An Enemy Old and New: The Donme, Anti-Semitism and Conspiracy Theories in The Ottoman Empire and The Turkish Republic

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Marc David Baer
Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 103, Number 4, Fall 2013, pp. 523-555
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2013.0033
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T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 103, No. 4 (Fall 2013) 523–555
An Enemy Old and New:

The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and
Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman
Empire and Turkish Republic
M A R C D AV I D B A E R
T H E IN T E RN ATI O NA L J E W controls the Freemasons.1 The Freemasons,

supported by the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and
Israel, pull the strings of the Sufi orders in Turkey. The Sufi orders direct
the Islamists, including the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who
is a Jew, the son of a Jewish woman from the Republic of Georgia.2 His
Jewishness is confirmed by his condemnation of anti-Semitism.3 Erdoğan
was put in power by the Anti-Defamation League, ‘‘the Jews’ most active
organization in the world,’’ which ‘‘establishes and controls a political
party’’ in Turkey in order to fulfill the Jews’ aim to overthrow the secular
regime and replace it with an Islamist one.4
If they were not so widely accepted, such claims would merely be
laughable, but these are the main theses of the best-selling book in Turkey
in 2007, Ergün Poyraz’s Musa’nın çocukları Tayyip ve Emine (Moses’s chil-
dren Tayyip and Emine). The second best-selling book in Turkey that
year was Musa’nın çocukları’s sequel, Musa’nın gülü (Moses’s rose, whose
title plays on the surname of the country’s president Abdullah Gül).5
Together these two books smashed sales records previously held by two
other books promoting conspiracy theories about Jews controlling Tur-
key. Soner Yalçın’s 2004 Efendi: Beyaz Türklerin büyük sırrı (Master: The
White Turks’ big secret) alleges the Jewish background of late Ottoman
1. Ergün Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları Tayyip ve Emine (Istanbul, 2007), 110.

2. His wife is supposedly the daughter of an Arab Jew from southeastern
Turkey. Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları, 18, 43.
3. Ibid., 298–99.
4. Ibid., 298.
5. Ergün Poyraz, Musa’nın gülü (Istanbul, 2007).
The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2013)

Copyright 䉷 2013 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.
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524 JQR 103.4 (2013)
and modern Turkey’s secular political elite, which is their ‘‘big secret.’’
The 2006 sequel, Efendi 2: Beyaz Müslümanların büyük sırrı (Master 2: The
White Muslims’ big secret), details the supposed Jewish origins of the
country’s leading Sufis, Muslim families, and Islamists, which is also their
‘‘big secret.’’6 By 2010, over 250,000 copies of Efendi 1 and 2 had been
sold. As Yalçın explains, he wrote the books ‘‘with the aim of uncovering
a secret: that secret Judaism is our reality. We cannot write history over-
looking it.’’7
The four books by Yalçın and Poyraz echo the Marxist nationalist
Yalçın Küçük’s eight-hundred-page rant Tekelistan (The monopoly state),
published in 2003 to rouse Turks naively unaware of how their lives are
controlled by Jews, with a cover portraying cockroaches crawling over
what seem to be the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.8 In Küçük’s
anti-Semitic scenario, Turkey is a colony administered by a cabal of secret
Jews. The United States dominates Turkey through descendants of
seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam known as Dönme, and
Freemason agents educated in American missionary or Dönme schools
and planted in Turkey to open the door for Sufis, Islamists, and corporate
capitalism. They have included secularist prime ministers and presi-
dents from the 1960s to 2002. Thus, for example, Kemal Derviş, a vice-
president at the World Bank, was made Turkey’s minister of economics
at the beginning of the new millennium to impose the will of international
financial circles on the country, overstepping governmental authority and
implementing drastic new financial policies, applauded in the media. The
media cartel is also in the hands of the Dönme, as is the bureaucracy.
‘‘Facing these facts,’’ Küçük concludes, ‘‘can we still have any doubt that
there is a conspiracy? I do not think so.’’9 By conspiracy, the author
explicitly means ‘‘a Jewish conspiracy’’ or a ‘‘Jewish-Dönme’’ conspir-
acy, since the Dönme ‘‘support world Jewry and follow their political
line.’’10
Küçük has been blamed for introducing a ‘‘new’’ anti-Semitism to Tur-
key and Yalçın credited with causing a once marginal phenomenon to
reach alarming levels of acceptance and popularity.11 Indeed, measured
6. Soner Yalçın, Efendi: Beyaz Türklerin büyük sırrı, 83rd printing (166,000 cop-
ies sold) (Istanbul, 2010); Yalçın, Efendi 2: Beyaz Müslümanların büyük sırrı, 53rd
printing (105,000 copies sold) (Istanbul, 2008).
7. Yalçın, Efendi, 566. The statement is repeated in Efendi 2, 437.
8. Yalçın Küçük, Tekelistan (Istanbul, 2003).
9. Ibid., 676.
10. Ibid., 252, 691.
11. Necati Polat, ‘‘Yeni anti-semitizm: Efendi üzerine notlar’’ (The new anti-
Semitism: Notes concerning Efendi), Doğu Batı 7.29 (October 2004): 179–80.
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AN ENEMY OLD AND NEW—BAER 525
by the widespread dissemination of the claims of these books through

