The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Donmes [New York: Oxford University Press, 2015]
- ️https://uhcl.academia.edu/CengizSisman
Related papers
Review of the Burden of Silence_Matthias Lehmann_2018
Unlike other scholars who have focused on ei-ther the early modern origins of the movement or on the Dönme of the lateOttoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, Sisman presents a sweeping nar-rative that takes his readers from the life of Sabbatai Sevi all the way downto the Dönme of contemporary Turkey. His analysis ranges from the politicaland cultural circumstances in the Köprülü period in the seventeenth-centuryOttoman Empire to the emergence of the modern Turkish nation-state, andfrom Sabbatean kabbalah to the relation between the Dönme and Sufism.
Socio-political challenges of marginal religious groups: the Sabbatean movement as a case study
2018
perspective. 13 The circumstances of Tzvi's conversion will be further elaborated on in Chapter four. Since that time, Shabbetai Tzvi's movement has been viewed as a marginal sect by the followers of majority religions. Elkan Adler remarks that, When Shabbetai Tzvi returned to the city in 1666, heads of oriental Jews and others lived in Salonica. I saw Donmes smoking outside their open shops on Saturday but was assured that they were Crypto-Jews and practised all they could of Judaism at home. I spoke to one of them in Hebrew and he evidently understood though he protested he was a Turk [Muslim]. 14 Certainly, Adler was not the only eye witness of these members of the Sabbatean movement at that time. There are still numerous misconceptions about the life of Shabbetai Tzvi. For instance, according to Turkish writer, Fırat, "There are Kurdish Dönmes, Laz Dönmes, Albanian, Arab, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish Dönmes" which shows how some writers misappropriated the term Donme, to apply to converts of any faith, rather than Sabbateanism. 15 Other authors sought to provide reasons for the emergence and flourishing of the Sabbatean Movement. According to renowned Jewish Ottomanist Lewis, the appeal of Shabbetai Tzvi's movement was linked to the Jewish massacre in Russia. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire never had to face anything like the Khmelnitsky massacres. They were, however, profoundly affected by one of its indirect consequences. In 1648, the year when the Khmelnitsky massacres began, a young Jew in Izmir, a student of the cabbala called Shaptay Sevi, proclaimed himself to be the awaited Messiah. There had been many false messiahs during the centuries of Jewish exile. None was so well heralded, nor so widely accepted as Shaptay Sevi. The Shabtay Sevi affairs had a tremendous impact. It left a double legacy on the one hand, discouragement verging on despair among the Jews, on the other, reinforcement, of rabbinical authority among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire. 16 On the other hand, Scholem noted that Tzvi's messianic declaration was based on the popularity of Lurianic Kabbalah in the seventeenth century. From this perspective, Scholem rejected hypotheses about the Jewish massacre as the reason for the messianic expectation of 13 llgaz Zorlu, Evet, Ben bir Selanikliyim, (Istanbul: Zvi Geyik Yayınları, 1999), 48. 14 In the middle of sixteenth century, the Jewish suburb of Salonica was destroyed by a great fire. There were eight thousand houses and eighteen synagogues that were decimated in the process.
The Dönmeh: Sabbataist legacy in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey
The aim of the article is to introduce to the foundation and the history of the Sabbataist community in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The article is focusing on a relatively small number of Jewish descendants in the mid-17th century whose community could survive and their members managed to reach high societal and administrative positions by the late 19th century. The Dönmehs later played a key role in reform movements which led to a political transition in the 1920s. This paper analyses the relation of the Dönmeh’s identities and the community’s preferences regarding the form of government.
