View Full Version : Powerful Jewish Marranoes in Turkey - info from a mainstream Jewish source
"Certainly Turkey felt that it had what to gain by supporting Israel. By supporting Israel and the Jewish state they showed the world a support for secularism and enlightenment. The perception that Jews were powerful and influential both in Turkey and the U.S reigned. "
I posted this article on the Original Dissent forum as an example to overtly conspiratorial wackoes on just what kind of material you need to prove genuine Marrano conspiracies/networking.
http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20663&page=2&highlight=kemal
http://www.angelfire.com/ex/sbtai/ehrlich.html
Sabbatean Messianism as Proto-Secularism: Examples in Modern Turkey and Zionism
/ Avrum Ehrlich
Ana Sayfa
Makale ve Röportajlar
TURKISH JEWISH ENCOUNTERS Studies on Turkish Jewish Relations Through the Ages
Edited by Mehmet Tütüncü ISBN 90-804409-4-9 Published and distributed by SOTA, Haarlem 2001
This article tries to understand two aspects of the relationship between Sabbateanism and secularism, the first is the influence of the Dönme; an organised Sabbatean group that converted to Islam out of theological conviction which we will argue underscored a distinct "assimilation doctrine" and a profound sympathy for secularism. The second is the general effects of Sabbatean doctrines and the extent to which it trickled down and influenced strains within the mainstream Jewish mindset. These two are very different, despite its secrecy the former is an organised cultural group while the latter does not credit Sabbateanism in any way and even tries to disguise it, so proof must be sought through clues and doctrinal similarities still extant within the thinking patterns of suspected groups. Scholars such as Scholem and Katz undertook this and we have them to thank for drawing the connection between Sabbateanism and certain modern Jewish phenomena. This article carries off from Scholem's assertion and Katz's follow-up that Sabbateanism, as an anti-nomian religion, provided precedents and legitimacy to a Judaism that did not necessarily keep all Jewish law and in doing so paved the way to forms of ritually non-observant Judaism such as the Haskalla and Zionism. In this paper we will concentrate, amongst other things, an evidence of Sabbatean influence an the Young Turk revolution and an Zionism.
The Dönme answered to various names such as "Maaminim" (Hebrew for `believers'), "Avdeti" (Arabic for `heretics'), "Selanikli" (from Salonika), and Sabetayci (Sabbetai). By the 19th century three strains of Dönme had emerged, each with their own distinct classes and kahal/synagogues and they were particularly represented in the Dönme stronghold of Salonica.
I. Izmirim, (otherwise known as Kapanci) were the original followers of Sabetay Sevi, named alter his home-town of Izmir. The Izmiris were successful in trade and in intelligentsia - they formed the aristocracy of Dönme society under the name "Cavelleros", they were highly assimilated into Ottoman society and spoke Turkish.
2. The Yakoviyim, followed Sevi's brother Jacob believing him to be his incarnation. They were represented in lower and middle classes of Ottoman society and were commonly bureaucrats in Ottoman government.
3. The Konyoses, (otherwise known as Karaka~) followed one of Sevi's disciples Baruchia Russo believing him to be his incarnation. They were the poorest of the Dönme, spoke Judeo-Spanish and were generally artisans and workers. A part of this group are believed to still practice.
The extent to which Jews were involved in the Young Turk revolution is debated, some arguing that Jews and Dönme dominated the Committee of the Union and Progress Party (C.U.P) - which gained control of the State. Others argue that this was anti-Semitic rhetoric and exaggerated and that while the Jews supported the revolution an a grass roots level, they were not highly represented in the upper echelons of the party. Indeed British diplomats did report to the home office that a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy was at work favouring the revolution. The Dönme are believed to have been equally involved in the revolution but exact details are less known due to a number of reasons. Many Dönme were cursorily described as Jews by observers lacking an appreciation for the subtleties of the two communities. The general secrecy of the community and its increased secrecy alter WWII and the threats of Islamic fundamentalism peppered with assimilation trends and extreme secularism makes documentation difficult.
Revolutionary activists Leon Gattegno and a Dönme friend Mazlum Hakki published a Journal in Paris entitled "Resad" under pseudonym of `sucro' and sent it to the great powers condemning the Sultans government. In an article in the C.U.P Journal "Mechveret Suppliment Francais" the Dönme were mentioned to be the only group in Salonica active an behalf of the C.U.P and the revolution. Another article describes the Dönme as one of the most modernised groups in the empire. According to Sükrü Hanioglu about five people appear active in the Salonican branch of the C.U.P two were Jewish and two of possible Dönme descent. Emmanuel Karasu was Grand Master of the Macedonia Risorta Masonic Lodge and invited Muslims and Dönme to join the vlodges of the Empire sheltering them and providing them with a framework to disseminate their ideas. Avram Galante was a writer and participated in the Second Turk Congress in Paris, 1907. Ferdinand Efendi, an Ottoman of Greek descent and possibly Dönme. A man called Archbolo whose ethnic descent is unknown, and another who had a Muslim name but might also have been Dönme. Dr Nazim, Nuzhet Faik, Mustafa Arif, Muslihiddin Adil, Sukru Bleda, Halide Edip Adivar and Ahmet Emin Yalman were all active in the Young Turks and of Dönme families. Mehmet Kapanci (1839-1924) who was a mayor of Salonica and a weil known banker funded the C.U.P and was a Dönme.
Other Jews active in the Young Turks were Nissim Mazliah from Izmir and Vitali Faradji , Moise Cohen (later called Munis Tekinalp) who was an active Jew and once rabbinical student who turned to business and actively asserted a proud Turkish identity along with Zionist sentiments. Other Jews and Dönme served as ranking officers in the Turkish army. Jews had always been represented in Ottoman parliaments but there had been a significant rise alter the revolution reflecting their degree of participation.
Unable to work together in their respective religious environments, The Jews and Dönme appeared to have met and fraternised within the Masonic lodge. Because of the rigid initiation rites the fear of espionage by the Sultan was less in such an environment and it was here that revolutionary sentiments. The Dönme thrived in the Masonic environment allowing them to be both secretive and influential, maintaining their religious ideas in a non-dogmatic atmosphere, bridging the gap between the Jews and the Muslims, they seemed to represent the happy medium of the secular Young Turk revolution. Even today Dönme are involved in the Masonic Lodges of Turkey. Sahir Talat Akev of the Kapanci-Izmir group of Dönme was the Grand Master of the Masons until his death in 1999. In Salonica of 1879 the Kapanci Dönme set up a private school system called "Terakki Mektebi'' (``progress'' named alter the revolutionary "Progress Party" and suggesting the strong spare of ethos) which became a model for other private schools in Turkey. It was transferred to Istanbul alter the population-transfer and has become one of the best- known private high schools (called Sisli Terakki Lisesi). Similarly the Karakas Dönme founded the Fevziye Mektebi School and recently founded a university by the name of Isik Üniversitesi.
Considering its Islamic heritage and the environment of Arab hatred for Israel it is remarkable that Turkey has fostered such strong ties with Israel and the causes for it may be traced to the Dönme influence. Dönme members today represent the elite of society within Turkey and it is the fear of being discovered that created the intense secrecy around them, their inereased secrecy and influence continues to circularly feed the hatred and suspicion surrounding them.
Presently there are some well-known Dönme families and other less known families occupying important positions in Modern Turkish life. The current Foreign Minister Mr. Ismail Cem is a Dönme though some of his family members have officially come out and declared Dönme ethnicity but disassociate from the cultural group These include relatives: Cemil Ipekci, a famous fashion designer in Turkey is of Dönme descent and Nukhet Izet Ipekci, daughter of the famous Journalist Abdi Ipekci, who declared on an Islamic channel that her parents were of Dönme origins. Others such as the industrialist the Dilber and Bezmen familie are Rahsan Ecevit wife of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit is a Dönme. First ever ,female Prime Minister Tansu Ciller is half Dönme on her mother's side. Altan Öymen, past leader of the Republican People's Party was of Dönme descent.
Other prominent personalities ranging from well known writers, journalists, film makers, professors, lawyers, judges, bureaucrats (legal and foreign Service), bankers, industrialists are of Dönme origin. They can almost be said to be the standard bearers of secularism and modern Turkish nationalism that is based an cultural unity rather than racial characteristics. They are more advanced in this process than secular Turkish Jews and in many ways resemble the prominence and thinking of the European Jewish Enlightenment leading many to suspicion that Sabbateanism played a rote there too. Sympathy with Jews exists but association is not common because of the fears of being tainted by Islamic fundamentalism.
Turkey was a member of the commission for Palestinian conciliation and as an Islamic country was expected to take an anti-Israel Position. Under the representation of the intellectual Huseyin Cahit Yalcin Turkey proved to be very supportive of the fledgling State. Yalcin had been friendly Ben Gurion and there are many reasons to believe that his intellectual background brought him into contact with many Jews and Dönme of Turkey. He became the step-father of Mehmet Cavit Bey's son Siar Yalcin after Bey's execution in 1926. While his initial concern had been that Israel represented foreign interests in the region, those fears were allayed, and Turkey formally recognised the State of Israel an 28 th March 1949, embassies, trade and direct flights followed. Certainly Turkey feit that it had what to gain by supporting Israel. By supporting Israel and the Jewish state they showed the world a support for secularism and enlightenment. The perception that Jews were powerful and influential both in Turkey and the U.S reigned. The agreement was signed only a few days before the Turkish foreign minister met with American President Truman, who himself supported the partition plan of Palestine and was helped by many Jews. The appointment of Henry Morgenthau, a Jewish - American as ambassador in Turkey during the early Part of the century reinforced this perception.
From a Philhellenic site The Greco Report - another good piece that doesn't look too paranoid or rabidly anti-Semitic and thus makes overall a reliable and respectable impression, IMHO.
Note how their claims and citations are properly detailed, avoiding vague generalizations.
http://www.grecoreport.com/the_young_turks_who_were_they.htm
The Young Turks: Who Were They?
During the last quarter of the 19th century, the Near East Question passed into its critical phase. As a result of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, the Ottoman Empire lost extensive territory mainly in the Balkans where the "autonomous" states of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina passed into the de facto administrative sphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thessaly and the prefecture of Artas were ceded to Greece, and in Asia, Russia annexed the territories of Kars and Ardachan in Turkish Armenia. In Africa, the English claimed Egypt, and the French Tunisia, while the Italians did not bother to conceal their territorial ambitions toward Tripoli. Meanwhile, the dissident movements in Crete, Armenia, and Macedonia were beginning to reach worrisome levels for the Turkish Sultanate.
One of the first real threats to the Ottoman Throne was a hard-core, conspiratorial group that formed in 1889 among the students of the Military Medical School in Constantinople. The dissatisfaction, though, was widespread throughout the entire military, and had to do with what might be considered today to be union demands: low wages that were paid sporadically and after months of waiting, a promotion system that was torturously slow and not based on merit but on connections, and a cynical disappointment engendered by the promised but never actualized modernization of the military. The main motivating factor in the ever-widening discontent, however, was an agony and concern over the independence of the Turkish State and how best to ensure its continuance. Added to this, and of equal concern, was the problem having to do with the welfare and perpetuation of the Muslim populations living among the many other ethnicities within the Empire.
