have
to fear for his life: although given the choice of conversion or death, his
change of religion saved him. He was not only the first Jewish messiah to
convert, but also one of the few neither killed in battle nor executed—
crucified, beheaded, or burned at the stake.^36 But centuries later, the
Dönme still maintained this hidden culture, one of the reasons being
simply that the way to be a Dönme, the proper mentality, and way of
acting, was to be secret.^37 Duplicity, or less pejoratively, the simultane-
ous play between simulation (acting like the majority) and dissimulation
(hiding secret beliefs and customs), or taqiyya, which Sufis and Shabbatai
Tzevi alike had practiced, was a fundamental rule of behavior and means
enabling them to not attract attention to themselves while remaining dis-
tinct and segregating themselves from others.^38 Moreover, secrecy and
sacredness go together. Secrecy helps create sacredness and maintains it.
Secret initiation, rites, and rituals preserve it.
Despite a shared commitment to secrecy and the common desire for
maintaining the unity of the group, several new leaders and splits quickly
arose. Dönme religion was not static, and developments were swift and
transformative in the early years. Mustafa Çelebi / Baruch Kunio opposed
Yakub Çelebi’s leadership of the group and implementation of Shabbatai
Tzevi’s principles. In addition, while he himself was considered to have
the soul of Rabbi Najara, a disciple of the sixteenth-century Kabbalist
Rabbi Isaac Luria, he claimed that Shabbatai Tzevi’s soul had not trans-
migrated into Yakub Çelebi, but into the body of a baby named Osman
or Baruchia, born to the son of one of Shabbatai Tzevi’s most devoted fol-
lowers nine months after the messiah passed away. This baby grew up to
be Osman Baba ( 1677 – 1720 ), who was proclaimed messiah either in 1690
or around 1715 (it should be noted that Baba is a typical Sufi title).
By the 1690 s, Mustafa Çelebi and his followers caused the first splinter-
ing in the movement. Yakub Çelebi’s group became known as the Yakubi,
and Mustafa Çelebi’s group as the Karakaş (Blackbrowed). The former
were marked by closer integration into the Muslim way of life and atten-
tion to the performance of Sunni Muslim religious obligations. Yakub
Çelebi passed away while journeying to or returning from the Hajj, prob-
ably in 1690 in Alexandria.^39 The Yakubi group was much smaller than
the Karakaş, whose members claimed that they adhered more closely to