interviews with the authors in the mainstream Turkish media, and affir-
mation of their theses in the Turkish press (journals, newspapers, televi-
sion) and on the Internet, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, formerly the
monopoly of Islamists and extreme rightists, have become the conven-
tional wisdom among secularists in Turkey.12 Yalçın’s books are published
by Turkey’s largest and most mainstream media company, Doğan.
Küçük, Yalçın, and Poyraz are all anti-Islamist extreme secular national-
ists; the former two are self-declared leftists. Poyraz (b. 1963) and the
other two men are currently in prison, not for incitation to religious vio-
lence, as one might imagine, based on the content of their books, but on
charges of participating in an alleged conspiracy, the so-called Ergenekon
plot to overthrow Erdoğan’s government. Yalçın (b. 1966) is a journalist
.
who formerly worked for the extreme nationalist Workers’ Party (Işçi
Partisi) journal Aydınlık (Enlightenment), wrote a weekly column for Tur-
key’s largest circulation daily, the secular nationalist Hürriyet, and hosted
a television program on CNN Türk. Küçük (b. 1938) is a Marxist politi-
cal scientist and writer who has been fired from university positions and
imprisoned for his views, whether expressed in the classroom or in print,
such as in Aydınlık. Indeed, he wrote Tekelistan while serving time.
Why have left-wing secularists written anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
in the past decade and why are they so popular? What is the relation
between the books they have written and those published by Islamists
and extreme rightists? Can secular nationalists’ conversion to anti-
Semitism have something to do with their losing power to the Islamists?
In order to answer these questions, this essay analyzes the anti-Semitic
notions central to these conspiracy claims, traces their first emergence to
the late Ottoman Empire, and follows the thread of anti-Semitic opinion
from Islamists and extreme rightists in the twentieth century to leftists
and secularists in the twenty-first. In so doing, it offers a comprehensive
Polat defines ‘‘new’’ anti-Semitism as the modern idea, used by the Nazis, that
Jews are driven by their nature to work against the nation’s political, societal,
and especially economic interests. Polat does not deploy the common North
American and European definition of ‘‘the new anti-Semitism,’’ which considers
Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel as anti-Semitism, the supposed inheritor of
‘‘Christian European anti-Semitism in general, and German Nazi anti-Semitism
in particular.’’ Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of
Narratives, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York, 2009), 274–75.
12. For an overview of the history of debates about Dönme in the Turkish
Republic, see Paul F. Bessemer, ‘‘Who Is a Crypto-Jew? A Historical Survey of
the Sabbatean Debate in Turkey,’’ Kabbalah 9 (2003): 109–52.
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526 JQR 103.4 (2013)
and original history of anti-Semitism in Turkey. It argues that rather than

being ‘‘Muslim’’ in nature, Turkish anti-Semitism is marked by the same
characteristics as European (Christian) anti-Semitism, especially in what
makes it ‘‘attractive.’’ As Hannah Arendt remarked, what makes people
accept anti-Semitic ideas depends ‘‘exclusively upon general circum-
stances which make them ready for a violent antagonism to their govern-
ment.’’13
The term ‘‘anti-Semitism’’ is not applied here to anti-Jewish sentiment
based on theology, or masking political and economic rivalry, on the part
of Ottoman and then Turkish Muslims.14 The anti-Semitism articulated
by Islamists and secularists alike in Turkey and examined in this essay
does not stem from Islam, Islamic theology, or anti-Judaism.15 Nor is it
to be equated with anti-Zionism.16 Instead, anti-Semitism—a term coined
13. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1968), 28.
14. For examples of early modern Muslim anti-Jewish sentiment, see Marc
David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe
(New York, 2008), 85–96 and 132–38. Although he uses the phrase ‘‘anti-
Semitism’’ in the title of an article, Pál Fodor concurs that premodern Ottoman
Muslim anti-Jewish sentiment was not anti-Semitism. See Pál Fodor, ‘‘An Anti-
Semite Grand Vizier? The Crisis in Ottoman-Jewish Relations in 1589–1591 and
Its Consequences,’’ in Fodor, In Quest of the Golden Apple: Imperial Ideology, Politics,
and Military Administration in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2000), 206.
15. That Islam lacks the same theological animus toward Jews as Christianity
is borne out by the fact that anti-Judaism was primarily a Christian phenomenon
in the Ottoman Empire. See Uriel Heyd, ‘‘Ritual Murder Accusations in
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Turkey’’ (Hebrew), Sefunot 5 (1961): 135–50;
Jacob Landau, ‘‘Ritual Murder Accusations and Persecution of Jews in Nine-
teenth-Century Egypt’’ (Hebrew), Sefunot 5 (1961): 415–60; Amnon Cohen, ‘‘Rit-
ual Murder Accusations against the Jews during the Days of Suleiman the
Magnificent,’’ Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986): 73–78; Jacob Barnai, ‘‘Blood
Libels in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–19th Centuries,’’ in Anti-Semitism through the
Ages, ed. S. Almog (New York, 1988), 189–94; Stanford Shaw, ‘‘Christian Anti-
Semitism in the Ottoman Empire,’’ Belleten 54 (1990): 1073–1149; and Esther
Benbassa, ‘‘Le Procès des sonneurs de tocsin: Une accusation calomnieuse de
meurtre rituel à Izmir en 1901,’’ in Society and Community: Proceedings of the Second
International Congress for Research of the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage 1984,
ed. A. Haim (Jerusalem,. 1991), 35–53, translated into Turkish as ‘‘Kampana
çalanlar davası: 1901’de Izmir’de cereyan etmiş bir kan iftirası vak’ası,’’ Tarih ve
Toplum 30 (Haziran 1986): 44–50.
16. Nuray Mert has claimed that anti-Semitism in Turkey derives from Arab
anti-Zionism: Nuray Mert, ‘‘Efendi,’’ Radikal, June 1, 2004; and Nuray Mert,
‘‘Efendi: Bir mit olarak tarih’’ (Efendi: History as myth), Virgül 75 (July 2004):
30–32. For a convincing analysis comparing hatred of Jews and hatred of Mus-
lims, see the essays in Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in
Europe, ed. M. Bunzl (New York, 2007), and Paul Silverstein, ‘‘The Fantasy and
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by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to define the modern, racist form of hostility to