The conspiratorial leadership, who came to be known as the Young Turks, expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo, throwing all of the blame on the Sultan, Abdul Hamit, who they proclaimed to be too dictatorial. They demanded his exile -- though not the abolishment of the Sultanate -- together with the restoration of the constitution of 1876.
Union and Progress
The Young Turk movement -- after many mishaps and near dissolution -- finally achieved it first goal. In early July of 1908, led by the officer-members of the Committee of Union and Progress (Itihàt vè Terakì), the Turkish troops stationed in Macedonia refused to obey orders coming from Constantinople. The Young Turks then sent a telegraphed ultimatum to the Sultan from Serres on the 21st of July. They demanded the immediate restoration and implementation of the constitution, and threatened him with dethronement should he fail to comply. On the 24th of July, Abdul Hamit announced that the constitution had been restored and was in full force and effect.
The subsequent mid-20th century overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt by the Nasserite revolutionaries bears some striking similarities to the Young Turk movement. There are, however, some very striking differences as well. Some of these are: 1) the diverse ethnic background of the conspirators; 2) the significant and crucial role played by the allied movement of fellow-conspirators known as the Donmè (Jews who had converted [?] to Islam); and, 3) the enthusiastic way in which the conspiracy was embraced by Masonic elements.
As far as the multiethnic composition of the conspirators is concerned, one need only read their names to verify their diverse background: Tserkès (Circassion ), Mehmet Ali, Xersekli (Herzogovinians), Ali Roushdi, Kosovali (Kosovars) and others. In many cases, the ethnic origin of the conspirator was not evident from the name: Ibrahim Temo was an Albanian, as was Ismail Kemal. Murat Bey Dagestanos and Achmet Riza had an Arkhazian father and an Austrian mother. One of the theoreticians of the movement was Ziyia Ngiokali, a Kurd, while one of the major planners of tactics and theory was a Jew from Serres who went by the name of Tekìn Alì (real name, Moshe Cohen).
The telegraph-office clerk who became one of the ruling troika of post-revolutionary Turkey, Talaàt Pasha, was Bosnian, Pomack, or Gypsy; the point being that he was not a Turk. We should also make note of the fact that the Committee of Union and Progress admitted many members from areas outside of the Ottoman Empire, and that some of these even served on its Central Committee.
Masonic elements
The strong connection between the Itihàts (conspirators) and Masonry is a well-documented fact. The leftist Turkish writer, Kamouran Mberik Xartboutlou, in his book, The Turkish Impasse ( from the Greek translation of the French publication of 1974. p.24), wrote: "Those who desired entry into the inner circle of that secret organization [the Itihàt], had to be a Mason, and had to have the backing of a large segment of the commercial class." The true nature of the relationship between the Young Turks and the Masonic lodges of Thessaloniki has been commented upon by many researchers and writers. In her well-known and extensively documented book, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London. 1928, p. 284), author and historian Nesta Webster writes that "The Young Turk movement began in the Masonic lodges of Thessaloniki under the direct supervision of the Grand Orient Lodge of Italy, which later shared in the success of Mustapha Kemal."
Of course, the precise nature of this relationship is clouded in mystery, but enough facts exist allowing for more than just informed conjecture based on circumstantial evidence. An example of the Itihàt-Masonic connection is the interview that Young Turk, Refik Bey, gave to the Paris newspaper Le Temps, on the 20th of August 1908: "It's true that we receive support from Freemasonry and especially from Italian Masonry. The two Italian lodges [of Thessaloniki] -- Macedonia Risorta and Labor et Lux -- have provided invaluable services and have been a refuge for us. We meet there as fellow Masons, because it is a fact that many of us are Masons, but more importantly we meet so that we can better organize ourselves."
The Jewish Component
The Donmè ("convert" in Turkish), was a Hebrew heresy whose followers converted [?] to Islam in the 18th century. They were most heavily concentrated in Thessaloniki. According to the Great Hellenic Encyclopedia [Megali Elliniki Enkiklopethia]: "It is generally accepted that the Donmè secretly continue to adhere to the Hebrew religion and don't allow their kind to intermarry with the Muslims."
The disproportionate power and influence (in light of their number) that the Donmè had on both the Ottoman Empire and on the Young Turk movement has been the subject of a great deal of commentary by many observers and researchers. The eminent British historian, R. Seton Watson, in his book, The Rise of Nationality in the Balkans. London, 1917 (H Gennisi tou Ethnikismou sta Valkania), wrote the following: "The real brains behind the movement were Jews or Islamic-Jews. The wealthy Donmè and Jews of Thessaloniki supported [the Young Turks] economically, and their fellow Jewish capitalists in Vienna and Berlin -- as well as in Budapest and possibly Paris and London -- supported them financially as well.
In the January 23rd, 1914, issue of the Czarist Police [Okrana] Ledger (Number 16609), directed to the Ministry of the Exterior in Saint Petersburg, we read: "A pan-Islamic convention of Itihàts and Jews was held in the Nouri Osman lodge in Constantinople. It was attended by approximately 700 prominent Itihàts and Jews, including "Minister" Talaàt Bey, Bentri Bey, Mbekri Bey, and (Donmè) Javit Bey. Among the many Jews in attendance, two of the most prominent were the Head of the Security Service, Samouel Effendi, and the Vice-Administrator of the Police, Abraham Bey."
Donmè and Constantine
The numerous Donmè in positions of authority within the machinery of the Itihàt government, as well as on the powerful Central Committee, strengthens the conviction that their influence was widespread and vital to the cause. Ignoring the names mentioned in the Czarist Police Ledger, and even ignoring such Jews as the fanatical Pan-Turkic [Marxist revolutionary and poet, Hikmet] Nazim, or even the many casual allusions [as if it were common knowledge at the time] to the Jewish descent of that most dedicated believer in the Young Turk movement, Mustapha Kemal "Atatürk," one still finds oneself wondering by what authority and under whose auspices was such an obscure Jewish Donmè from Thessaloniki, by the name of Emmanouel Karasso, able to become a member of the three-man committee that announced his dethronement to Sultan Abdul Hamit after the counter-coup of April 1909?
Compelling, too, is the widely-referenced document which states that Constantine, the King of Greece at the time, characterized the entire Young Turk movement as composed of "Israelites." According to the facts presented in her book, Glory and Partisanship, the Greek professor of the University of Vienna, Polychroni Enepekithi, contends that Constantine made that characterization while complaining to the German Ambassador in Athens about the outrages committed by Young Turks against Hellenes living in the Ottoman Empire.
These references to the relationship between the Donmè, the Masons, and the Young Turks has not been prompted by anti-Semitism or Masonophobia. Rather, we are attempting to shed some light on what to us seems like a puzzling paradox in this revolutionary movement, which is: Why it is that this non-Turkish leadership struggled so hard under the banner of justice for the Turkish people? Also, why is it that others, having nothing to do with Sunnite Islam [the form of Islam practiced in Turkey] struggled equally hard under the banner of justice for Islam? The only answer to this paradox demands that we consider that there may have been another reason behind their fervid struggle, and that this unstated cause is what bound these "ideologues" together.
Source
[I]Nemesis. by Ioasif Kassesian. September 2001. pp. 64-66.
Translated by staff. Emphasis added.
This article would look like almost too good to be true (I am always on my guard in such cases), but it would indeed seem to come from a mainstream Jewish newspaper.
In any case, Kemal Atatürk was born in Salonika (Thessaloniki), a place teeming with Jews and crypto-Jews before the WW II - these are both universally accepted facts. I have also read that he was actually born right in the Jewish part on the town as well, but I can't confirm it just now.
"In 1900, there were approximately 80,000 Jews in Salonika (out of a total population of 173,000)."
http://www.bh.org.il/Communities/Archive/Salonika.asp
(And those were only the "official" Jews, not including Donmé marranos)
Btw, this Hillel Halkin seems to be neocon who has written stuff for "The Commentary"
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http://www.ahiworld.com/bbs/messages/51.html
The Jewish Post of New York. January 28, 1994
WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL
"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed
By Hillel Halkin
ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask, I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday, Jan. 24, on the first visit ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.
Ms. Kenan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of their arrival, and asked what my second question was.
"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"
"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's national hero.
Excited and Distressed
I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so glad you called again," said Ms. Kenan, who now sounded excited and a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"
Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it too?
* Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up," she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"
I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one.
Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:
"Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and
founder of the modern Turkish state.
"Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika
and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief,
widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from
the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a
traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his
demand to study in a military academy."
Secular Father
The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name. The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers:
"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a
partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a * lay
school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science.
"In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after
a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and
arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with
the traditional ceremony. ...
"Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the
school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free
preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no
objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions
respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."
Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."
Learning Hebrew
Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor: " 'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one* with the bottle of arrack?' "
" 'Yes.' "
" 'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.' "
" 'What's his name?' "
" 'Mustafa Kemal.' "
" 'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was
startled by his piercing green eyes."
Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided:
"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an
ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in
this country would do well to join his camp."
During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:"
'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I
remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read
it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "
And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our
glasses."
Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith:
"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.
Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it eflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, in his book on lost Jewish communities, "The Exiled and the Redeemed":
'Saintly Offspring'
"Once a year [during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday'] the candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional bithday. ... It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as saintly."
Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-21, and its descendants, many of whom are said to be wealthy businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have assimilated totally into Turkish life.
After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the father of the 'Father of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept.
Petr
Here is another good source. A whole book on Marranos - I'd love to get my hands on The Secret Jews, but this is the only excerpt I could find through web search so far:
http://www.ummah.net/sultan/donmeh.html
The Secret Jews, Joachim Prinz, 1973, pp. 111-122
..... In December 1686, more than three hundred families converted to Islam in Salonika. Like Shabtai and other Marranos, they continued to attend Jewish services secretly and observed certain Jewish customs in their homes.
This was the origin of the most important group, numerically and historically, of Islamic Marranos. The faithful Mohemmedans call these hidden Jews 'doenmehs', the renegades.
..... Over the years the 'doenmeh' movement became firmly established in Asia Minor. In the nineteenth century the sect was estimated to have twenty thousand members. Salonika remained its main seat until that city became Greek in 1913. Although the Jewish community remained there under Greek rule, the 'doenmehs' moved to Constantinople.
In Salonika in the early days of the movement the ten commandments "of our Lord King and Messiah Shabtai Zvi" were proclaimed by the 'doenmehs'. They still form the credo of the surviving 'doenmehs' of our time.
I shall meticulously adhere to the customs of the Turks so as not to arose their suspicion. I shall not only observe the Fast of Ramadan but all the other Muslim customs which are observed in public.
I shall not marry into a Muslim family nor maintain any intimate association with them, for they are to us an abomination and particularly their women.
From time to time the Turkish governors of Salonika, who received complaints about the sect from the Mohammedan clergy, tried to investigate the strange existence of the 'doenmehs'. Their clannishness, their refusal to mingle with Mohammedan families, and their marital restrictions had become a well-known fact, difficult to hide from the majority of the people among whom they had lived for many generations.
Socially, they seemed impenetrable, although in their Moslem religious practices they were beyond reproach. In fact, they often seemed even more devout followers of the Prophet Mohammed and more sincere worshipers of Allah than the rest of the community. They fasted during Ramadan, and their leaders and adherents were found in large, even conspicuous numbers among the pilgrims to Mecca. It was well known that in the seventeenth century Joseph Zvi, one of the immediate followers of Shabtai Zvi and one of his inner circle, died on the way from his pilgrimage to Mecca, and the day of his death is still commemorated.
