[Bilimsel Haber] New book: The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks {A.Law]

[Onur Inal]

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of

*The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks*,
by Marc David Baer.

This book tells the story of the Dönme, the descendents of Jews who resided in
the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam along with their messiah, Rabbi
Shabbatai Tzevi, in the seventeenth century. For two centuries following their
conversion, the Dönme were accepted as Muslims, and by the end of the
nineteenth century rose to the top of Salonican society. They  
eventually became
the driving force behind the 1908 revolution that led to the overthrow of the
Ottoman sultan and the establishment of a secular republic.

To their proponents, the Dönme are enlightened secularists and Turkish
nationalists who fought against the dark forces of superstition and religious
obscurantism. To their opponents, they were simply crypto-Jews engaged in a
plot to dissolve the Islamic empire. Both points of view assume the Dönme were
anti-religious, whether couched as critique or praise. But it is time that we
take these religious people seriously on their own terms. In the Ottoman
Empire, the Dönme promoted morality, ethics, spirituality, and a syncretistic
religion that reflected their origins at the intersection of Jewish Kabbalah
and Islamic Sufism. This is the first book to tell their story, from their
origins to their near total dissolution as they became secular Turks in the
mid-twentieth century.

More information about this book may be found at
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17426