page_title: Dönmeh
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Dönmeh / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Yeni Mosque, Thessaloniki.
context_page_description: The Dönmeh were a group of Sabbatean crypto-Jews in the Ottoman Empire who converted publicly to Islam, but retained their beliefs in secret. The movement was centered in Thessaloniki. The group originated during and soon after the era of Sabbatai Zevi, a 17th-century Jewish rabbi and kabbalist who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah and eventually converted to Islam under threat of death penalty by the Sultan Mehmed IV. After Zevi's conversion, a number of Jews also falsely converted to Islam and became the Dönmeh. Since the 20th century, assimilated Dönmeh have intermarried with other groups and most have assimilated into Turkish society.
  The Turkish word dönme is from the verbal root dön- that means 'to turn', i.e., "to convert", but in a pejorative sense or 'turncoat'. They are also called Selânikli "person from Thessaloniki" or avdetî "religious convert". “Dönmeh” not only refers to the Jewish “untrustworthy converts” to Islam in Turkey but it is also a derogatory Turkish word for a transvestite, or someone who is claiming to be someone they are not.
context_section_description: Despite their conversion to Islam, the Sabbateans secretly remained close to Judaism and continued to practice Jewish rituals covertly. They recognized Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) as the Jewish Messiah, observed certain commandments with similarities to those in Judaism, and prayed in Hebrew and later in Ladino. They also observed rituals celebrating important events in Zevi's life and interpreted Zevi's conversion in a Kabbalistic way.
  There are several branches of the Dönmeh group. The first is the İzmirli, formed in İzmir (Smyrna). This was the original sect, from which two others eventually split. The first schism created the sect of the Jakubi, founded by Jacob Querido (ca. 1650–1690), the brother of Zevi's last wife. Querido claimed to be Zevi's reincarnation and a messiah in his own right. The second split from the İzmirli was the result of claims that Berechiah Russo (1695–1740), had inherited a soul known in Turkish as Otman Baba, who was truly next reincarnated in Zevi's soul. These allegations gained following and gave rise to the Karakashi (Turkish), or Konioso (Ladino), branch, the most numerous and strictest branch of the Dönmeh. Missionaries from the Karakashi/Konioso were active in Poland in the first part of the 18th century and taught Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who later claimed to have inherited Russo's soul. Frank went on to create the Frankist sect, a different non-Dönmeh Sabbatean group in Eastern Europe. Yet another group, the Lechli, of Polish descent, lived in exile in Thessaloniki and Constantinople.
  According to some, several leading members of the Young Turk movement, a group of constitutional monarchist revolutionaries who brought down the Ottoman Empire, were Dönmeh. At the time of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, some among the Thessaloniki Dönmeh tried to be recognized as non-Muslims to avoid being forced to leave the city. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1922–1923, the Dönmeh strongly supported the Republican, progressive reforms of Atatürk that tried to restrict the power of the religious establishment and to modernize society. In particular, the Dönmeh were instrumental in establishing trade, industry, and culture in the emerging Republic of Turkey, which is partially due to the prominence of Rumelian immigrants in general, and of Thessaloniki in particular, in the early Republic years.
  An interesting case is the one of Ilgaz Zorlu, a Dönmeh publisher who founded Zvi Publishers in 2000 and sought recognition as a Jew, but a beth din refused to recognize his Jewishness without a full conversion. He claimed to have converted in Israel and then filed a lawsuit for changing his religion from Islam to Judaism in his registry records and identification. The court voted in his favor.
  Işık University, which is the part of the Feyziye Schools Foundation (Turkish: Feyziye Mektepleri Vakfı, FMV), and Terakkî schools were founded by the Dönmeh community in Thessaloniki in the last quarter of the 19th century and continued their activities in Istanbul after Greeks captured the city on 9 November 1912.
  There is a Dönmeh community in Yeniköy, Sarıyer.
  The independent scholar Rifat Bali defines the term dönme as follows:
  The term Donme is a Turkish gerund meaning ‘to turn, revolve or return' and, by extension, “to betray” (i.e., ‘go back on’) and ‘to convert’ to another religion. It has come in popular parlance to refer to religious converts in general, and, more specifically, to the seventeenth century followers of the Jewish false messiah Sabbatai Sevi and their descendants, who outwardly converted to Islam but retained their secretive religious practices over the next several centuries, maintaining close communal and blood ties and practicing strict endogamy. While the great majority of the community’s members abandoned their practices during the first quarter century, their past identity has continued to haunt them within Turkish society, and the term Dönme itself remains one of opprobrium.
caption: Yeni Mosque, Thessaloniki, built by the Dönmeh community during the Ottoman Empire
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