The revolt of the Young Turks in 1908 against the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid began among the intellectuals of Salonika. It was from there that the demand for a constitutional regime originated. Among the leaders of the revolution which resulted in a more modern government in Turkey were Djavid Bey and Mustafa Kemal. Both were ardent 'doenmehs'. Djavid Bey became minister of finance; Mustafa Kemal became the leader of the new regime and he adopted the name of Ataturk. His opponents tried to use his 'doenmeh' background to unseat him, but without success. Too many of the Young Turks in the newly formed revolutionary Cabinet prayed to Allah, but had as their real prophet Shabtai Zvi, the Messiah of Smyrna.
I recognized this author, because Israel Shahak had cited him in his classic book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, and there Prinz was also expressing viewpoints that modern Jewry would find (ahem) somewhat embarrassing:
http://www.abbc.net/islam/english/books/jewhis/jewhis4.htm
"Perhaps the most shocking example of this type is the delight with which some Zionist leaders in Germany welcomed Hitler's rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of 'race' and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among 'Aryans'. They congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy - the forces of liberalism. Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We, Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so- called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism:
The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.28
The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify them- selves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfillment of our desires'. And further:
We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations.29
The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution~a and great expectations that, in the congenial atmosphere of the myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive.
28 Dr Joachim Prinz, Wirjuden, Berlin, 1934, pp. 150-1.
29 Ibid., pp. 154-5.
Yes, Joachim Prinz was the essential thousand-faced Jew - in the early 1930s he was praising Nazis for their racial separatism, and in the 1960s he was marching with Martin Luther King! Gold medal in hypocrisy for this guy.
"While serving as President of the American Jewish Congress, he represented the Jewish community as an organizer of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington. He came to the podium immediately following a stirring spiritual sung by the folk singer Odetta and just he before Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream speech."
http://www.joachimprinz.com/civilrights.htm
(A whole website dedicated to him:
http://www.joachimprinz.com/
Petr
And here's another fellow I'd like to learn more about - he was shortly referred to in the article by A. Ehrlich that started this thread:
"Moise Cohen (later called Munis Tekinalp) who was an active Jew and once rabbinical student who turned to business and actively asserted a proud Turkish identity along with Zionist sentiments."
Well, this inspired me to perform a little web search, and I found this tidbit:
http://www.jagnes.com/5_2.html
M. Asim Karadmerlioglu:
Some Notes on Tekinalp and Turkish Nationalism in the 1920s
This paper intends to shed light on some of the ideas of Munis Tekinalp, a prominent theoretician of Turkish nationalism who, despite his enormous contributions, has been quite neglected in modern Turkey, probably due to his Jewish origin. In that context, the paper intends to discuss some features of Turkish nationalism during the 1920s. A comparison of Tekinalps theoretical contributions with some recent findings on nationalism, and the role of his Jewish identity, are also discussed."
Then I found Turkish blogger Mavi Boncuk's review of Tekinalp's biography, kindly providing us with some details about this Turanian giant:
http://www.blogger.com/email-post.g?blogID=6888473&postID=108952664476073025
Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot: 1883-1961.
Mavi Boncuk |
This is a perfect and well detailed book about Munis Tekinalp "Tekinalp" (aka. Moise Cohen), one of the first and most important and influent theorists of the Turkish patriotism and Turkish identity along Ziya Gokalp and others, including large quotes from his works. In the book, his life is very well descripted as a very productive intellectual and writer at all of his long life, his thoughts on the Turkish Resurrection, his promotions and works on the behalf of the Turkish Renaissance. After the Proclamation of the Republic, Tekinalp took part of the reforms who leads to Westernisation of the Turkiye. As a enthusiastic supporter of the Ataturk's principles, he wrote one of most complete and consistent desciptions of these principles and he interpreted firstly by the frame of an ideology "Kemalism". He agreed and demostrated as a believing Jew, how valid the definition of a Turk: "Who feels Turk, is a Turk" whatever his religion, race or nationality. Thinking how different this definition at other "Civilised" countries, who relies it to the blood, race, or to born at a country, he showed well the invalidity of the continuous injustices, unfairnesses, and libelous propagandas against the presence of the Turks on the Worlds. He is a great Turk and patriot.
What a perfect neo-conservative Mr. Cohen/Tekinalp was! Turkey too is a "Proposition Nation," don't you know. :p
Petr
Felix the Cat
11-13-2005, 06:02 PM
A lot of interesting stuff here. Some quick points -
Western Jews seem rather embarassed by the whole "Khazar" business, but if European Jews indeed posess a significant amount of Turkic blood, there would be no surprise at all in their support of Turkish nationalism
And Islam, no less than Christianity, is an offensive and blasphemous heresy in Jewish eyes. Any movement that delegitimizes it would naturally tend to attract Jewish support
A common hostility to Russians and Arabs would also tend to work in favor of Jewish/Turkish friendship
A common hostility to Russians and Arabs would also tend to work in favor of Jewish/Turkish friendship
Indeed. Basically, Israel and Turkey are both nations that have routinely and roughly abused their neighbors and are therefore now hated by nearly everybody. Even without Marrano influence, it is only natural for these bandits to stick together, as even this Jewish columnist puts it:
http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ViewsPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article^l1453&enZone=Views&enVersion=0&
The intertwined fates of Turkey and Israel
By Albert Nekimken September 22, 2002
Originally published in the Washington-based Turkish Times.
...
In the mid-1970s, Ilhan Selcuk, a Leftist and often anti-American columnist for Cumhuriyet, a leading Istanbul daily, wrote with empathy about the plight of "the lonely man," by which he meant the country in the Middle East that stood alienated and alone, surrounded by hostile neighbors-presumably Israel. As he developed his argument, the reader gradually understood that the "yalniz adam" (lonely man) was, in fact, Turkey.
...
But it is worth remembering again that the relationship between Turkey and Israel, or Jews, began long before the 20th Century. In 1492, Ottoman Sultan Bayazit II, ordered provincial governors "not to refuse the Jews entry or cause them difficulties [after their expulsion from Span and Portugal], but to receive them cordially." Historians such as Bernard Lewis, write that Jews were not just permitted to settle in Ottoman lands, but were encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled to do so. Bayazit II remarked allegedly that "the Catholic monarch Ferdinand was wrongly considered as wise, since he impoverished Spain by the expulsion of the Jews, and enriched Turkey."
But this was only the beginning. Jews expelled from territory in Italy under Papal control in 1537 and those expelled from Bohemia in 1542 by King Ferdinand also found safe haven in the Ottoman Empire. In March 1556, Sultan Suleiman "the Magnificent" wrote a letter to Pope Paul IV asking for the immediate release of the Ancona Marranos, whom he declared to be Ottoman citizens. The Pope had no other alternative but to release them in recognition of the superior status of the Ottoman Empire at the time. By 1477, Jewish households in Istanbul numbered 1,647, or 11% of the total and 50 years later, their numbers had risen four-fold.
...
During WWII, Turkish diplomats rescued many Jews from Nazi persecution by giving them passports and Istanbul became a haven for many Jewish academics, such as Erich Auerbach, who did some his best work in Turkey.
In 1948, the United States was the first nation to recognize the new state of Israel; Turkey was the second. When the General Assembly adopted a resolution in December of the year calling on the Arabs and Jews to negotiate peace and creating a Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC), it consisted of the United States, France and Turkey. All Arab delegations voted against it.
..
In 1952 (the year when Turkey became a full member of NATO), General Omar Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that the West required 19 divisions to defend the Middle East and that Israel could supply two. By 1955, he expected only three states to provide the West with air power in Middle Eastern defense: Great Britain, Turkey and Israel.
Today, although Turkey is a Muslim country, it has become Israel's strongest ally in the region and comprises one leg of an official, strategic and military alliance between the United States, Turkey and Israel. Strong relations between the countries on the levels of trade, tourism and diplomacy stand in sharp contrast to the cold relations between Israel and Egypt, or between Turkey and its neighbor Syria.
Both Turkey and Israel have highly developed intelligence networks, modern weapons and trained armies. Beyond that, Turkey and Israel cooperate on the level of lobbying to influence American and European public opinion on a variety of issues. (With some annoyance, a leading Greek think tank attributed much of the effectiveness of the Turkish lobby in the U.S. to its "ability to manipulate and exploit the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship and the influence of the Jewish-American community in order to advance the Turkish agenda.")
...
Petr
Felix the Cat
11-14-2005, 06:24 AM
Also worth remembering the assistance Israel has given to Turkey against the Kurds
Mossad was almost certainly behind the capture of Abdullah Ocalan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_Ocalan) back in in 1998
He was earlier forced out of Syria after Turkey threatened war against the country.
The Turks have also periodically threatened to close the Euphrates to put pressure on Syria
Happy news, I have found a full version of this extraordinary essay on Turkish Marranos (Dönmes) - here:
Sabbatean Messianism as Proto Secularism
published in Turkish □ Jewish Encounters, (Haarlem, 2001)
M. Avrum Ehrlich
http://www.avrumehrlich.net/sabbatean.htm
And what do you know, Justin Raimondo's old enemy Stephen Schwartz is also involved with these people - now his conversion to Sufism makes a whole lot more sense:
"15. Personal correspondence with Stephen Schwartz, a writer and researcher on religion in Kosovo. Schwartz has taken a particular interest in the relationship between Bektashism and Sabbateanism in Kosovo and the region."
Here are some other interesting excerpts:
"It is also likely that those who had converted to Islam for pragmatic reasons prior to Sevi’s mystical apostasy later joined Donme communities feeling more comfortable there than in a purely Islamic environment. In many respects this resembled (or inspired) a later declaration by Moses Mendelsohn to be a “Jew in the home and a German in the street”, or rather in this earlier context “to be a Muslim on the street and a Jew in private”. The Donme became a home for assimilated Jews, much like the modern phenomena of mixed Jewish-Gentile couples joining Reform Temples because they are accepted there and are not in Orthodox communities. The influences of Sabbateanism can be detected in Mendelsohn’s sentiments and within the highly assimilatory program of the Enlightenment.
...
"The greatest change for the Donme community occurred during the Balkan wars when Salonica passed over to Greek hands. At this point many Donme resettled in Turkish Istanbul and set up schools and communities which have left a mark on Turkish society till today. However, the forced transfer of Turks from Salonica to Turkey in 1924 was the final blow to the Donme stronghold and changed the course of Donme history. While many attempted a rapprochement with the Jewish community that would allow them to remain in Salonica as Jews not as Turks, their efforts were rejected. Rabbinic refusal to accept them back remarkably saved them from extinction along with the rest of Salonican Jewry during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Other Donme are alleged to have converted to Christianity so as to remain in Salonica but the Greek public opinion viewed the Donme as more harmful than other Turks and sought their absolute expulsion. It is therefore unclear to what extent conversion to Christianity helped them and to what extent those that remained were saved from destruction under the Nazi occupation. From the 1940s there began a strong assimilatory trend among the Donme who resettled in Turkey. Efforts to preserve their secrecy were intensified, probably resulting from having witnessed the destruction of Greek Jewry and fear that the same could happen to them in the wake of Turkish co-operation with the Nazi regime. Fear of growing Islamic antagonism to the perceived Donme role in the overthrow of the Sultan and establishment of a secular State in Turkey further forced Donme affiliates to underplay their prominence and community network.
