This history of the Dönme, followers of seventeenth-century messianic leader Shabbatai Tzevi (an Ottoman convert from Judaism to Islam), offers a timely contribution to a cross-disciplinary trend: the study of ontology, that is, questions about which groups exist, what they have in common, and how they should be grouped or divided. As Baer writes, “What are the limits to being a Jew, a Muslim, a Turk, or a Greek?” Using genealogies, tomb inscriptions, memoirs, interviews, and archival sources, Baer argues that for three hundred centuries the Dönme were neither Crypto-Jews nor heretical Muslims, as many have argued, but something else entirely, namely a mythologized group known for secrecy and syncretism.

Because the Dönme “counted” in records and official documents as Muslims for a large swath of Ottoman history, and due to their near-invisibility today, it is nearly impossible to estimate their demographic contours. However, Baer nicely shows how Dönme identity maps onto other ontologies, specifically how public and private spheres are reclassified over time and space. Building on Taussig's notion of the “public secret,” Baer chronicles how what are considered public and private in the Dönme world shifts according to the general political conditions that dictate how these categories are defined and ordered. For example, an irony of the transition from Ottoman Empire to the Turkish and Greek nation-states is that, despite pronouncements of privatization of confessional identities, nationalistic ideologues' parsed ontological oppositions in ways anything but confessional; instead, classificatory practices became increasingly tied to racialized categories, based on the argument that Dönme had Jewish “blood” that no amount of time or “belief” could overwrite.

Baer attributes the Dönme's demise to the rise of powerful state ideologies that undercut Dönme cosmopolitanism, and a weakening of the community's once-stringent rules of endogamous marriage. He offers a striking case of the first-noted marriage between a Dönme and a Muslim, celebrated among Young Turks as “the fatal blow to the Dönme caste.” By treating the question of endogamy, we see how resistance, or lack thereof, to powerful state ontological processes may take shape in the intimate or “private” sphere. Another useful locus for studying tensions between private and public subjectivities is the educational realm. Drawing on Turkish, Greek, and English sources, Baer details the ethical philosophies and practices that characterized the syncretism practiced in Dönme schools. His examination of seemingly non-political realms—marriage, education, and funerary practices—illuminates the complex social and historical processes behind ontological classifications.

The book left me with three questions: (1) How were Dönme “marked” as distinct from Muslims or Jews? Given that Baer's subjects are identified by their particularly “Dönme” names, I would have liked more explicit attention to the question of names, or other signifiers, that made Dönme “knowable” to the public and to themselves. (2) Baer offers suggestions toward comparative lessons drawn from the Dönme experience, but given the record of regular accusations of Dönme as “Judaizers” (non-Jewish practitioners of Judaism), it would have been helpful to focus more closely on the comparative differences between treatments of the Dönme, Muslims, and Rabbinic Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and the Turkish Republic. More to the point, if Dönme “Judaizing” was such a crime, what does this tell us about the lives of self-proclaimed Jews (and others) under these regimes? (3) How, where, and why does Dönme identification persist? Given that Baer's exegesis builds on statements made by descendants of Dönme who were interviewed over the past decade, readers would benefit from understanding how, exactly, Baer employed oral history and memoir in his analyses, as well as how Dönme today interpret their own past.

One anticipates Turkish and Greek translations as alternatives to today's bestselling titles that capitalize on conspiracy theories that accuse the Dönme—in the past as in the present—of being secret Jews responsible for undermining Islam, Turkey, secularism, and everything in-between. Baer's employment of historical vignettes enlivens his narrative, and the book lends itself to undergraduate teaching and popular adoption. The latter is critical given that the book offers, finally, a non-sensational treatment of the Dönme.