Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marc David Baer is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His first book, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (2008), won the Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association.

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The Dnme

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface....................................................................................ixAcknowledgments............................................................................xixIntroduction: Following the Jewish Messiah Turned Muslim, 1666-1862........................11 Keeping It Within the Family, 1862-1908.................................................252 Religious and Moral Education: Schools and Their Effects................................443 Traveling and Trading...................................................................654 Making a Revolution, 1908...............................................................835 Choosing Between Greek Thessalonki and Ottoman Istanbul, 1912-1923.....................1116 Losing a Homeland, 1923-1924............................................................1417 Loyal Turks or Fake Muslims? Debating Dnme in Istanbul, 1923-1939......................1558 Reinscribing the Dnme in the Secular Nation-State......................................1849 Forgetting to Forget, 1923-1944.........................................................213Conclusion.................................................................................243Postscript: The Shooting of Ahmet Emin Yalman..............................................259Notes......................................................................................265Index......................................................................................315

Chapter One

The marriage of the Muslim Mehmet Zekeriya and the Kapanci Dnme Sabiha, daughter of Nazmi Efendi (later Sertel), in 1912 was a revolutionary act, breaking down walls of distinction. It is believed in Turkey to have been the first between a Dnme woman and a Muslim Turkish man. As we see in the biography of Sabiha and in Mehmet Zekeriya's autobiography, Dnme greeted the decision with a mixture of shock and celebration:

Sabiha's Salonikan home was turned into a battlefield by the strong-willed teenager's decision to marry a Muslim man.

"Dnme do not marry outsiders," her sister warned her. "It would only bring disaster."

"Dnme are narrow-minded," Sabiha replied. Look how they say, 'We are all one, religion, language, nationality make no difference among us.' ... Will they then still refuse to intermarry?"

"Are you crazy? You are a Dnme. How can you marry a Turk [i.e., a Muslim]?"

"I do not know whether I am a Turk. We are all humans. We match, he wants me, and I am pleased to accept."

Her older brother, Hidayet, was outraged: "What? Our sister, a Dnme, marry a Turk? Choose her own husband? This one is crazy. Mother, she will ruin the honor of the entire family. She will humiliate us in the eyes of all Dnme!" He advises his mother to keep the seventeen-year-old at home so that she cannot humiliate the family any further.

Meanwhile, her prospective groom was being congratulated.

"Dnme have collected information about me," Mehmet Zekeriya thinks to himself, "and have decided to meet with me once and see me up close, because the decision they are going to make about me is very important, even bearing historic import." The bride is a member of a Dnme family, "and the Dnme do not allow their daughters to marry outsiders. If her family approves, it will be the first time a Dnme girl has married a Turk." Word got out that "I was about to marry a Dnme girl." One day, Dr. Nzim of the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress [CUP-the formerly secret society of Young Turks, which since the 1908 revolution had been transformed into a political party and at the time of this marriage was running the empire] called me to appear before him. He congratulated me, saying: "Do you know the significance of what you have done? You may not be aware of it, but you are opening the gates to the unification and mixing of two societies that have looked askance at each other for centuries. You are delivering the fatal blow to the Dnme caste. We must analyze this event as it deserves and must celebrate the union of Turks and Dnme now enabled by your action. This should be regarded as a national and historic event."

Mehmet Zekeriya was surprised and asked Dr. Nzim what he should do.

"We'll conduct your marriage ceremony," Dr. Nzim replied. "We'll pay all the expenses. We'll announce it to the press. In this way, we'll turn it from being merely a marriage between two families into a national and historic event.'"

"The marriage of Sabiha and myself did indeed become an example to the Dnme," Mehmet Zekeriya wrote later. "After us, the number of Dnme men and women marrying outsiders increased greatly. And in this way, the Dnme caste was destroyed and became a thing of the past."

At this point, around the beginning of World War I, at least in this circle, Dnme were not seen as a racial group, and their mixing with other Muslims was seen as a positive action. The wedding was announced and hosted by the CUP, whose secretary-general at the time the influential Mehmet Talat Pasha, minister of the interior during World War I, and Dr. Tevfik Rst (Aras), a future foreign minister (1925-38), who married Dr. Nzim's sister, gave away the bride and groom, respectively, during the ceremony.

Mehmet Alkan argues this marriage reflected ongoing attempts by Dnme at that time to resolve conflicts between the three Dnme sects-in part, through committees set up to try to unite them-and, concomitantly, to improve their relations with Muslims. Neither effort was successful. The marriage of Sabiha and Mehmet Zekeriya was an important development, a first serious step in establishing closer relations with Muslims, but it caused major disputes among the Dnme, and even a crisis, because it went against prevailing marriage customs.