Though the Donme were never officially deemed to be a separate group there were signs that this might change when the 1960 Census registered them as a distinct group, primarily for taxation purposes. At the time it was believed that approximately 20,000 Donme members existed in Turkey. Some estimate their numbers to be around 50,000-60,000 today, others estimate it at 100,000. They are believed to be very prosperous but highly assimilated, with only a small minority being Sabbatean in the religious sense. They generally refer to themselves as “Salonicans” not as Sabbateans. They are extremely non-religious. The enmity of Islamic fundamentalism towards them is one of the strongest factors in the preservation of their distinct ethnic memory. Because of the high intermarriage rate the phenomenon of half-Donme is becoming increasingly well known. There have been recent efforts by partisan Donme activists to reclaim their national pride and standing in Turkish society but this has met with overall rejection, embarrassment and denial from the mainstream Donme population.
...
"There has been little evidence of anti-Semitism in Albanian history and few instances of collaboration with the Nazis to kill their Jews. (Stephen) Schwartz also asserts that Sevi became anti-nomian under Bektashi influence and was protected by the Bektashis after his conversion, who sent him to Albania where they were most powerful. Clearly this viewpoint is unduly influenced by Schwartz’s Bektashi sympathies.
...
"The religious press attacked the Republic, its founder Ataturk, and the secular nature of the regime. They never forgave the Donme for their role in the secular revolution and they became a convenient target for hatred. Over the last sixty years it is this hatred and racist rhetoric in the guise of Arab nationalism which constantly reminded Sabbateans of their racial heritage, otherwise complete assimilation into secular Islam might have been possible.
...
"The extent to which Jews were involved in the Young Turk revolution is debated, some arguing that Jews and Donme dominated the Committee of the Union and Progress Party (C.U.P) which gained control of the State. Others argue that this was anti-Semitic rhetoric and exaggerated and that while the Jews supported the revolution on a grass roots level, they were not highly represented in the upper echelons of the party. Indeed British diplomats did report to the home office that a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy was at work favouring the revolution. The Donme are believed to have been equally involved in the revolution but exact details are less known due to a number of reasons. Many Donme were cursorily described as Jews by observers lacking an appreciation for the subtleties of the two communities. The general secrecy of the community and its increased secrecy after WWII and the threats of Islamic fundamentalism, peppered with assimilation trends and extreme secularism, makes documentation difficult. The fear of reprisal by fundamentalist groups in Modern Turkey has left the remnants of Donme communities less willing to testify to their role in the revolution.
...
"Unable to work together in their respective religious environments, The Jews and Donme appeared to have met and fraternised within the Masonic lodge. Because of the rigid initiation rites the fear of espionage by the Sultan was less in such an environment and it was here that revolutionary sentiments and activity fermented. Whether the suspicions that Masonry is responsible for sedition and subversive activities are true or not, in this context they were a convenient home for the revolution, providing lodges and personnel, secrecy and structures for the revolution. The Donme thrived in the Masonic environment, allowing them to be both secretive and influential, maintaining their religious ideas in a non-dogmatic atmosphere. Bridging the gap between the Jews and the Muslims, they seemed to represent the happy medium of the secular Young Turk revolution. Even today Donme are involved in the Masonic Lodges of Turkey. Sahir Talat Akev of the Kapanci-Izmir group of Donme was the Grand Master of the Masons until his death in 1999.
...
"Donme members today represent the elite of society within Turkey and it is the fear of being discovered that created the intense secrecy around them. Their increased secrecy and influence continues to circularly feed the hatred and suspicion surrounding them.
"At present there are some well-known Donme families and other less known families occupying important positions in Modern Turkish life. The current Foreign Minister Mr. Ismail Cem is a Donme though some of his family members have officially come out and declared that although they are of Donme ethnicity they disassociate from the cultural group. These include relatives: Cepil Ipekci, a famous fashion designer in Turkey and Nukhet Izet Ipekci, daughter of the famous journalist Abdi Ipekci, who declared on an Islamic channel that her parents were of Donmeh origins . Others such as the industrialists; the Dilber and Bezmen families are Donme. Rahsan Ecevit, wife of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit is a Donme. First ever, female Prime Minister Tansu Ciller is half Donme on her mother’s side. Altan Oymen, past leader of the Republican People’s Party was of Donme descent. Other prominent personalities ranging from well known writers, journalists, film makers, professors, lawyers, judges, bureaucrats (legal and foreign service), bankers, industrialists are of Donme origin. They can almost be said to be the standard bearers of secularism and modern Turkish nationalism that is based on cultural unity rather than racial characteristics.
...
"53. Ex-Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos gave an interview to the Greek Eleftherotypia Newspaper (17 December 2000) declaring Ismail Cem not to be a pure Turk but a Salonici Donme. He said that the foreign ministry of Turkey was in the hands of those whose races were different. Most of the Foreign Ministers of the Turkish Republic have in fact been of Donme origin.
(Btw, the Foreign Ministry was an especially Jew-dominated office in the early Soviet Union as well. Jews do indeed tend to make good, scheming diplomats with their many international connections.)
PS:
I also found out that the writer of this essay, Avrum Ehrlich, has written a biography of the (false) messiah of Chabad Jews[/B]:
"The Messiah Of Brooklyn: Understanding Lubavitch Hasidism Past And Present"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0881258369/ref=ase_infoline-20/002-3497983-2850452?v=glance&s=books
Petr
Jimbo Gomez
11-14-2005, 05:08 PM
I will have to read this all in great detail when I have the time for it. Thank you for providing these interesting articles.
See also this thread for more on the ongoing Turco-Judaic snug-fest:
"Armenia’s Jewish Scepticism and Its Impact"
http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4169
Petr
It seems that I sort of scooped on this subject - Steve Sailer just became aware of Turkey-Marrano issue. I also didn't know that his daddy was a high-level Mason...
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/was-mustafa-kemal-ataturk-founder-of.html
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, crypto-Jewish?
Conspiracy theories were quite prestigious in the 1970s, but ever since the release of Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK," the elite cultural atmosphere has turned strongly against them.
And yet, there really have been lots of secret societies, cabals, covert activities, and the like down through history. For example, the history of Italy since WWII can't be adequately explained without reference to the Mafia, Operation Gladio "leave-behind" cells, the P2 Masonic Lodge, and secret CIA funding of the anti-Communist parties, not to mention all of the Communist conspiracies on the other side.
It turns out, of course, that most of the secrets are pretty mundane. My late father-in-law, a 32nd degree Mason, liked to say that he couldn't tell any outsiders the secret protocols of the Masons because it might be fatal to them.
"Because if you told them, you'd have to kill them?" I asked.
"No, because if they heard what we really do, they might die laughing."
Secret groups are by no means omnipotent. In fact, they are generally less effective than public groups in most circumstances. Secrecy imposes costs and makes expansion harder.
Nonetheless, there are aspects of the world that do resemble a Jorge Luis Borges story, such as the murky role of crypto-Jewish pseudo-Muslims, the "Donmeh," in modern Turkey. Three and a half centuries after the forced conversion from Judaism to Islam of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, his followers and their secular descendents remain, apparently, strongly represented among the anti-Muslim fundamentalist political, business, and cultural elites in Istanbul and Ankara.
But what about the founder of modern Turkey himself, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk? Was he a crypto-Jew?
Hillel Halkin, the respected New York native turned Israeli journalist who is a regular in Commentary and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and the New York Sun, thinks so. In a January 28, 1994 article in New York's Forward, a Jewish newspaper, entitled "When Kemal Ataturk Recited Shema Yisrael: 'It's My Secret Prayer, Too,' He Confessed," Halkin wrote:
Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins: "Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman and founder of the modern Turkish state. "Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military academy."
The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name.
The encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his biographers: "My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion, and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me go to a * lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran but on modern science. "In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic] school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ... "Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had satisfied her."
Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of his parentage."
Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi, the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in 1911 and being asked by its proprietor:
"'Do you see that Turkish officer sitting there in the corner, the one* with the bottle of arrack?' "
"'Yes.'"
"'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.'"
"'What's his name?'"
"'Mustafa Kemal.'"
"'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him I was startled by his piercing green eyes."
Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these, Kemal confided: "I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."
During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel, Mustafa Kemal said at one point:" 'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old, and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' " And Ben-Avi continues: "He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space. Then he recalled: "'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
"'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
"'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling our glasses."
Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one containing the confession of faith: "Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the mosques.
Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. [More[
[SIZE="3"]Keep in mind that Halkin loves this kind of tale, as he admits in a column about his meeting with a tipsy gentleman who claims to be the last descendent to the throne of the legendary Khazar Jews:
[I]The fact is that I've always been a sucker for this kind of stuff. Ever since I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, I've lapped it up: stories about the lost tribes, descendants of the Marranos, shadowy Jewish kingdoms in the Middle Ages, Jews turning up in far places — the mountains of Mexico, the jungles of Peru, Kaifeng, the Malabar Coast, Timbuktu . The Jews of Manhattan were boring. Jews spotted by Marco Polo on the China coast or surviving centuries of the Inquisition in the hills of Portugal gave me goose pimples.
Call it the romance of Jewish history. The idea that we were a profoundly more adventurous, infinitely more varied, more far-ranging, more interesting people than the Jews I knew.[/I]
Halkin's 2002 book [I]Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel [/I]makes the case that the obscure Mizo ethnic group on the India-Burma border are really the descendants of Manasseh, one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
To shift gears, all this might help explain a little how the struggle between Turkey and its hostile neighbors, Greece and Armenia, is waged in Washington. The Greeks and the Armenians play an "outside game," based on grassroots hostility toward Turkey among Greek-Americans and Armenian-Americans. For example, the Armenian Caucus in Congress numbered almost 100 a few years ago, even though only one Member of the House was Armenian. In some Congressional districts, such as Pasadena-Glendale in California, promising to stick it to the Turks is a major vote-getter.
[B]In contrast, the Turks play an "inside game" in Washington, relying on high level contacts in the Executive branch. For instance, in 2000, the House was minutes from passing a long awaited resolution blaming the 1915 genocide of Armenians on the Turks, when a phone call from President Clinton to Speaker of the House Hastert, reminding Hastert how important Turkish good will is to the American position in the Middle East, led to the vote being called off.[/B]
The Bush Administration has strongly supported Turkey becoming a part of the European Union, despite the evident downsides of opening the borders of Europe to 70 million more Muslims.
A key to Turkey's inside game in Washington, besides American defense contractors, has been the powerful Jewish lobbies in Washington, who support Turkey because, among other reasons, Turkey spends a lot of money on Israeli arms. It's interesting that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith had a lobbying firm in the 1990s, International Advisors Inc., whose main client was the government of Turkey. Morris Amitay of AIPAC was an employee.