Jews that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century—is
hatred based on the modern concept of race. According to this idea, Jews
form a distinct and morally inferior race.17 Jews carry essential biological
traits that can never be altered. Among them is ‘‘a metaphysical principle
that drives the Jew to do evil under all circumstances.’’18 The Jew’s will is
imagined to be ‘‘one which wills itself purely, gratuitously, and univer-
sally to be evil. It is the will to evil. Through him Evil arrives on the earth.
All that is bad in society (crises, war, famines, upheavals, and revolts) is
directly or indirectly imputable to him.’’19 Anti-Semitism, therefore ‘‘rests
on ‘false projection’—to the point of paranoia. The paranoiac perceives
the outside world only in accordance with his blind sense of purpose. He
‘seizes on whatever presents itself to him and fits it into his mythic web,
utterly indifferent to its own characteristics.’ Through practical insis-
tence, the Antisemite models the surrounding world—the reality in which
his notions can find no firm hold—on his own truth, his idée fixe, an
inner image.’’20 Anti-Semitism itself is thus a conspiracy theory, the idea
that inherently evil Jews are everywhere, and always plotting the
destruction of one’s society. Anti-Semites believe that the Jew’s alleged
malicious traits cannot be changed, even when Jews convert to other
religions. Anti-Semitism posits an eternal, unconvertible Jew.
This essay argues that the main focal point in Turkish anti-Semitism
is the figure of the Dönme—Turkish for a convert, which refers to the
descendants of Jews who converted to Islam at the end of the seven-
teenth century along with their messiah Shabbatai Tsevi (d. 1676). The
focus on the Dönme arises from the perception that the Salonikan-based
Young Turks and the party they formed, the Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP), make up a cabal of Dönme, or secret Jews. It was
immediately in the wake of the 1908 constitutional revolution—which
culminated in the dethronement of the last powerful, pious sultan, Abdül-
hamid II (r. 1876–1909; d. 1918), and ultimately led to the construction
Violence of Religious Imagination: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in France

and North Africa,’’ in Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and
Friend, ed. A. Shryock (Bloomington, Ind., 2010), 141–70.
17. See The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. P. Mendes-
Flohr and J. Reinharz (2nd ed.; New York, 1995), 331–33.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate,
trans. G. Becker (New York, 1976), 39.
19. Ibid., 40.
20. Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holo-
caust (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 108. The quotes are from Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 5:217 and 220.
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528 JQR 103.4 (2013)
of the secular Turkish Republic—that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

