One gets a sense of the difficult terrain that Marc Baer navigates in his new book, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, when one reads in the acknowledgements that, “[b]ecause of the sensitivity of this book's topic in Turkey, I do not refer to my interviewees by name or even location unless their identity as Dönme is already publicly known” (xix). Three and a half centuries after followers of Shabbatai Tzevi—some two or three hundred families—joined the Ottoman Jewish claimant of messiah and converted to Islam, the group is all but disappearing after being uprooted from its native Salonika in the Turkish–Greek population exchange of 1923 and due to the pressures of Turkish nationalism. Yet popular imagination still spots “secret Jews,” which is how the Dönme came to be seen, everywhere in Turkish society. The second best-selling book in Turkey in 2007 contended, for example, that Prime Minister Erdoğan, from the Islamist Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, and his wife were in reality “secret Jews,” and other popular publications have claimed the same about many prominent figures in Turkish society (ix).

That Dönme should be regarded as “secret Jews” was, as Baer shows convincingly in this erudite and well-documented study, a product of the “ethnicized religion” and the racial thinking of early twentieth-century Turkish nationalism. Dönme did not consider themselves as “crypto-Jews,” nor did Ottoman Jews consider them as such. In the traditional order of Ottoman society, “religion” was a matter of communal belonging, not subject to the sincerity and orthodoxy of one's religious beliefs, and the Jewish ancestry of the Dönme was irrelevant before Western ideas of race entered the discourse of Turkish nationalism. In his introduction, Baer provides a brief discussion of the origins of the Dönme as a social group and of their syncretistic religious tradition that emerged at the intersection of Sabbatean Kabbalah and Sufism. He describes the early split in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century into three distinct groups—Yakubi, Karakaş, and Kapanci—but the bulk of Baer's account focuses on the century between 1850 and 1950, for which, he says, documentation is most extensive and which was the pivotal period that saw the transition from the imperial Ottoman order to post-Ottoman nationalism.

In Baer's reading, there was nothing unusual about the Dönme in the Ottoman context prior to the mid-nineteenth century. They were fully part of the Ottoman social fabric, thoroughly assimilated into Ottoman urban culture, and part of Muslim society. Yet the Dönme also succeeded in perpetuating the sense of a distinct ethnic identity tied to their syncretistic religious outlook and practice, maintaining social boundaries separating the group from its surroundings through elaborate genealogies, endogamy, and social segregation, creating their own schools, maintaining their own burial sites, and establishing business partnerships and a merchant network beyond the confines of the empire within a space defined by belonging to the Dönme community. Baer's narrative chronicles the demise of this traditional imperial order and the impossibility for the Dönme to find a legitimate place within the new reality of the late Ottoman Empire, with the expanding role of the state in defining normative boundaries of religious belonging and Islamic Orthodoxy, and of Turkish nationalism, predicated as it was, according to Baer's provocative interpretation, on ethnicized religion (one could not truly be a Turk without being Muslim) and on racialized nationalism (one could not truly be a Turkish Muslim without having “Turkish blood”).

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Dönme—as individuals if not as a community—played an important role in the modernization of the empire, in particular of Salonika, one of its largest and most cosmopolitan cities and the single most important center of the Dönme. Dönme leaders established some of the first modern schools in Salonika, promoting morality and ethics along with science and foreign languages, but also Sufi spirituality. Much has been made in Turkish historiography of the fact that the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, attended the modern school of the Dönme educator Şemsi Efendi in Salonika in 1886–1887, though Baer challenges the notion that the Dönme were instrumental in the emergence of Turkish secularism and secular nationalism, noting that religious teachings, especially Sufi teachings, continued to play an important role in the modern schools. The Dönme contribution to the modernization of Salonika extended well beyond schools. In the 1880s, for example, Dönme intellectuals began publishing a modern literary journal in Ottoman Turkish, Gonca-i Edeb (The Rosebud of Literature). Noteworthy too is the role of Salonika's Dönme mayor Hamdi Bey who served from 1893 to 1902 and oversaw the modernization of the urban landscape of this Ottoman port city. Inasmuch as Salonika can be seen as a “laboratory of Ottoman urban political reform” (85), this certainly had implications for the modernization of the empire more generally.

Given their important role in the local politics and the emerging public sphere of Salonika—where the Dönme represented one-third of the city's Muslim population on the eve of the population exchange in 1923 (67)—and their prominent role as journalists or in the city's Masonic lodges where many of the revolutionaries of 1908 had been socialized, it is not surprising to see that many Dönme individuals played a leading role in the Young Turk revolution that brought the authoritarian rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II to an end and the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) to power. One of the CUP's main ideologues in 1908, scion of a Dönme tobacco merchant family, was Dr. Nâzım, who was, as Baer points out by invoking what is probably the most obvious parallel, “about as representative of the Dönme as Leon Trotsky was of Russian Jews” (91).

After the Greek occupied Salonika in 1912 and made it part of the Greek nation state, the demise of the Dönme community in the city began, as the Greek state set out to make the city less Ottoman, less Muslim, and less Jewish (Sephardic Jews had long been the majority of the city's population). The forced population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923 finally led to the demise of Salonika's Dönme community. In the eyes of the Greek government, the Dönme were Muslims and thus subject to deportation; arriving in large numbers in Turkey (particularly Istanbul), however, the place of the Dönme in the new Turkish national order became the subject of heated controversy. Ironically, it was a Dönme author who incited, in 1924, a public debate when he suggested in an “Open Letter to All Salonikan Dönme” that Dönme could not be considered members of the Turkish race because Turks were Muslims by birth and not by conversion (!), and that the Dönme were Jews in origin and thus remained alien to the Muslims (157–163). Whereas the Salonikan Dönme managed to recreate many of their former institutions in Istanbul—Baer talks about Dönme schools and cemeteries that were established—and while Dönme intellectuals defended their Turkishness and patriotism and sought a place for themselves within a secular Turkish nationalism, the basic dilemma remained: The racialized notion of Turkish nationalism embraced by the Young Turks and in the new Turkish Republic meant that the boundary separating the Dönme from Muslim Turks could not easily be overcome because Dönme now became genealogically “Jewish” (or, worse, “secret Jews”).

Baer's analysis is most compelling when he uses the fate of the Dönme as a way to understand the transition from the Ottoman imperial to the Turkish (and Greek) nation state. He is to be commended for giving us at last a nonsensationalist account of the Dönme that frames a provocative interpretation of modern Turkish nationalism. It might have been helpful to bring in the history of the Jews in the late Ottoman and the Turkish republican era, especially given the demographic realities in Salonika, and one wonders about the implications for Turkish Muslim–Jewish relations, as well as the relations between Jews and Dönme, once the latter were publicly marked as “secret Jews.” It is also true that we learn relatively little about the quotidian lives and religious practices of the Dönme, and Baer's account provides only occasional glimpses, for example when he comments in his description of the new Yakubi Dönme mosque in Salonika on the “Dönme custom of publicly fulfilling all of the requirements of Sunni Islam, but with slight alterations. Thus, for example, Dönme ended their Ramadan fast each day five minutes prior to its official end, invalidating it” (41). In all, though, this is an important, innovative, and provocative book on the fate of ethnic-religious pluralism under an ostensibly secular nationalism.