Dönmeh

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The Dönmeh were a community in the Ottoman Empire descended from Jews who followed the messianic claimant Sabbatai Zevi into Islam, adopting the outward forms of that religion while continuing in secret a faith of their own. The Turkish name, meaning roughly “convert” or “turncoat,” was applied to them by outsiders; among themselves they used other names. Their center was Salonika — now Thessaloniki — where the community persisted for some two and a half centuries.

The origin lies in one episode. In 1665 and 1666 Sabbatai Zevi, a Jew of Smyrna, was proclaimed the messiah across the Jewish world, in a wave of expectation that reached from the Ottoman lands to Amsterdam. Brought before the sultan in 1666 and given the choice between death and conversion, he became a Muslim. For most of his followers the apostasy ended the movement; for a smaller number it did not. A core of believers held that the conversion was no defeat but a deliberate descent — that the messiah had to go down into the realm of the unredeemed to gather the holy sparks scattered there. After his death some of these followers converted in imitation, forming the body later called Dönmeh.

What they actually held is known only in outline, since the faith was kept from outsiders, and the community’s internal writings survive in fragments. Scholarship reconstructs a Sabbatean reading of Lurianic Kabbalah in which the ordinary commandments belonged to an order now passing away, so that certain acts forbidden under the law could become, in the messianic age, acts of redemption — an antinomian turn whose more extreme expressions later provoked the suspicion of neighbors. The Dönmeh themselves split into rival factions tracing different lines of authority, and they married within the community and kept apart from both the Jews they had left and the Muslims they outwardly joined.

The historian Gershom Scholem, who recovered much of this story in the twentieth century, set the Dönmeh and the later, more radical Frankist movement within a single Sabbatean aftermath — evidence, on his reading, that the messianic eruption did not simply die when its messiah converted but went underground and changed shape. How far the Dönmeh remained a living religion rather than an inherited identity is harder to settle, and the secrecy that protected the community also thinned the record. With the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey the Salonikan community was moved to Turkey, where it dispersed into the wider society. The faith, so far as it endured at all, did so as it had begun: out of sight.

→ Related: Frankism · Early Kabbalah · Israel Sarug