centering on the Dönme were first voiced by Ottoman Muslims. These
arguments were expanded after 1923 to include the claim that the man
who abolished the caliphate and established the secular state, the Saloni-
kan Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was a Dönme, a crypto-Jew fulfilling world
Jewry’s secret agenda, but the first use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theo-
ries occurred in the wake of the constitutional revolution and deposition
of Abdülhamid in 1909.21 Turkish anti-Semitism was fed by Nazism and
Turkish anti-Zionism from the mid-1920s to 1945 and was more openly
articulated after World War II and the creation of Israel in 1948, when
anti-Semitic, anti-Dönme, and anti-Zionist paranoia merged, but at its
core, it remained a retelling of the events of 1908.
From 1908 to today, the Dönme character—a secret Jew hiding in the
guise of the nation’s leader who surreptitiously aims to destroy the Turk-
ish culture, nation, and people on behalf of world Jewry—has been the
stock figure in antigovernment conspiracy theories promoted by Islamists
dispossessed of their authority, extreme rightists, and most recently left-
ists and secularists divested of their power. Long indoctrinated by official
historiography’s belief that internal Christian enemies allied with foreign
Christians always seek to destroy Turkey, the secularists were prepared
to accept conspiracy theories about local minority puppets of world pow-
ers.22 The Islamists’ rise to power and the decline of the secular elite’s
control of Turkey’s wealth, power, and culture, triggered the secularists’
acceptance of the idea of a crypto-Jewish prime minister. Anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories gain traction among all elements of Turkish society
based on the essentialist and racist assumption that only an ethnic Turk-
ish Muslim can have Turkey’s interests at heart, while a Jew—here the
false convert, the secret Jew Dönme—can only serve foreign interests at
21. See Rifat Bali, Cumhuriyet yıllarında Türkiye Yahudileri: Bir Türkleştirme serü-
veni, 1923–1945 (Jews in early republican Turkey: An adventure in Turkification)
(Istanbul, 1999); and ‘‘Türk anti-semitizmi,’’ in Modern Türkiye’de siyası̂ düşünce
(Political thought in modern Turkey), vol. 5, Muhafazakârlık (Conservatism), ed.
M. Gültekingil, T. Bora, Y. Aktay (Istanbul, 2007), 402–9.
22. Esra Özyürek, ‘‘Christian and Turkish: Secularist Fears of a Converted
Nation,’’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29.3 (2009):
398–412. See also Füsun Üstel,‘‘Okul, gençler ve ‘öteki’ler’’ (School, youth, and
‘‘others’’), in Türkiye’de gençlik çalışması ve politikaları (Youth work and politics in
Turkey), ed. N. Yentürk (Istanbul, 2008), 447, 455; and Étienne Copeaux,
Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste, 1931–1993
(Paris, 1997);. published in Turkish translation as Tarih ders kitaplarında Türk tarih
tezinden Türk-Islâm sentezine, 1931–1993 (Istanbul, 2006).
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odds with those of the Turks. Moreover, they take advantage of the fact
that the Dönme attribution is as impossible to deny as to prove.
There is no means to determine whether a Muslim Turk today has
Jewish heritage from the Ottoman era. The Ottoman bureaucracy kept
no register of converts and conversion. Once a Jew became a Muslim,
he or she adopted a Muslim name, and his or her non-Muslim past was
forgotten. In the seventeenth century, the era in which Shabbatai Tsevi
and then his followers, the Dönme, became Muslims, a Jewish person
could convert and erase all Jewish ‘‘taint.’’23 Early modern anti-Jewish
sentiment was not modern racial anti-Semitism that posits an ‘‘eternal
Jewish biology,’’ which can never be purified, even by religious change.
Whereas a convert’s origins were forgotten within a generation in the
Ottoman Empire, even a person whose ancestors converted two and a
half centuries earlier can be considered a member of his or her ancestral
religion and ethno-national group in the present Turkish Republic, which
is what we see in the case of the Dönme. Who the descendants of Dönme
‘‘really were’’ has been irrelevant for the conspiracy mongers and is there-
fore not addressed in this essay. Suffice it to say that Dönme did not
consider themselves Jews. Jews did not consider the Dönme as Jews
either. According to Islamic and secular Ottoman law, the Dönme were
not Jews, because they had converted to Islam.24 The imposition of sur-
names in 1934 by the Turkish Republic did not clarify matters. Sharing a
common surname does not mean sharing familial relations or heritage.
Because ‘‘Dönme’’ is such a plastic, unprovable category and can be
applied to anyone—especially since it is believed members of the group
bear a Muslim name in public but a Jewish name in private—the label
becomes credible.25
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: ‘‘It is not the Jewish character that provokes
anti-Semitism, but rather, that it is the anti-Semite who creates the
Jew.’’26 Sartre was not saying that those called Jews are Jews; rather, he
was focusing on the mentality of those who see Jews everywhere. Yalçın
is one. He identifies a ‘‘Jewish problem,’’ which is not ‘‘purely Jewish
23. Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam, 136.