In the year 1814 in Kopust, White Russia, a particularly interesting book was published by the name of Sippur Halomot Kets Hapla’ot, alternately titled Meora’ot Tzvi. The book was published by R. Israel Jaffe, an associate of Habad Hasidism, who also published late in that same year the first edition of the book Shivhei haBesht. The title page of Meora’ot Tzvi claims that the book is based on the writings of Moses Hagiz, Jacob Sasportas and the Hacham Tzvi, but it in fact far exceed these three sources. This book was the first Hebrew portrayal of the Sabbatean episode as a narrative and not only a polemic; some scholars have described this as the first Hebrew novel about Sabbateanism. The author remains anonymous but it is clear from the book that he was learned in the secrets of the Sabbatean movement as well as in the history of other religions. The book was published multiple times throughout the nineteenth century, and it seems that for many people it was their primary source of knowledge about Sabbeteanism. Despite the scholarly interest in the book, especially its trustworthiness (or lack thereof) as a historical source, no attempt has yet been made to understand its nature, its sources or its influence. A manuscript of the book was recently discovered (Sefer halomei kets pela’ot) – presented here for the first time – which changes dramatically our understanding of the books and also raises new questions. The manuscript, composed in the last decades of the eighteenth century, is dedicated primarily to convincing Sabbateans who had converted to Islam to return to Judaism. The anonymous author made use of internal Sabbatean traditions (primarily those connected to the Dönme) and presented his own alternative history, in which he reveals an understanding of the secret magic of Sabbateanism. The manuscript was edited repeatedly, with notes and addenda from multiple hands, each with its own focus, until it found its way to Israel Jaffe, who edited it dramatically, removing multiple passages and inserting his own polemics (as on the title page), thereby presenting an entirely new creation befitting his own goals, as he would do with Shivhei haBesht. By investigating the differences between the manuscript and the printed version, we can ascertain the methods by which the image of Sabbateanism was manufactured in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with multiple methods for combating it.
Rachel Goshgarian (editor)_ Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (editor)_ Ali Yaycioğlu (editor) - Crafting History_ Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar, 2023
Harvard, and beyond. This volume is a tribute to Cemal Kafadar from us-his students, colleagues, and friends-as we hope to participate in this turn and showcase some of the works he has formally supervised, casually discussed over tea, and generally inspired over the years. What is the nature of the turn initiated by Cemal Kafadar? As the editors of this volume, we would like to begin by underlining the remarkable intellectual pluralism that Kafadar has cultivated. His scholarship invites historians of the Ottoman world, medieval Anatolia, and the modern Middle East to cross disciplinary boundaries between political, social, economic, environmental, and material history. He fosters a holistic vision of the past; one where economy and culture, spirituality and materiality, warfare and business, life and dreams, built and natural environments, space and place, order and disorder, individual and society, self and others are to be understood and examined as components of a complex reality. Prose and poetry, documents and codices, hagiographies and chronicles, archives and architecture, texts, and paintings-together, they
In contrast to the accepted scholarly consensus, the Eastern European Haskalah maintained a complex relationship toward Kabbalah. It was maskilim from Eastern Europe, and not, as is commonly portrayed, Western Europe, who became the first scholars of Kabbalistic literature in the modern age. They offered critical readings of Kabbalistic texts, produced historical-philological scholarship, and presented the fundamental questions which later scholars, such as Gershom Scholem, would labor to once more present anew. Parts of the arguments they presented were indeed rooted in earlier literature, including both rabbinic and Christian Kabbalistic writings, but they spoke a different language while operating in a new historical and polemical context. If until now the approaches offered by Western scholars (among them Peter Beer, Isaak Markus Jost, Adolphe Franck, Adolf Jellinek, and Heinrich Graetz) have for the most part been presented as the antecedents to the modern study of this body of literature, it seems worthwhile to draw attention to another series of developments which occurred simultaneously among the maskilim of Eastern Europe, primarily during the first half of the 19th century. The links between east and west were crucial, as a not insignificant number of Western scholars were nourished both directly and indirectly by the earlier discussions of Eastern European maskilim who engaged with related topics (this phenomenon is particularly noticeable in the writings of Jost, Beer, and Leopold Zunz). Many maskilim took part in the renewed debates over the nature of Kabbalah and how it ought to be understood, even if their remarks were not especially penetrating and lacked any sort of systematic organization. While Nahman Krochmal’s utterances concerning Kabbalah are well known, he is presented as an isolated incident within Eastern Europe, as a lone spark of Wissenschaft des Juduntums which shone before its time. It appears that the matter should be presented anew within a broader, more accurate context. I will briefly discuss the case of Isaac Ber Levinsohn—who was greatly influenced by Krochmal even as he strode in his own direction—as one chapter of a larger study on the relationship of 19th century Eastern European maskilim to a diverse range of esoteric phenomena.