Endogamy and Genealogies

One of the main ways in which the Dnme preserved their distinct ethno-religious identity was by marrying only members of the same Dnme sect. Endogamy and genealogy are important features of many crypto-faith communities, whether conversos, Huguenots, or Moriscos, Muslims compelled to convert to Catholicism in Iberia. For all of these groups, as for the Dnme, marrying insiders allowed them furtively to continue their religious practices, protect a separate way of being, and maintain close economic networks. Marrying outsiders would expose their secrets and could be considered a betrayal of the ancestors. Closed communities remained loyal to their origins. Genealogy and religious meaning were interwoven: "Preserving the memory of one's ancestors is therefore part and parcel of remaining faithful to the covert religion." Being Dnme meant both engaging in certain ritual practices and belonging to a group related by blood. Religion and community were intertwined. Groups such as the Dnme compile genealogies, not only to preserve a religion, but also as part of a social practice aiming to perpetuate a people. Keeping alive the memory of ancestors entailed repeating names: as was common among Mediterranean Jewish and Indian Ocean Muslim diasporic groups, newborn sons were named after grandfathers.

Such naming practices are "akin to leapfrogging backward to eponymous ancestors tied to places. Like climbers roped together on a rock face, the generations together maintain a tenacious grip, despite their precarious individual hold on the surface." This process of "positional succession" serves to confer "the blessings inherent in an ancestral name" on a descendant." Like the conversos, who considered themselves "The Nation," and the Jews, who were a people with a religion, not merely members of a religion, the Dnme kept genealogies, because Dnme identity was part religion, part peoplehood, part diasporic belonging. The memory of the ancestors recorded in genealogies allowed them to know whom they could marry. Using genealogies hindered intermarriage, because it maintained corporate identity, a key constituent of the Dnme way.

I was able to trace the Dnme in part through genealogies provided me by descendants of the Yakubi, Karakas, and Kapanci, which like genealogies of other diaspora groups, have both open and closed aspects. When compiling a genealogy, a family has to decide what and whom to include, and what and whom to exclude, in order to stake claims, which are often of a religious nature. What gets left out? Is the genealogy to be patriarchal, or matrilateral? Are men or women or both included? Is the importance of women emphasized? A balance is established between exclusion of the elements that do not fit the ideology of the narrative, which itself is a claim to history, argued by the genealogy, and inclusion of the elements that strengthen that narrative. Genealogies are important for groups that live on the frontier, which is the limit of their geographical space, and the boundary between insiders and outsiders, and for diaspora groups who are beyond the range of the homeland and need to police membership in the group when there is a great potential for mixing with others. They complement means of daily contact, such as marriage, trade, news, and postcards, with a more historical, authoritative record.

While other diasporic groups' genealogies express connections to new societies, the Dnme genealogies were used to preserve group boundaries, not expand them. Dnme kept genealogies in part to ensure proper Levirate marriages, in which a widow was required to marry one of her deceased husband's brothers. One does not find (except in the most recent genealogies) Dnme wives in western and central Europe, for example, until after the Dnme began to deteriorate as a social group. Dnme genealogies begin with male progenitors, but include daughters and wives, spelling out the choice of partners, who can marry whom. Unlike other diasporic Muslim groups, among whom patrilineal descent was crucial, making intermarriage normal, the Dnme, who had both Islamic and Jewish roots, not only preserved patrilinealism, but added the matrilocal, thus combining Jewish and Muslim definitions of descent. Hence the importance of both one's father and one's mother being Dnme. Individuals who do not fit the image the family is trying to present of itself, individuals who break the chain of continuity going back to illustrious forebears, are excluded. One does not expect to find prostitutes, concubines, and bastards in family genealogies. But what is remarkable about the Dnme, and another reason they did not later fit into the bourgeois framework of the nation-state, was how the Dnme included second and even third wives in their genealogies, women who were very close family members, as well as children who would be considered bastards by other groups, such as Jews.

Conflicts could arise in diaspora among such a group, and genealogies could serve as very important mediating contracts. As Esra zyrek has pointed out, since the 1990s, many Turks have sought to recover and remember their diverse past, including the trauma of dramatic, sudden change suppressed or erased by the homogenizing early republic. Swept up in this nostalgic wave, one also finds a new effort by descendants of Dnme to record their family histories, in so doing interviewing the elderly to figure out the webs of family relationships. These genealogies are different from the earlier ones in that they are produced with a sense of nostalgia, and with the aim of writing popular books on the topic-family histories recorded desperately before the last relatives who know something pass away. They are thus unlike genealogies written before World War II, which were recorded to ensure distinctions between Dnme sects and Dnme and the rest of the world, which is to say, with a religious and not merely documentary intent. The aims of the compiler today, especially when married to an outsider, are far from those of the original compilers.

Genealogies also have a legal nature. Kinship and marriage offer rights to inheritance. In a group as closely knit (yet divided into three sharply delineated sects) as the Dnme, it was crucial to keep relationships well ordered, not only to keep marriages in line with the aims of the group, but also to keep wealth and property in the proper hands as well. Marriage and family alliances were mapped onto trade alliances. Genealogies can function as legal wills. Inheritance claims can be substantial.