24. On the ethno-religious identity of the Dönme, see Marc David Baer, The
Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, Calif.,
2010), 1–21.
25. Yalçın, Efendi 1, 221.
26. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 143. Sartre has been criticized for not allowing
a voice to Jews themselves. For an analysis of how Jews in Turkey live with
and respond to anti-Semitism, see Marcy Brink-Danan, Jewish Life in 21st-Century
Turkey: The Other Side of Tolerance (Bloomington, Ind., 2012), 83–105.
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530 JQR 103.4 (2013)
history, it is human history’’ through which Ottoman and Turkish history

should be viewed, since ‘‘according to Jewish doctrine, there can be no
world history that is not Jewish history!’’27 To what Jewish doctrine he
is referring is not clear. This statement alerts us that for the anti-Semite,
it is ‘‘the idea of the Jew that one forms for himself which would seem to
determine history, not the historical fact’ that produces the idea.’’28 While
the people accused of being secret Jews in the late Ottoman Empire and
republican Turkey may have changed, the accusation has remained the
same.
T H E FI R S T C O N S P I R AC Y T H E O R I E S A B O U T TH E D ÖN M E
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are not new to Turkey. As Elie Ked-
ourie, Bernard Lewis, and Feroz Ahmad have shown, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, British diplomats articulated anti-Semitic conspir-
acy theories centering on the Dönme to explain away the events sur-
rounding the 1908 constitutional revolution. Sir Gerard Lowther, British
ambassador to Constantinople from 1909 to 1913, repeatedly alleged a
crypto-Jewish-Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and called the ruling CUP
‘‘the Jew Committee of Union and Progress.’’ Minister of finance Meh-
met Cavid Bey was a ‘‘secret Jew, an official manifestation of the occult
power of the Committee, one of the only members of the Cabinet who
really count, and the apex of Freemasonry in the empire,’’ Lowther
claimed.29 Originating ‘‘in a line of clerical and nationalist thought famil-
iar on the Continent,’’ the notion of a Jewish-Masonic plot ‘‘was taken
up in some British circles, and a few years later seized upon by Allied
propagandists as a means of discrediting their Turkish enemies,’’ Bernard
Lewis asserts.30 Feroz Ahmad also locates anti-Semitic conspiracy theo-
ries in ‘‘British Foreign Office reports, the dispatches of the Istanbul cor-
respondent of The Times (London), and the conservative press of the
Ottoman capital,’’ which was ‘‘in some cases owned by Greeks.’’31 None
of these influential scholars of Ottoman history, however, entertained the

28. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 16.
29. Elie Kedourie, ‘‘Young Turks, Freemasons and Jews,’’ Middle Eastern Stud-
ies 7 (1971): 92.
30. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (2nd ed.; New York, 1968),
211, n. 4.
31. Feroz Ahmad, From Empire to Republic: Essays on the Late Ottoman Empire
and Modern Turkey, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 2008), 1:133–34. The essay was originally
published as ‘‘Unionist Relations with the Greek, Armenian and Jewish Commu-
nities of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1914,’’ in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman
Empire, ed. B. Braude and B. Lewis, 2 vols. (New York, 1982), 1:401–34.
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possibility that the anti-Semitism propagated in the capital could also

have had a Muslim source.
What has recently been demonstrated is that parallel with the launch-
ing of British conspiracy theories about the alleged true aims of the Jews,
Dönme, and Masons supposedly behind the CUP, religious Ottoman
Muslim protonationalist opponents of the Young Turks and supporters
of Sultan Abdülhamid II led by Derviş Vahdeti (d. 1909) propagated
similar anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.32 Vahdeti—long considered a
British-financed agent provocateur in secularist Turkish historiography
—originated in British Cyprus and was educated in a missionary school
where he could have been introduced to British anti-Semitism.33 He and
other writers in his journal Volkan (Volcano) considered the Dönme to be
atheist Jews who promoted immorality and irreligion in the empire
through Masonry and certain Sufi orders and were backed by ‘‘foreign
Jewish capital’’ and foreign colonial powers. As the dominant force
within the leading political organization of the era, the CUP, the Dönme
supposedly orchestrated Abdülhamid II’s overthrow.
‘‘There are many Jews who came to Istanbul who, of course, are not
really Muslim,’’ Vahdeti wrote in 1908, referring to the Dönme. ‘‘Soon
afterward, some Muslims joined the Masonic lodges, also displaying their
Freemason nicknames, and no longer could be considered pious, and fell
into disgrace in the Muslim community.’’34 He thus links the arrival of the
Dönme with the spread of Freemasonry and immorality among Muslims.
Vahdeti became most vocal of Muslims articulating opposition to politi-
cally active Dönme. He opposed the revolution of 1908 and helped incite
the countercoup the following year. Vahdeti and others opposed the
‘‘atheism’’ (secularism) of the CUP, its alleged attacks on Islam, the fact
that many of its members were influential Freemasons, and the Jews and
Dönme in its ranks. The main magnet of anti-Dönme rhetoric was the
cabinet minister Mehmet Cavid (d. 1926). Cavid had conveyed the news
to Abdülhamid II that a delegation had a communication to make
to him—it had come to inform the sultan of his dethronement—and
32. Baer, The Dönme, 101–8.