I have no idea if this is relevant to the story of crypto-Jewish influence in modern Turkey, but one recurrent pattern is that American neocons, based on their warm ties with the Turkish elites, have repeatedly over-estimated how pro-Israel and pro-American are Turkish voters, most notoriously on the eve of our war to bring "democracy" to Iraq, when Paul Wolfowitz was shocked by the Turkish parliament democratically voting against allowing America to invade Iraq from Turkey despite a huge payoff promised to the Turkish government.[B]
This is not to say that there is a conscious conspiracy between the neocons and the Donmeh, but it may help explain why the neocons have misinterpreted what Turkey is really like. So many of their Turkish contacts have been people with whom they feel culturally comfortable that they can't really fathom what Turkish democracy unfettered by secularist military coups (which is what Turkish accession to the European Union would deliver) will really turn out to be like. [/B]
The result of all this loving attention to Turkey from the neocons is that the Turkish public is now insanely anti-American, as the success of the anti-American Turkish blockbuster "Iraq: Valley of the Wolf" attests. That's the one where Gary Busey plays a Jewish-American surgeon who harvests kidneys for resale from living inmates at Abu Ghraib.[/SIZE]
A reader in Istanbul writes:
[I]Your 2nd write-up on the Sabbateans is also good. The interpretation at the end is critical: [B]this is the split personality picture of Turkey I see all the time. There's an elite of Jewish/Donmeh and Balkan origins - plus a few remnant Greeks and Armenians - who favor all things European, and there's the rest (about 95% of the country) who are deeply Anatolian or Middle Eastern. But the elites - especially Jews - don't believe their unlying eyes.[/B]
I'm sure you know the joke: A guy hits the road. While he's on the highway, a highway patrol chopper descends and announces with a megaphone: "Attention, drivers! There's a car on the 4-lane highway going in the wrong direction." The guy thinks, "Just one? More like all of them, dammit!"
[B]This is practically the Turkish elite when it comes to dealing with the realities of both their country and that of the world[/B].[/I]
***
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/its-borges-borges-borges-borges-world.html
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
It's a Borges Borges Borges Borges World (Sometimes):
I have a taste for tales that sound like bizarre fictions made up by Jorge Luis Borges but are actually true. My favorite is the story of the shocking discovery that economist John Maynard Keynes made when he purchased a trunk full of Isaac Newton's papers.
Another historical character worthy of Borges is the False Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. One of the major figures in Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews is the 17th Century mystic Sabbatai Zevi, a bipolar ecstatic from Smyrna who, with the help of his brilliant publicity agent Nathan of Gaza, declared himself the redeemer of the Jews. His claims caused wild excitement in Jewish communities throughout the world. But when Sabbatai Zevi (there are alternate spellings such as Shabbetai Zevi and Shabbtai Tzvi) traveled to Constantinople in 1666, the Ottoman Sultan threatened him with death unless he performed a miracle or converted to Islam. He chose the latter.
Now that might have been the end of the cult, but Nathan of Gaza was no ordinary PR flack. Johnson writes (p. 268-272):
Nathan was an outstanding example of a highly imaginative and dangerous Jewish archetype which was to become of world importance when the Jewish intellect became secularized. He could construct a system of explanations and predictions of phenomena which was both highly plausible and at the same time sufficiently imprecise and flexible to accommodate new events when they occurred. And he had the gift of presenting his protean-type theory, with its built-in capacity to absorb phenomena by a process of osmosis, with tremendous conviction and aplomb. Marx and Freud were to exploit a similar capacity...
The apostasy was transformed into a necessary paradox or dialectical contradiction. Far from being a betrayal, it was in fact the beginning of a new mission to release the Lurianic [Kabbala] sparks which were distributed among the gentiles and in particular in Islam... It meant descending into the realm of evil. In appearance [Zevi] he was submitting to it, but in reality he was a Trojan Horse in the enemy's camp. Warming to his task, Nathan pointed out that Zevi had always done strange things. This was merely the strangest -- to embrace the same of apostasy as the final sacrifice before revealing the full glory of the messianic triumph... Nathan quickly provided massive documentation in Biblical, talmudic and kabbalistic texts.
[FONT="Times New Roman"]Johnson writes:[/FONT]
As a result, the Shabbatean movement, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, not only survived the debacle of the apostasy but continued in existence for over a century.
But is there an equally Borgesian sequel to this sequel? Are the Shabbateans, also known as the Donmeh or Dönme, still around today? The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in 2002:
[FONT="Arial"][B][SIZE="5"]In search of followers of the false messiah[/SIZE][/B]
By Orly Halpern
Aubrey Ross is an unusual man with an unusual pastime. He's looking for Jewish Muslims. In Turkey. With the help of the Internet. And he's convinced he has found some.
In a book entitled "The Messiah of Turkey," due to be published this winter by Frank Cass Publishers in Great Britain, Ross reveals that there are a number of key figures in the present government of Turkey who are Sabbateans - i.e., followers of Shabbtai Tzvi, a Jew who, in the 17th century, claimed he was the messiah, God of Israel, and later converted to Islam.
Ross, an Orthodox Jew from London who has lectured on mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem - but has university degrees in economics and the history of political thought, and is an adviser on pensions at the National Health Service in Great Britain - became intrigued by the subject when he was reading the chapter about false messiahs in Gershom Scholem's "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism."
"I was fascinated by a short sentence that said `many of them were still around in 1970,'" he says...
After Shabbtai Tzvi's death, he relates, his family and followers moved to Salonika. When Greece took it over in 1924, descendants of that community returned to Turkey...
Ross, who is also warden of Hendon United Synagogue, one of the largest in London, decided four years ago to write a book about his discoveries. He began learning Turkish and traveled twice to Turkey: "I penetrated the Sabbatean structure. I met with the president of the Sabbatean community. They were at the point of showing me one of their secret synagogues, but got scared."...
According to Ross, the secretive Sabbatean community, with an estimated 20,000 members, is known to security forces in Turkey, but not to the general public. Most of them live in Istanbul in large blocks of luxury flats in the Shishli Jewish quarter - unbeknownst to their neighbors.
"It's like a well-known secret. But the Sabbateans don't want to be exposed. I have been asked by four members of the community not to publish my book. They fear reactions from extreme Islamic elements."...
Ross believes that there are a number of secret Sabbateans who hold key positions of influence in the Turkish parliament, legislature and executive branches of government, including the foreign minister himself. This, he observes, may help explain the close relations that exist today between Israel and Turkey.[/FONT]
[FONT="Times New Roman"]One of Ross's Turkish contacts, an accountant named Ilgaz Zorlu, has written a book in Turkish entitled, "Yes, I Am a Salonikan," which argues that many of the leading Turkish business and political figures in the secular tradition of Kemal Ataturk are Sabbateans even today.
Is this true? That the Sabbateans were at least somewhat important in the political upheavals at the end of the Ottoman empire appears fairly well established.
[I]The Encyclopedia Britannica[/I] writes:
[I]At the turn of the 20th century, the Dönme, well represented in the professional classes, took active part in the Young Turk movement and the revolution of 1908.[/I]
And Wikipedia says:
[FONT="Georgia"]While being accepted by the Muslim society, they only married within their own community which resulted in several recessive genetic traits being typical of Donmeh.
Several Donmeh were among the Young Turks, Turkish intellectuals who tried to reform the Ottoman Empire. At the time of the interchange of Greek and Turkish populations between Turkey and Greece, the Salonika Donmeh tried to be recognized as not Muslims to avoid forced transport to Anatolia. In the Republican era, they strongly supported the pro-Western and laïque reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an attitude that bolstered the suspicions of Muslims towards them.
At the same time a large number of them did migrate to modern Turkey and helped Kemal Atatürk build the secular, pro-western Turkey of today. In particular, Donmeh were instrumental in establishing trade and industry in the emerging Turkey. In time they become highly influential in the Turkish private sector which, invevitably, lead to highly speculative conspiracy theories.
It should be noted that as of the end of 20th century Donmeh were fully integrated to the secular fabric of Turkish society and the intermarriage tradition had ceased after the 1960s.[/FONT]
Here's an article on their contemporary role in Turkey:[/FONT]
[FONT="Arial"][B][SIZE="5"]Shabbtai Tzvi Would Be Proud[/SIZE][/B]
Moshe Temkin
May 24, 1999
The Jerusalem Report
Until this century, the sect was concentrated in the city of Saloniki; today most Sabbateans live in Istanbul. And everyone in Istanbul, so it seems, knows about the Sabbateans, or, as they are known here, the Doenmeh ("converts" or "apostates" in Turkish; the Sabbateans themselves dislike this title, and seldom use it.) They are perhaps Turkey's best-known secret. No Sabbatean, with the exception of Ilgaz Zorlu himself, will ever publicly admit to being one, and they are rarely talked about...
They're Muslims, as their identity cards attest, but, as Zorlu puts it, "all the Muslims know we're different." Their elders speak Turkish in an accent heavily flavored by Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish of Sephardi Jews. Their beliefs and rituals are largely unknown to outsiders. They rarely go to mosques. They marry mainly among themselves and live in the neighborhoods on the European side - Nisantasi, Sisli and Haskoy - where most of the city's Jews also reside. But they are not Jews either. The Jewish community wants nothing to do with them. "As far as we're concerned," says Rabbi Yitzhak Haleva, deputy chief rabbi of Istanbul, "there are only Jews and Muslims. There's nothing in between."
So who are the Sabbateans? This is what Zorlu set out to explain in his book, "Yes, I Am a Salonikan," which has been through six printings since its publication earlier this year and which has made its author persona non grata in the Sabbatean community. After centuries of secrecy and denial, Zorlu is determined to break the silence, to put the issue on the public agenda, and to prove that the Sabbateans are actually crypto-Jews, that their Muslim appearances are nothing more than a sham.
Sabbatean leaders are convinced that Zorlu's disclosure has put the community in jeopardy, and have washed their hands of him...
Turkish muslim society tolerates Jews as long as they are out in the open and do not attempt to convert Muslims. Hidden Jews, claiming to be Muslims, are something else entirely. This is one of the reasons Zorlu's book caused such a commotion. Fundamentalist Islamic groups question the loyalty of these "secret Jews" to the faith, and Zorlu, who publicly exposed the Sabbatean separateness and stressed that they have an undying connection to Judaism, provided the fundamentalists with ammunition.
Jews and other minorities can advance only so far in Turkish society; because they keep their identity secret, Sabbateans, on the other hand, can and do enjoy high positions in almost every field. The Sabbatean cemetery, which is ostensibly Muslim, offers ample evidence: The tomb of a Supreme Court judge lies next to that of an ex-leader of the Communist party, and near them stand the graves of a general and a famous educator. Zorlu freely adds more big names to the list of prominent Sabbateans, including Foreign Minister Ismail Cem, who, claims Zorlu, used to have a Sabbatean surname (Cem has denied being a Sabbatean). Zorlu also claims that former prime minister Tanso Ciler is a Sabbatean, as is the wife of the current prime minister, Bulent Ecevit.
Many of the Sabbateans tend to be left-wing, academics and journalists - members of the cultural elite. They're also quite affluent. All this puts them at odds with Islamic extremists, traditional opponents of Turkey's democratic political heritage. One of the leaders of the Young Turks, the late 19th-century reform movement, was a Sabbatean, and the fundamentalists also hold that the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had some Saloniki roots, was part-Sabbatean. "My great grandfather," Zorlu says proudly, "was Ataturk's teacher in grade school."
Rifat Bali, a Jewish businessman and writer, who is well acquainted with the Sabbateans, used to be Zorlu's friend and patron. They've since stopped speaking; Bali wrote a scathing review of Zorlu's book in an academic newsletter, accusing him of willingly playing into the hands of the fundamentalists, and Zorlu wrote an equally aggressive reply.
