The Dönme are one of the most extraordinary communities in the history of religion, a group of Sephardic Jews in Thessaloniki who converted to Islam in 1683 following their charismatic leader Sabbatai Zevi, maintained Islamic practice in public for the following three centuries, and secretly continued their Jewish religious life behind closed doors. They married exclusively within their own community. They kept their true religious identity from the Ottoman authorities who nominally governed them as Muslims. And they maintained this double life — outwardly Muslim, secretly Jewish in a specifically Sabbatean form — through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the transfer of Thessaloniki to Greece in 1912, the population exchange of 1923 that sent most of them to Turkey, and into the twentieth century.
The Dönme story begins with Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth century rabbi from Smyrna who convinced a significant portion of the Jewish world that he was the Messiah. The messianic excitement he generated was extraordinary: Jews across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Europe sold their possessions and prepared for the redemption they believed was imminent. When the Ottoman Sultan had Sabbatai arrested in 1666 and offered him a choice between conversion to Islam and death, Sabbatai converted. The conversion was catastrophic for his followers, but his inner circle interpreted it as a deliberate mystical act, a descent into the realm of impurity to retrieve the holy sparks hidden there, and they followed him into nominal Islam.
Life as Dönme
The Dönme in Thessaloniki developed a sophisticated double life over the following centuries. They performed Islamic prayers in public, fasted during Ramadan, and sent their children to Islamic schools. In private they maintained Sabbatean religious practices, observed Jewish holidays in secret, used Hebrew prayers, and followed the specific theological doctrines that Sabbatai Zevi’s followers had developed after his conversion. They transmitted their true identity through the family, each generation initiating the next into the knowledge of what they actually were.
Their maintenance of endogamy, marrying exclusively within the Dönme community, was the primary mechanism that preserved the community’s identity across generations. A Dönme who married outside the community broke the chain of transmission, and the community’s social structures strongly discouraged it. Over three centuries this produced a community that was genetically as well as culturally distinct from both the Muslim and Jewish populations among whom they lived.
The Dönme and the Young Turks
The Dönme have been the subject of considerable historical controversy because of their alleged role in the Young Turk movement that overthrew Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1908 and drove the modernisation of the late Ottoman Empire. Several prominent Young Turk leaders came from Thessaloniki and from backgrounds that may have had Dönme connections, which has led to claims, most prominently in Turkish nationalist and Islamist literature, that the Young Turks were a Dönme conspiracy to undermine the Ottoman state from within.
The historical evidence for a coordinated Dönme role in the Young Turk movement is contested, and serious historians treat the conspiratorial version with scepticism. What is less contested is that Thessaloniki’s cosmopolitan, multi-confessional character, of which the Dönme were a part, produced an environment unusually hospitable to the modernising, secular ideas that the Young Turks represented.
The Dönme Today
The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey sent the Dönme to Turkey as Muslims, since they were classified by religion rather than by ethnicity. Their descendants in Turkey have largely assimilated into Turkish secular society, though community identity survives in some families. Their story is one of the most remarkable examples of sustained religious concealment in modern history, and it raises questions about identity, authenticity, and the relationship between public performance and private belief that have no easy answers.
Further Reading
If this article sparked your interest, these are the books worth reading next.
The Iliad — Homer (Penguin Classics)
by Homer — the primary source for everything in this article, and still the most vivid account of the Trojan War ever written.
The Odyssey — Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson — the best modern English translation, and the book that contains Odysseus’s own account of the horse.
The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction
by Eric Cline — the clearest and most up to date account of what archaeology actually tells us about Troy and whether any of it happened.
For more on the folklore and history of Greece, the The Mani article covers another community that maintained a fierce separate identity through the Ottoman period. The Klephts article covers the mountain outlaws whose resistance to Ottoman rule produced the Greek independence movement. The Greece folklore hub page has every article in the cluster.
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