33. Ahmad, From Empire to Republic, 1:14. The essay originally appeared as
‘‘The Young Turk Revolution,’’ Journal of Contemporary History 3 (1970): 19–36.
34. Kıbrıslı Derviş Vahdeti, ‘‘Millet selamettedir’’ (The . nation is sound), Vol-
kan 45 (February 14, 1909): 213–14, in Volkan gazetesi, Ikinci Meŗutiyetin ilk ayları
ve 31 Mart olayı için bir yakın tarih belgesi: 11 Aralik 1908–20 Nisan 1909 [December
11, 1908–April 20, 1909], tam ve aynen metin neşri (Volkan newspaper: A historical
document for the first months of the second constitution and the events of March
31) ed. M. Ertuğrul Düzdağ (Istanbul, 1992).
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532 JQR 103.4 (2013)
Emmanuel Carasso was a member of that delegation. That the first was a
Dönme and the second a Jew became pegs upon which Muslims were
able to hang their fears of Jewish conspiracy.35
When he became the head of the Committee of Muslim Unity at the
beginning of 1909, Vahdeti began to claim that the Dönme were behind
the spread of Freemasonry and thus of atheism in the empire, and that
this was a Jewish plot. In order to connect the dots in this argument,
Vahdeti had to prove that the Dönme were secret Jews. He quickly found
the evidence he sought when he turned to the media. Vahdeti notes how
in an article in a recent issue of the Dönme-owned Salonikan newspaper
Zaman (Epoch), the term gavur (infidel) was misspelled as yavur. The
author implies that the misspelling was neither a random mistake nor a
slip of the typesetter but was based on the fact that Jews, whose mother
tongue was assumed to be Judeo-Spanish, mispronounced Ottoman
Turkish words that way.36 Later he more explicitly articulates his racist
view of the Dönme, writing: ‘‘The reason the author of the piece . . .
spelled it that way is because that is precisely his predominant natural
tendency in pronouncing the word.’’37 Vahdeti had caught the slip, how-
ever, which revealed the true and unchanging Jewish essence of the
Dönme.
The anti-Semitic and anti-Dönme sentiment of Derviş Vahdeti and the
other writers in Volkan was shared by the political journalist Ebüzziya
Tevfik (d. 1913), who had been immersed in European, especially
French, language and literature, the main avenues introducing him to
anti-Semitic thought. Already in 1888, Tevfik had published the first
Turkish-language history of the Jews, which was ‘‘colored by anti-
Semitism.’’38 After the constitutional revolution, when the strict censor-
ship regime was lifted, Tevfik openly articulated anti-Semitic views,
depicting the CUP’s reforms as the work of anti-Islamic Jewish conspira-
tors and labeling Jews ‘‘parasites.’’ He argued that ‘‘the economic domi-
nation of the Jews is so strong that one could designate this congregation
of money changers that controls the financial and commercial markets as
the monarchs of money,’’ whose power no one in Europe or the Middle
35. Baer, The Dönme, 98.

36. Kıbrıslı Derviş Vahdeti, ‘‘Kuvve-i maneviyyeyi kırmak, ne fenadır!’’ (How
evil it is to crush moral power), Volkan 49 (February 18, 1909): 233.
37. Kıbrıslı Derviş Vahdeti, ‘‘Zaman! Asır!’’ Volkan 73 (March 14, 1909):
351–32.
38. Özgür Türesay, ‘‘Antisionisme et Antisémitisme dans la Presse ottoman
d’Istanbul à l’Époque jeune Turque (1909–1912): L’exemple d’Ebüzziya Tevfik,’’
Turcica 41 (2009): 152.
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East could resist.39 According to this line of thinking, since ‘‘money is the
master of the world and the Jews are the masters of money,’’ the Jews
were the world’s puppet masters, capable of accomplishing any of their
aims.40 Tevfik also posited a link between Freemasonry and Zionists in
Salonika, the home of the Dönme, claiming that after the 1908 revolution,
Jews established Masonic lodges in the city in order to pursue their aim
of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.41
In 1909, Tevfik displayed the turn to anti-Semitism when he wrote of
the existence of an unchanging Jewish character—hiding one’s true
nature behind a veil of hypocrisy and dissimulation—that could apply to
anyone, regardless of their religion. Thus he labeled the members of the
London Chamber of Commerce ‘‘Jews’’ even though they were Chris-
tians.42 This racist conception would prove very useful. If there was an
eternal Jewish type, then the Jewish or crypto-Jewish (Dönme) label
could even be applied to people who could not conceivably be Jews,
whether because they were Christians or because they were descendants
of Jews whose ancestors had converted to Islam two centuries before,
such as Mehmet Cavid. Between 1909 and 1911, Cavid’s Muslim oppo-
nents in parliament called him a Salonikan Dönme in league with interna-
tional Jewish capital.43
Decisions by the CUP and actions taken by its leaders set in motion a
chain of events that led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its
replacement by the Republic of Turkey. In its first two decades, the Turk-
ish Republic exiled the royal family; abolished the sultanate and the
caliphate; shattered the authority of the Muslim religious establishment;
outlawed independent religious education and the wearing of religious
insignia and clothing, including the veil and the turban; eliminated
Islamic law and law courts and imposed secular civil law; replaced the
Arabo-Persian Ottoman script with Latin-based Modern Turkish;
adopted the Christian calendar and work week; nationalized the econ-
omy; and gave women the right to vote and hold political office. A new
secular state governed by a new elite destroyed Islamic institutions and
appropriated their power bases and financial holdings.
Those who lost their societal position sought a scapegoat to blame.
Because many Muslims assumed that the revolutions of 1908 and 1923
39. Ibid., 161.