"Ilgaz is like a missionary," says Bali. "If he really wanted to be a Jew, that wouldn't be a problem. He could go to Israel and live as a Jew. But that's not his real purpose. He wants to spread the word of Sabbateanism. He knows that there isn't a solution to the problem, that the Sabbateans will never convert and that the Jews will never accept them as they are.
"Ilgaz knows that the Sabbateans are in a very sensitive position," Bali continues. "They're prominent, they're part of the elite, and that's why the fundamentalists target them. Even the word Doenmeh has very negative connotations. Obviously they don't want the issue of Sabbateanism to be out in the open. So why is Ilgaz doing it? He wants the topic to be in people's consciousness."[/FONT]
[FONT="Times New Roman"]So, do followers of Sabbatai Zevi still play an important role in contemporary Turkey, or is this all just Byzantine conspiracy theorizing?[/FONT]
http://www.radioislam.org/islam/english/jewishp/turkey/sabbateanpower.htm
28 July , 2002, Turkish Probe issue 496, Copyright © Turkish Daily News
The Sabbatean myth revived at a political turning point
By Elif Kelebek
---------------------------------------------------------------
Politics never takes the backseat in Turkey. Because of its much-fragmented structure, the political scene is always apt to give way to sensations, including at times when the country least needs it, like the critical phase of an economic program or a turning point for European Union affairs.
As the country now moves fast towards an early election now, it is engulfed by speculations over the plans of key political figures, scenarios on the possible consequences of their actions, prophecy about the possible election outcome and eventually the post-election government structure, but these debates are not the center of concern here.
On the periphery of all this talk, arguments that have faded out sometime ago are once more coming to life. These arguments are of the kind that would fascinate the public like a grand conspiracy theory and have most coincidentally reemerged at a time when election campaigns are set to take off.
Ilgaz Zorlu, the author of the once hype book "Yes, I Am a Salonikan," is the one who raised the allegations in a recent interview with pro-Islamist magazine Gercek Hayat (Real Life). Zorlu has asserted that people of a mystic Jewish sect, already holding very key positions in the state, would come to power in Turkey, naming Ismail Cem, Kemal Dervis, Rahsan Ecevit among the members, none of whom publicly denied the allegations.
Zorlu, who managed to reclaim his Jewish identity a few years back at the end of a toilsome struggle, was a Sabbatean himself and revealed the secrets of this group in Turkey in his book. The reason he wrote the book in the first place, he says, was to win acceptance from the mainstream Jewish community and from Israel both for himself and the Sabbateans in Turkey.
Sabbateans take their name from the self-proclaimed messiah of the 17th century, Shabatai Zvi. Following Zvi, who ultimately chose conversion over death, the Sabbateans converted to Islam but continued to practice Judaism in secret. Salonika has been a major center for the sect until the exchange in 1924 when Zorlu argues that most people (some 25,000) Turkey welcomed as Muslim Turks expelled from Greece were in fact members of this community.
Turkey's Sabbateans have remained secretive as they were somewhat disliked by both Jews and Muslims, but maintained their beliefs and traditions. Until 1950s they only married among themselves and their children would find out about their Sabbatean origin only after the age of 18. Therefore many truths about the sect are still unknown and the veil of secrecy has added to the legends surrounding the community.
Most people who Zorlu claimed in his book to be Sabbateans denied this identity because of historic concerns, mainly the mistreatment of Jews throughout history. The closest example was his grandmother who refused to reveal her beliefs and continued to do her prayers secretly because of, for example, a wealth tax imposed on non-Muslims during the republican era in Turkey and the tendency among the overwhelmingly Muslim populace to isolate non-Muslims from the community.
Zorlu's claims were most interesting because he named the most prominent families, politicians, diplomats, journalists, businessmen among the members of the sect, only a few of whom later on admitted to being Sabbateans. He filed documented evidence at various court cases to prove his allegations and his claims were backed by leading pro-Islamist writers like Mehmet Sevki Eygi and Abdurrahman Dilipak.
Zorlu assets that Sabbateans in Turkey, which he estimates around some 100,000 now, all wealthy and well-educated, are socially, politically and economically supporting each other and also enjoying support from the Jewish lobby in the U.S. Both Zorlu and Eygi have suggested that the members of this sect are very powerful and are holding influential positions in the state and business world.
Despite their extremely different backgrounds, these two sides strangely meet on a common ground when it comes to criticizing the covert Sabbatean community in Turkey: Islamists are worried about the power of and the strong bonds among this group, probably regarding them as a threat to their own existence, while Zorlu criticizes his community for exaggerating secularism in Turkey, which Sabbateans are known to have contributed significantly through organized action under the Union and Progress Party in early 1900s.
Most recently in an interview to Jerusalem Report Ilgaz Zorlu suggested that Tansu Ciller, leader of the True Path Party (DYP) was a Sabbatean. He claims, on documented evidence, Ismail Cem and Kemal Dervis, the two key figures of the new political formation now called the "New Turkey" party, are also Sabbateans, as well as Rahsan Ecevit, who he says have always had a distance with Husamettin Ozkan, the third key figure of New Turkey, because he wasn't of the same origin.
Zorlu suggests that if it wasn't for his Sabbatean origins, Dervis could never become an independent cabinet minister without political responsibility, a theory which would delight those who have sought a conspiracy behind Dervis's unusual appointment as economy minister from a World Bank post in the U.S. last year. Dervis is now a figure seen as a vote booster for any political party he may choose to join.
Ilgaz Zorlu further claims that Rahsan Ecevit, who actually rules the Democratic Left Party although she's not a deputy and doesn't hold an official post in the government, will become president once Chief of Staff Huseyin Kivrikoglu's term expires on August 30. He argues that there are Sabbateans in senior military ranks to support this turnover, but refuses to name them. Sukru Sina Gurel, who is viewed a potential successor for Bulent Ecevit in the Democratic Left Party, is one of the people Zorlu counts among Sabbateans. Can Paker, chairman of the prominent non-governmental organization Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), is another.
"Rahsan Ecevit is like Golda Meir. Her attitude and ideology is the same. The way Golda Meir was a totalitarian and disrespectful of democracy in defending the elimination of the entire Arab world for the salvation of Israel, Ms. Ecevit accommodates the same thinking for Islamists," Zorlu has told Gercek Hayat.
"Don't underestimate Ms. Ecevit because she's 81 years old. There are people who are younger than 70 and she chewed them like gum," he said, recalling what he described as a famous statement of her after Ismet Inonu was toppled from the Republican People's Party (CHP) leadership in 1972 and Bulent Ecevit took over the post.
"'I took the revenge of the wealth tax,' she said."
Ankara - Turkish Daily News
Jimbo Gomez
06-23-2006, 09:23 AM
Petr names the turk.
I find it intriguing how Sailer is right now going through the same sources (like the essay by Avrum Ehrlich) that I have been gathering on this thread in recent months... :p
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-imagine-most-readers-are-heartily.html
Friday, June 23, 2006
I imagine most readers are heartily sick by now
of my obsession with the Donme, the secretive ethnic group descended from followers of a Jewish false messiah who apparently make up much of the secular elite of Turkey, but it strikes me as reasonably important for Americans to understand more about how Turkey works:
- Although every country in the world, with the possible exception of Mali, has been described as "strategically located," Turkey really is strategically located. And it is a country of about 70 million, with a highly respectable military.
- Turkey has many high-level contacts in Washington, both neocon (e.g., Perle, Feith) and anti-neocon (e.g., Scowcroft)
- The U.S. is pushing for Turkey to be admitted to the European Union, with vast potential consequences for Europe.
- Turkish public opinion is rapidly becoming more anti-American and anti-Israeli.
- We are at war in Iraq, on Turkey's southern border.
- Although we are increasingly involved in that part of the world, we dumb hick naive Americans basically don't have a clue how Byzantine the politics of the old Byzantine Empire remain.
- The Donmeh have become a big issue in Turkey over the last 7 years.
- But practically no mainstream media outlet in America has mentioned this topic at all, presumably for two reasons: First, the ridiculous variety of spellings of the terms donmeh and Sabbatean make Google searches hard, and, second, for the same reason that Solzhenitsyn's last two books haven't been published in America.
Just to prove (perhaps to myself) that I'm not crazy, but that this phenomenon really exists, here is an excerpt from a 2001 paper by Jewish theologian M. Avrum Ehrlich, the Editor-in-Chief of the upcoming Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora:
"Sabbatean Messianism as Proto Secularism"
Published in Turkish-Jewish Encounters, (Haarlem, 2001)
by M. Avrum Ehrlich
Considering its Islamic heritage and the environment of Arab hatred for Israel, it is remarkable that Turkey has fostered such strong ties with Israel and the causes for it may well be traced to the Donme influence.
Donme members today represent the elite of society within Turkey and it is the fear of being discovered that created the intense secrecy around them. Their increased secrecy and influence continues to circularly feed the hatred and suspicion surrounding them.
At present there are some well-known Donme families and other less known families occupying important positions in Modern Turkish life. The current Foreign Minister Mr. Ismail Cem is a Donme though some of his family members have officially come out and declared that although they are of Donme ethnicity they disassociate from the cultural group. These include relatives: Cepil Ipekci, a famous fashion designer in Turkey and Nukhet Izet Ipekci, daughter of the famous journalist Abdi Ipekci, who declared on an Islamic channel that her parents were of Donmeh origins.
Others such as the industrialists; the Dilber and Bezmen families are Donme. Rahsan Ecevit, wife of Prime Minister Bilent Ecevit is a Donme. First ever, female Prime Minister Tansu Ciller is half Donme on her mother’s side. Altan Oymen, past leader of the Republican People’s Party was of Donme descent. Other prominent personalities ranging from well known writers, journalists, film makers, professors, lawyers, judges, bureaucrats (legal and foreign service), bankers, industrialists are of Donme origin.
They can almost be said to be the standard bearers of secularism and modern Turkish nationalism that is based on cultural unity rather than racial characteristics. They are more advanced in this process than secular Turkish Jews and in many ways resemble the prominence and thinking of the European Jewish Enlightenment leading many to suspect that Sabbateanism played a role there too. Donme sympathy towards Jews exists but association is not common because of the fears of being further tainted by Islamic fundamentalism. This fear is becoming increasingly real as the Islamic party grows...
The remnants of the Dönme have few overt messianic signs. Few go any longer to the seashore raising their hands and calling out in Spanish “Sabatey Sabetay we await thee”. They are predominantly secular and liberal and highly assimilated. They are predominantly atheist and at best only culturally Sabbatean. Whether the mystical designs of Sabbatean doctrine intended to form such a community is secondary to the fact that mystical doctrine outside of a protected environment contains highly liberal characteristics. As a group, the Dönme assimilated, leaving only a shadow of their doctrinal selves. Sabbateanism, despite its mystical nature and its roots in sectarianism sowed the seeds of tolerance, assimilation, interpretation, anti-fundamentalism and universalism within Judaism and in wider circles and in so doing was a proto-secular group, instrumental in laying down the ideological infrastructure for other Jewish groups to follow.
It is clear that messianism changes form and has moved from working within religious frameworks to working within highly secular frameworks. With this in mind the messianic tendencies of secular and political groups can be better understood, as can be an appreciation of their ideological architecture.
Largely leftist, the Sabbateans mostly opposed the successful 1980s conservative reformist leadership of Turgut Özal.