The Dnme primarily practiced endogamous marriage in Salonika in part in order to keep their wealth and businesses within the family. Nothing illustrated communal belonging better. Breaking this marriage pattern, marrying outsiders, was a way of leaving the community. Dnme opposition to exogamy was so strong that Dnme leaders imposed the death penalty on those who strayed, according to the Ottoman archival document dating from 1862 cited in the Introduction, and those who wanted to marry outsiders had to take extreme measures. The marriage between Mehmet Zekeriya and Sabiha, daughter of Nazmi Efendi, is well known. Less well known is its precedent. According to an Ottoman document from 1891, the eighteen-to-twenty-year-old Rabia, daughter of a Dnme (referred to as an Avdeti) named Ali Efendi, fell in love with a Muslim named Hajji Feyzullah Efendi of Monastir, who told her to leave home and to appear before a deputy judge, where she could publicly convert to Islam. Ali Efendi understood that his daughter's conversion was a pretext to marry the Muslim, and he was as dead set both against her marriage to the Muslim and to her conversion. He refused to approve either. The governor of Salonika referred the case to the meeting of Ottoman ministers in Istanbul, where it was noted that Rabia was of legal age to decide whether to marry or not, with or without her father's approval. Thus they supported Rabia's conversion and marriage to Hajji Feyzullah. But in order not to create a scene in Salonika, the couple was secretly brought to Istanbul on the first available ferry, because it was deemed better for them to marry far from the city where the Dnme were so prominent and might try to hinder the marriage.

Several features strike the reader of the 1891 document. First, members of the group are referred to as having long resided in Salonika. This draws our attention to the fact that Muslims had been aware that the Dnme had made the city their home-it was an open secret-for as long as anyone could remember. Thus it appears that memory worked for others the same way it worked for the Dnme: for others had always known that the Dnme were there, that they existed in Salonika. And at the end of the nineteenth century, others began to point them out, call upon them, sowing the seeds for discriminating against them both in Greece and in the Turkish Republic. Second, although Dnme should have been considered Muslims, by this point at the end of the nineteenth century, they were regarded as different from other Muslims. There is no other way to explain how the term for conversion (ihtida) could be used in this case, as if Rabia had been a Christian or Jew changing her religion. The document even notes how the Dnme had not practiced intermarriage with Muslims until now. Moreover, the Avdeti are referred to as living under the cover of Islam. A distinction between Dnme and other Muslims had thus by this point been made, which would have serious consequences for the next generation of Dnme.

The Dnme practiced both Levirate and first-cousin marriage. Among the Kapanci, according to the genealogy extending to the eighteenth century provided by the descendant of Yusuf Kapanci, this practice goes at least as far back as Ibrahim Kapanci (b. 1820). With his first wife, Hasibe, Ibrahim had two daughters and two sons, Ahmet and Mehmet. With his second wife, Fatma, he had three daughters and a son, Yusuf. Ahmet, Mehmet, and Yusuf are discussed at length in this book. Yusuf Kapanci (1858-1910) also had two wives. With his first wife, Aisha, he had three children, including Ibrahim, discussed here. With his second wife, Emine, he had five additional children, including Osman (1880-1932). Osman is also discussed at length in this book. The year Yusuf died, Osman was widowed when his wife Sabite died in labor. Three years later, in 1913, Ibrahim, who served as a journalist and correspondent of Austrian newspapers, was accidentally killed the same day King George I of Greece was assassinated in Salonika. Osman then married his brother Ibrahim's wife Aisha (1881-1960), his first cousin, since she was the daughter of Mehmet. They lived in a wooden house next to the Church of the Ascension (Ekklisia Analipseos) opposite Mehmet's seaside mansion. Osman's first daughter, Nevber, became Yusuf's cousin and stepsister, because Yusuf's mother Aisha married her father. Osman and Aisha then had a daughter, whom they named Wonder (Harika). Osman followed in his father's and grandfather's footsteps.

A descendant of the Kapanci Osman Ehat provided me with a family genealogy. The family traces its origins to Sarrafzade [Son of the Money Changer] Halil Efendi, who was born in Salonika between 1835 and 1840 and passed away there by 1899. His son Sarrafzade Osman Ehat was a merchant and money changer. Mustafa Fazil and Sarrafzade Osman Ehat came from different branches of a larger family. Osman Ehat's son Sarrafzade Ahmet Tevfik Ehat, a tobacco merchant, married Nasibe Emine Fazil, the daughter of Mustafa Fazil. Sarrafzade Ahmet Tevfik Ehat's brother, Sarrafzade Kudret Ehat married Acile Akif, daughter of the important tobacco merchant Duhani Hasan Akif. The Akifs also formed another branch of the same Sarrafzade family. Another branch of the family, named Ata, was well known for its role in textile production and distribution. Mustafa Fazil's youngest daughter, Nefise Mukbile Fazil, married Ahmet Feyzi Ata in Istanbul in 1919.

(Continues...)

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