40. Ibid., 170.
41. Ibid., 153, 175.
42. Ibid., 155–56.
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534 JQR 103.4 (2013)
were fomented by Dönme, who were simply Jews, they hatched many
conspiracy theories about their true aims. Islamists and extreme rightists
argued that ‘‘international Jewry’’ working through ‘‘crypto-Jewish’’
Dönme agents had first divided and destroyed the Ottoman Empire and
then replaced it with the anti-Muslim secular Turkish Republic, headed
by an alleged secret Jew, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.44 The anti-Dönme
conspiracy theories of 1908 took on new life with the establishment of
the Turkish Republic in 1923, but due to press censorship they were not
openly articulated until the World War II era.
ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-DÖ NME CONSPIRACY T HEORIES

AMONG I SLAMISTS AND EXTREME RIGHTISTS, 1923–2000
Turkish anti-Zionism fed into Turkish anti-Semitism, as did Nazism, and

these played a role in the articulation of anti-Dönme conspiracy theories
between 1923 and 1945, whose themes were then picked up by leftist
secularists in the twenty-first century. Citing an anti-Semitic logic that it
was the actions of the Jews that caused anti-Semitism, already in 1909
Tevfik had warned that the colonization of Palestine by masses of Jews
would provoke anti-Semitism among Muslims.45 And indeed, the conflict
over Palestine also contributed to anti-Semitism in Turkey. Turkey’s most
notorious anti-Semite, Cevat Rifat Atilhan (d. 1967), had witnessed the
loss of Palestine while serving as an Ottoman officer during World War I.
Believing that Jews have always sought world domination, in two works
written in the 1930s he attributed the defeat to Jewish spies working on
behalf of the British in Sina cephesinde Yahudi casuslar (Jewish spies on the
Sinai front) and the novel Suzi Liberman.46 Forty thousand copies of the
latter were distributed gratis to Turkish officers by the General Staff.47
The works of Atilhan and the second most notorious anti-Semite,
Hüseyin Nihal Atsız (d. 1975), display pervasive Nazi influence. They
reflect the hatred found in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which went
through a new Turkish printing every year from its publication in 1925
44. For examples of this conspiracy theory, see Rifat Bali, ‘‘The Dönmes as a
Theme of Turkish Anti-Semitism,’’ in Bali, A Scapegoat for All Seasons, 249–76.
45. Türesay, ‘‘Antisionisme et Antisémitisme dans la Presse ottoman,’’ 164.
46. Sina cephesinde Yahudi casuslar (Izmir, 1933) and Suzi Liberman (Istanbul,
1935). For a complete bibliography of his works, see Rifat Bali, ‘‘Yaşam öyküsü,
yayımları, ve düşünce dünyası ile Cevat Rifat Atilhan’’ (Cevat Rifat Atilhan’s
biography, publications, and world view), in Bali, Musa’nın evlatları cumhuriyet’in
yurttaşları (Moses’ children, the republic’s citizens) (Istanbul, 2001), 247–51.
47. Bali, ‘‘Türk anti-semitizm,’’ 403. For a biography of Atilhan, see Bali,
‘‘Yaşam öyküsü, yayımları, ve düşünce dünyası ile Cevat Rifat Atilhan,’’ 211–46.
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to 1945. The influence of this seven-hundred-page conspiracy theory

accusing Jews of treason to Germany and causing the national defeat
during World War I, cultural and moral decadence, sociopolitical domi-
nance, including controlling political parties to serve their own interests,
and conspiring with Communists to take over the world, cannot be over-
estimated.48 Atsız published the viciously anti-Semitic Edirne-based jour-
nal Orhun in 1933–34, when it played an important role in instigating a
pogrom in Thrace in 1934, whereafter it was banned, only to reappear in
1943–44.49 In this and other journals and books, Atsız displayed his
racialized conceptions of Jews:
There are two types of Jews. One is the authentic Jew, who can be
recognized by his speech. Another is the Dönme, who cannot be so
identified. In order to identify this type it is necessary to look carefully
for the degenerate Jewish features of his face. There is no difference
whatsoever between the Jew and the Jewish Dönme. One says, ‘‘We
Jews,’’ while the other says, ‘‘You Turks.’’50
Atilhan was an honored guest in Nazi Germany, where he praised the