The Sabbateans are by no means the only crypto-religion (or crypto-ethnicity today -- many of the Donmeh are now atheists) in that part of the world. The Druze, for example, will tell people that they are Druze, but they won't tell anybody what they believe. And then there are the dissimulating Alevi. Razib wrote on GNXP:
The Alevi, a heterodox Shia sect forms anywhere from 10-30% of Turkey's population, and are known as the "Alawites" in Syria (where they form 10% of the population and dominate the Baath Party and are the affiliation of Assad dynasty). Because the Alevi practice dissimulation and the Turkish authorities, Ottoman & Republican, would rather not acknowledge their existence, it is hard to gauge their numbers, and they are not well known by the outside world. But now you know....
Exactly what the Alevi or Alawites actually believe is not terribly clear. Are they Muslims at all? Mehrdad R. Izady of Harvard controversially argues that they are part of the very ancient Cult of the Angels -- Gabriel, Raphael, Lucifer (who is worshipped by the Yezidis), and so forth. He writes:
Some Dimili Alevis, as well as the Yezidi clans, still maintain the ancient Iranic rite of worshipping the deity represented as a sword stuck into the ground...
Which is pretty cool in a King Arthur sword-in-the-stone way.
Some modern European travellers have reported, as hearsay, that some Qizilbash worship a large (black) dog as the embodiment of the deity (Driver 1921-23). Even though Driver's account is rather derogatory toward the Alevis and to the practice, of which he clearly does not approve, veneration of the dog as a symbol of good (the serpent standing for evil) is a very ancient rite.
Which is not as cool as a sword in the ground, but, you've gotta admit, is pretty cute.
Anyway, the point of this digression into colorful arcana is that we Americans don't have a clue what that part of that world is really like. A lot of powerful forces in American want us to invade Syria and overthrow the Alevi / Alawite regime that oppresses the Sunni Muslim majority. Would that be a good idea? Or would that create a radical Sunni state? Who knows? What would be the repercussions in Turkey, where their co-religionists number somewhere between 7 million and 21 million? Who knows squared?
The British, with their antiquarianism, could keep an empire going for awhile in that part of the world because their own medieval history plus the Greek and Roman history they studied at Eton gave them some preparation for this. But American history is useless for comprehending the Near East. It is nothing like Philadelphia in 1787.
P.S. A reader writes:
I must point out one inconsistency in the Hillel Halkin article on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk claiming to be a Sabbatean that you cite, though. That Turkish officer in the cafe in Jerusalem is described as having "green eyes". All throughout Kinross's book and everywhere else I've read, Ataturk's eyes are described as "blue". They appear to have been as striking as Paul Newman's, because everyone mentions them. Perhaps that's an understandable confusion, but it seems odd. Of course Mustafa is quite a common Arab name and Kemal is a common Turkish one. So there could well have been another officer named Mustafa Kemal in the Turkish Army. And it wouldn't stretch coincidence too far that he might have had green eyes. On the other side of the argument, Ataturk did have an inordinate fondness for "raki", which I guess is the same as the "arrack" cited by Halkin. In fact he apparently died of cirrhosis at the age of 57 - hmm, just my age. Better get my liver checked.
A blue-eyed alcoholic doesn't sound too Jewish too me, although it is possible.
Kodos
06-24-2006, 10:13 PM
C'mon it would probably be bad to have some Islamic shithole controlling the Bosphorous Petr...
If Ataturk was a jew good for the jews.
C'mon it would probably be bad to have some Islamic shithole controlling the Bosphorous Petr...
If Ataturk was a jew good for the jews.
Your political analyses are so wearingly anti-intellectual... you are poster boy for Yankee ignorance.
Petr
Kodos
06-24-2006, 10:25 PM
Your political analyses are so wearingly anti-intellectual
An insult is not a refutation.
Felix the Cat
06-24-2006, 10:28 PM
Turkey supports Israel... therefore Jews control Turkey?
This may be true, but there's a simpler explanation for Turkish foreign policy: Turks don't like Arabs
Turkey supports Israel... therefore Jews control Turkey?
This is crude over-simplification. I believe these articles prove that Sabbatean Marranos make up an important part of Turkey's Western-oriented (and therefore secular and anti-Islamic) elite, just like Jews form a big part of liberal, anti-Christian elites in Western countries.
Petr
Good grief, more Sabbateans! A reader in Istanbul writes about the crypto-Jewish ethnic group, descended from followers of the apostate false messiah Shabbetai Zevi, who make up a big chunk of modern Turkey's secular elite:
There's a Turkish saying that goes: "When a madman meets another madman, he hides his stick". It means that people - especially people of extreme nature - tend to inspire reasonable behavior in each other. Seems like our "Muslim fundamentalists," in their craze to discover conspiracies in the way Turkey has been steered in the last century, hit upon something quite significant with their research into the Donmeh. They were among the most relentless and instrumental, though by no means the sole, element in unearthing this.
But whenever their opinion leaders meet with alleged members of the Sabbetaians in the media - either the TV or the write-ups on the Internet - the discussion becomes remarkably sober, well-reasoned, and empirically grounded. Using micro-demographic techniques like census records, marital bondings and family genealogies, cemeteries, residential areas, common private schools, enterprises with certain connections, etc., they have aggregated quite a clear picture now of this reality...
God, there's so much buried under the ground in this part of the world - this truly Byzantine world - that it gives me a headache to even think of it.
And here is an article, "Secret Muslim Jews await their messiah: Shabbetai Tzvi" by Gad Nassi, an Israeli psychiatrist who grew up in a Jewish community in Istanbul. He writes:
http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/009/nassi.html
Today, only the Karakash, one small group of three to four thousand Dônme, continue in the traditional ways and does not marry out. The remaining 40,000 to 60,000 Dônme who retain some memory of their heritage have ceased all observance and restrictions on marriage.
Although the Dônme maintain their traditions, they have not made a complete break with Judaism. For more than 200 years, they have not brought their disputes to Turkish courts. As knowledge of Talmud decreased among them, they consulted rabbis to settle controversial cases. As long as the Dônme lived in Salonica, preservation of their Jewish character was feasible because of their proximity and steady contact with its large, bustling Jewish population. Many members of the Dônme community in Salonica were among Turkey's reform leaders - the Young Turks - and members of an influential reform organization known as the Committee for Progress and Union. In 1909, the revolution of the Young Turks overthrew the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. The first administration that then came to power, laying the foundation of the future Turkish republic, included three Dônme ministers - Nuzhet Faik, Mustafa Arif and Mehmet Javid.
At the time of the [Turkish] revolution, few Dônme lived in Turkey; the center of community - about 16,000 strong - was in Salonica. There they remained until after the Turko-Greek war, when a treaty in 1924 provided for an exchange of populations. During the period of amnesty before exchange, members of the sect, whishing avoid their transfer to Turkey, asked the rabbis of Salonica to permit them to return to Judaism. Their application was rejected by the rabbis because children who were the fruit of the Festival of the Lamb were mamzerim, conceived from an adulterous relationship, according to halachah (Jewish religious law). The Dônme left for Turkey.
The Festival of the Lamb was, apparently, an annual religious holiday evening devoted to eating lamb, followed by wife-swapping. Young Donmeh deny that it is still practiced. A reader suggests that the orgy in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," which was based on a work by the Jewish Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, was inspired by this (perhaps through the intermediary of the colorful Central European false messiah Jacob Frank, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Zevi).
***
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/salonika.html
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Salonika
The port city at the north end of the Aegean Sea, spelled Thessaloniki since Greece seized it from the Ottoman Empire before WWI, would be a fine setting for an Umberto Eco novel or a Dan Brown knock-off of an Eco novel.
Salonika had an appropriately Byzantine social history a century ago. It was the home of both Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern Turkey, and of the Donme, the crypto-Jewish followers of the 17th Century false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, who comprise much of the secular elite of Istanbul today. (In Turkey today, "Salonikan" is a synonym for Sabbatean.) Also, Masonic Lodges in Salonika played a role in the emergence of both the Young Turks who deposed the Sultan and, more indirectly, of the modern yogurt industry. I haven't found any links between Salonika and the Knights Templar yet, but I'm sure I just haven't burrowed deep enough into the fever swamps.
Salonika is back in the news as the birthplace of new French president Nicolas Sarkozy's beloved maternal grandfather Benedict Mallah, who was the scion of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family in that remarkable city. Salonika was about half Jewish early in the 20th Century, before the great fire of 1917 scattered much of the Jewish community, and then the rest were murdered by the Nazis. (The Donme, as nominal Muslims, were shipped to Turkey in the population exchanges of 1923 that, at great cost, brought peace between Turkey and Greece, so they escaped the fate of the Salonikan Jews.)
Sarkozy's father, an anti-Communist Hungarian refugee of castle-owning minor aristocratic stock, abandoned his family, so little Sarkozy grew up in the small mansion of his maternal grandfather, who had converted to Catholicism upon marrying a French war widow in 1917 and then became a respected Parisian clap doctor.
"To this day many Mallahs are still active Zionists around the world," says the Australian Jewish News:
Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Beniko, was born in 1890.
Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a well-known Rabbi and a devoted Zionist who, in 1898 published and edited “El Avenir”, the leading paper of the Zionist national movement in Greece at the time.
His cousin, Asher, was a Senator in the Greek Senate and in 1912 he helped guarantee the establishment of the Technion – the elite technological university in Haifa, Israel.
In 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years. In the 1930’s he helped Jews flee to Israel, to which he himself immigrated in 1934.
Another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, was a philanthropist for Jewish causes who served in the Greek Parliament, and in 1920 he was offered, but declined, the position of Greece’s Minister of Finance. After the establishment of the State of Israel he became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece.
During the Holocaust, 57 members of the Mallah family were murdered by the Nazis. Sarkozy's grandfather, who had changed his name to Benedict upon his conversion, had to lie low during WWII to keep from being caught by the Nazis in France.
Nicolas was especially close to Benedict, who was like a father to him. In his biography Sarkozy tells he admired his grandfather, and through hours spent of listening to his stories of the Nazi occupation, the “Maquis” (French resistance), De Gaulle and the D-day, Benedict bequeathed to Nicolas his political convictions.
During a visit to Greece in 2006, a visibly moved Sarkozy received a family tree album from a delegation of Thessalonikian Jews, saying "My roots are here."
By the way, each time I've tried to post something about Salonika, my computer acts up and tries to swallow my entry. I blame albino monks.
And now for some new material on Sabbatean Marranos:
http://www.forward.com/articles/shrine-of-false-messiah-in-turkey-to-be-razed/
Shrine of False Messiah in Turkey May Be Razed
Jay Michaelson | Fri. May 18, 2007
Far away from the eyes of the Jewish mainstream, in modern-day Turkey there live hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto-Jews — and today, one of their most sacred shrines is in danger.
This is the hidden, fascinating tale of the doenmeh, descendants of the faithful followers of the 17th-century false messiah Sabbetai Tzvi, who converted to Islam in 1666. Tzvi’s own conversion came under duress: The Ottoman sultan demanded that he don the turban or die after nearly one-third of European Jewry had come to believe he was the messiah and had begun swarming into Turkey, expecting the long-awaited triumph of the Jews.
