Dönmeh

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.

Members of the group referred to themselves as "the Believers" (Hebrew: המאמינים, romanized: ha-Maʾminim),[2][4][9] Ḥaberim "Associates",[4] or Baʿlē Milḥāmā "Warriors",[4] while in the town of Adrianople (now Edirne) they were known as sazanikos, Judaeo-Spanish for "little carps",[4] perhaps about the changing outward nature of the fish[10] or because of the prophecy that Sabbatai Zevi would deliver the Jews under the zodiacal sign of the fish.

Despite their supposed conversion to Islam, the Sabbateans secretly remained close to Judaism and continued to practice Jewish rituals covertly.

The second split from the İzmirli was the result of claims that Rabbi Beruchiah Russo (Baruch Konio, 1677–1720) of Salonica, known in Turkish as Osman Baba, was the true reincarnation of Zevi's soul.

[11] Missionaries from the Karakashi or 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.

[12] At the time of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, some of the Thessaloniki Dönme tried to be recognized as non-Muslims to avoid being forced to leave the city.

[citation needed] One of the leaders of the İzmir plot to assassinate President Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) in İzmir after the establishment of the Turkish Republic was a Dönme named Mehmed Cavid,[13] a founding member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the former Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire.

[citation needed] The additional commandments are concerned with defining the kinds of interactions that may occur between the Dönme and the Jewish and Muslim communities.

[24] As the Hakham Bashi of Turkey and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel did not accept the Dönme as Jews without a lengthy conversion to Judaism,[25][26] Zorlu applied to the Istanbul 9th Court of First Instance in July 2000.

As a crypto-Sabbatean sect, the Dönme always made an easy target for claims about secret, crypto-Jewish political control and social influence, whether charged with setting in motion political upheaval against the status quo, or accused of shaping an oppressive regime's grip on the status quo.

The Dönme's manoeuverings were said to have lain at the heart of the Young Turk Revolution and its overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the dissolution of the Ottoman religious establishment, and the founding of a secular republic.

Pro-sultan, religious Muslim political opponents painted these events as a global Jewish and Freemasonic plot carried out by Turkey's Dönme.