Tzvi chose to convert, and most of his followers lost hope — but not all of them. Many saw the conversion as a heroic act of tikkun, or repair, and followed their messiah’s lead by outwardly becoming Muslims while secretly maintaining their messianic Jewish faith. They were called doenmeh, meaning “turncoats”— a pejorative term not unlike marrano (“pig.”) Among themselves, they were called ma’aminim, “believers.” Sabbateanism did not die out in 1666, or even 10 years later when Tzvi himself died. There were subsequent messiahs — largely forgotten men like Baruchiah Russo and Jacob Frank — and, as recent scholarship has shown, Sabbateanism greatly influenced the 18th-century emergence of Hasidism. And then there are the doenmeh, who live on until the present day, in secretive communities, at first primarily in Salonika and today almost entirely in present-day Turkey.
A move to tear down the Turkish home where Tzvi is said to have lived, however, may now disturb the balance the community has cultivated for centuries.
Over the years, most of the doenmeh assimilated into Islam; many more were annihilated during the Holocaust, and still more have, in modern-day Turkey, come to see their background as a curious but largely irrelevant heritage. But even those who did assimilate usually maintained some knowledge of their ancestry, and doenmeh were among the founders of the secular Turkish republic. Today, many doenmeh are among Turkey’s elite, though it is taboo to speak their names; since doenmeh are regarded as traitors by both Muslims and Jews, it is scandalous to accuse a person of being one of them, even if his or her identity is an open, unspoken secret. (Recently-deceased Turkish foreign minister Ismail Cem, for example, was “outed” by several Turkish newspapers, but he denied being a Sabbatean, and Iglaz Zorlu’s best-selling 1999 memoir, “Yes, I am a Salonikan,” stirred controversy throughout the country.) But the secret is open, like the doenmeh cemeteries outside of Istanbul, with their distinctively unadorned gravestones, and the mosques where doenmeh are known to pray.
Barry Kapandji is one of the few doenmeh descendants willing to openly acknowledge his ancestry — and even he wouldn’t use his real name (“totally out of the question,” he said). Kapandji, 33, was told by his father that he was a doenmeh when he was nine years old. Since then, he has been fascinated by his heritage. Kapandji first contacted me a few months ago, when he learned that the house in Izmir (formerly Smyrna) in which Tzvi is believed to have lived was slated for demolition by the municipality to make way for a park. No one would help him: The doenmeh he knew were afraid of going public, and the Jewish community wanted nothing to do with this sect of heretics.
“This is a crime against culture, history and my heritage,” Kapandji told me. “The Jewish community elders do not want the house turned into a museum.… They would like Sabbetai’s name to be eradicated from history.”
The Forward was not able to obtain a comment from the Izmir Jewish community, but it is true that in traditional Jewish circles it is customary to add the epithet “Yemach shemo,” “May his name be blotted out,” to the names of Sabbetai Tzvi and other heretics. Usually, the epithet works: Few know their names today. Yet, Kapandji said, “Sabbetai Tzvi, for better or for worse, helped shape the history of the Jewish people, and we should acknowledge him for that.”
But is the house at 920 Agora Girisi, half-ruined and barely distinguishable from others in the old Jewish neighborhood (now mostly destroyed), really the birthplace of Sabbatai Tzvi, the “mystical messiah”?
Yes, according to Dr. Cengiz Sisman, an expert on Sabbateanism who received his doctorate from Harvard University. Sizman cited a wealth of evidence, including 1925 and 1940 newspaper reports of the house (the architecture of which is clearly described) being used as a “visiting site by believers,” a 1935 book by noted historian Abraham Galante, and a 1961 account by writer John Freely of a group of believers lighting candles and performing a ritual on the third floor of the building.
By the 1990s, however, few doenmeh were maintaining the old rituals, and the house, like the rest of the area, had fallen into disrepair. It appeared briefly in a French-language documentary on the doenmeh by filmmaker Michel Grosman, but only a few interested parties, like Sisman and Kapandji, were even aware that it had been slated for demolition. Last month, Kapandji interceded with the Izmir municipality and, on the basis of testimony by elders from the Sabbatean and Jewish communities, temporarily halted the destruction of the house — or at least what remains of it.
Today, Sisman said, “neither the Jewish nor the Sabbatean groups are particularly keen to utilize the house for any kind of Sabbatean or Jewish purpose.” For the Jews, it is the home of a heretic best forgotten; and the few doenmeh still aware of their ancestry fear being branded as traitors if they are exposed.
Surely, though, if this house is what Sisman and Kapandji believe it to be, it is an important relic of a key episode in Jewish history. Of course, as shown by Israel’s many Crusader tombs doubling as the supposed burial places of prophets and rabbis, the fact that a place is venerated by believers does not mean that it is what they believe it to be. Then again, there are reasons to think that this instance might be different. The doenmeh, after all, have lived in the same place, continuously, since the time of Tzvi himself, and have maintained a secret tradition of belief, liturgy, ritual, even recipes. Kabbalah scholar Avraham Elqayam recently published an article describing the mystical significance of a newly unearthed doenmeh cookbook, and Zeek, an online journal of which I am an editor, is publishing translations of Sabbatean hymns and first-person accounts of Tzvi at prayer, compiled by David Halperin, professor emeritus of religion at the University of North Carolina.
So perhaps it’s not as much of a stretch to suppose that a secret community, living continuously in one place, might preserve historical memory more accurately than, say, Jews returning to the Land of Israel after centuries away — or, for that matter, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who is supposed to have identified most of the Christian holy sites in Israel while on a pilgrimage of her own. “I come from a family of academics,” Kapandji said. “We aren’t accustomed to claiming things without any evidence.”
Kapandji wants to see the house as some kind of museum, though he acknowledged that openly discussing Tzvi himself is still taboo in Turkish society. Sisman thinks the house should be preserved for Turkish reasons, as a testament to that country’s “multicultural heritage.”
Perhaps the house is of significance to Jews, as well. Sabbateanism was a dynamic, mystical and progressive movement — it was the first to put women in positions of leadership and to question the authority of normative Judaism — that was, according to many, an antecedent of Zionism. (Israeli presidents Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Zalman Shazar were both scholars of the movement, and Theodor Herzl’s opponents labeled him a “new Sabbetai Tzvi.”) In an age in which many people are seeking alternative forms of Jewish expression, perhaps it is worth remembering those that did not survive.
Or rather, those that still, secretly, endure.
Fri. May 18, 2007
The Turks themselves seem to enjoy the sport of Marrano-spotting...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/04/AR2007100401357.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
The Protocols of the Elders of Turkey
By Mustafa Akyol Sunday, October 7, 2007; Page B02
Look in just about any bookstore in Turkey, and you'll see some of the strangest bestsellers imaginable. The cover of "The Children of Moses," the first and most popular book in a series of four, shows the country's devoutly Muslim prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the middle of a six-pointed Star of David. Inside, you'll find a head-spinningly weird argument: that Erdogan and his conservative allies in Turkey's ruling pro-Islamic party are actually crypto-Jews with secret wicked ties to the conspiratorial forces of "global Zionism."
The books are hardly a fringe phenomenon. They're arrayed in chic bookstores along Istiklal Avenue, the funky pedestrian mall that's the heart of secular Istanbul. They're openly displayed alongside Orhan Pamuk novels at Ataturk International Airport. And they're even sold on tiny bookstands on the Princes' Islands, the vacation destinations in the Sea of Marmara that many well-off Turks view the way Manhattanites do the Hamptons. By the publishers' figures, they've sold about 520,000 copies since the books started rolling out this year -- a staggering figure for a nation of about 71 million people.
...
Ergun Poyraz, who wrote the series, is a self-declared "Kemalist," the term used here to describe the committed followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the resolutely secular war hero who founded modern Turkey in 1923. The politicians whom Poyraz is out to skewer define themselves as sensible conservatives, but they're derided as closet fundamentalists by their foes among Turkey's traditional elites, who are still deeply suspicious of any intrusion of Islam into the public sphere. Poyraz's books argue -- apparently in all seriousness -- that "Zionism" has decided to steer Turkey away from its time-worn secular path and turn it into a "moderate Islamic republic." It is hard to believe that "Zionism" (let alone any sane Israeli leader) would prefer an Islamist Turkey to a secular one, but Poyraz is convinced that a mildly Islamic state would be more easily manipulated by foreign powers than a staunchly nationalist one.
...
The books' odd fusion of anti-Semitism and Kemalism also has a historical pedigree. When Ataturk raised modern Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, he wisely decided to orient it toward the West. But during his time in power (1923-38), the West included not only democracies such as the United States and Britain but dictatorships such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Ataturk never admired these tyrannies, but some of his aides and followers certainly did, and they incorporated numerous fascist elements into Turkey's state-sponsored brand of secular nationalism. Fantasies about the supremacy of the Turkish race soon became official rhetoric. Turkey adopted corporatism, Benito Mussolini's state-dominated economic model, and when Ataturk died, he was declared the country's "eternal chief." His successor, Mustafa Ismet Inonu, introduced a heavy "wealth tax" in 1942 that specifically targeted Jews. Unable to pay, many were sent to labor camps in eastern Turkey.
This dark episode of Turkish history ended after the Allies' victory in World War II, which forced the Kemalist elite to shift from single-party rule to democracy. But unlike other European nations, Turkey never engaged in much self-criticism of its interwar chauvinism -- which let ultra-nationalist themes persist as legitimate ideas. When the E.U. admission process pushed Turkey to liberalize itself, these skeletons came out of the closet.
Last February, the country was shocked by the exposure of a fascist gang called the Union of Patriotic Forces, led by Fikri Karadag, a retired colonel. The group's secret oath included the words, "I am of pure Turkish stock, and there is no Jewish convert in my blood," as well as a promise to "kill and to be killed" for the sake of "making the Turkish nation the lord of the world."
In June, police found 27 hand grenades and stacks of TNT in an Istanbul house belonging to another fascist gang with shadowy links to the country's security forces. The bust led the authorities to other cells, and Poyraz, the prolific anti-Semitic author, was among their members. After his arrest, the lawyer who rushed to defend him was none other than Kemal Kerincsiz, who has lately made a name for himself by suing dozens of liberal intellectuals -- including the Nobel Prize-winning Pamuk -- for "insulting Turkishness."
...
Hartmann von Aue
10-17-2007, 01:11 PM
Early Christian Zionists - some with connections to Sabbetai Zevi:
http://img387.imageshack.us/img387/6092/6judeochristianity6py2.jpg
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/3738/quakers8ms2.jpg
http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/6005/zevi10yj6.jpg
From Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe (http://books.google.com/books?id=Mjrni72sM-gC&dq=secret+conversions+to+judaism+in+early+modern+europe&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=ybk-YhgtsE&sig=f8sX63cHcW0Dlfgl2n2spFWYhNo)
LF thread (http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=ethnic_judaism&Number=295529235&part=1)
http://www.ahiworld.com/bbs/messages/51.html
The Jewish Post of New York. January 28, 1994
WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL
"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed
By Hillel Halkin
The link above apparently no longer works, but I have found this aggressive new YouTube video that goes through the entire article:
Freemason Dictator Mustafa Kemal Confessed to Being Jewish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjRKVrUn9xI
The poster is apparently an anti-Kemalian Turk:
"Turkish Muslims are waking up! It's time to destroy the Zionist Jewish Freemason dictator Mustafa Kemal's statues and the so-called secular republic!!"
http://www.youtube.com/user/Hakikatperver
The comments section seems to get pretty bloodthirsty as secular nationalist Turks and Turkish Islamists settle their internal scores. Popcorn, anyone? :p
Petr
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