concentration camps for their ‘‘cleanliness,’’ and he attempted to establish
a branch of the Nazi Party in Istanbul.51 In 1933 and 1934, Atilhan’s
. .
journal Inkilâp (Revolution), later Millı̂ Inkilâp (National Revolution),
adopted all the themes of Nazi anti-Semitism, reproducing parts of the
48. In 2005 Mein Kampf was a best-seller in Turkey but was banned two years
later thanks to the efforts of the state of Bavaria, which owns the copyright. Yet
in 2010 a Japanese manga edition, specifically targeting youth—with a striking
red cover depicting a youthful Adolf Hitler, who is presented in a sympathetic
way—evaded this ban and was published in Turkish, the only language into
which this version of the book has been translated. Miraç Zeynep Özkartal,
‘‘Kavgam, yasağı ‘manga’yla deldi’’ (The manga version of Mein Kampf pokes a
hole in its prohibition, Milliyet, May 27, 2010). Adolf Hitler, Kavgam-Manga,
trans. D. Aybar (Istanbul, 2010).
49. On the pogrom, see Hatice Bayraktar, ‘‘The Anti-Jewish Pogrom in East-
ern Thrace in 1934: New Evidence for the Responsibility of the Turkish Govern-
ment,’’ Patterns of Prejudice 40.2 (2006): 95–111; Bayraktar, ‘‘Zweideutige Individuen
in schlechter Absicht’’—Die anti-Semitischen Ausschreitungen in Thrakien 1934 und ihre
Hintergründe, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen Band 297 (Berlin, 2011); and Rifat
Bali, 1934 Trakya olaylari (Istanbul, 2008).
50. Nihal Atsız, ‘‘Komünist, Yahudi, ve Dalkavuk’’ (Communist, Jew, and
toady), Orhun 5 (March 12, 1934), quoted in Bali, ‘‘The Dönmes as a Theme of
Turkish Anti-Semitism,’’ in Bali, A Scapegoat for All Seasons, 254.
51. Bali, ‘‘Yaşam öyküsü, yayımları, ve düşünce dünyası ile Cevat Rifat Atil-
han,’’ 220.
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536 JQR 103.4 (2013)
anti-Semitic turn-of-the-twentieth-century forgery Protocols of the Elders of

Zion and articles by the anti-Semite ideologue Theodor Fritsch (d. 1933),
finally reprinting caricatures from the Nazi paper Der Stürmer.52 Thanks
to his close affiliation with Der Stürmer’s founder and publisher Julius
Streicher (convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged at Nurem-
berg in 1946), Atilhan was elected president of the International Organi-
zation against Zionism, Communism, and Freemasonry in Munich in
.
1934.53 His 1937 book Iğneli fiçi: Tarih boyunca Yahudi mezalimi (The
needle-filled barrel: Jewish atrocities throughout history), which was
translated and published in Germany, claimed that Jews used the blood
of Christian children in baking matzo.54
A retired army officer educated in Nazi Germany first translated the
complete Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Turkish in 1943.55 For Atilhan,
only this fictional account of a secret Jewish world government could
explain how the Jewish State of Israel could be established in part of the
former Ottoman Empire. In ‘‘Siyonizmin protokolleri’’ (The protocols of
Zionism), published as a series in the Islamist Sebilürreşâd (The straight
path) in 1948, Atilhan writes, ‘‘The Protocols predicted exactly what hap-
pened in reality. So what will they say to this? Is what is written and
insolently confessed in the Protocols—that they aim to change the state of
the world, bring down governments, destroy civilizations, and bridle the
press—not a reality today?56 Atilhan brought together Derviş Vahdeti’s
and Ebüzziya Tevfik’s main villians: Dönme, Jews, Masons, and Zion-
ists.57 Writing in Sebilürreşâd, Atilhan asserted that the collapse of the
52. Hatice Bayraktar, ‘‘Stereotypes of Jews in Turkish Caricatures, 1933–

1945,’’ in Jewish Images in the Media, ed. M. Liepach, G. Melischek, and J. See-
thaler (Vienna, 2007), 85–104. On Fritsch, see Jew in the Modern World, 340–50.
53. Quoted in Esther Debus, Sebilürreşâd: Kemalizm öncesi ve sonrasi dönemdeki
Islamcı muhalefete dair karşılaştırmalı bır araştırma (Sebilürreşâd: A comparative
study of the Islamic opposition before and after Kemalism), trans. A. Dirim
(Istanbul, 2009), 222. .
54. Cevat Rifat Atilhan, Iğneli fiçi: Tarih boyunca Yahudi mezalimi (Istanbul,
1937). A needle-filled barrel was allegedly used by Jews to extract the blood of
the non-Jewish children they abduct.
55. It would be reprinted in forty-five additional editions over the next half
century. See Rifat Bali, ‘‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Turkey,’’ in The
Global Impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—A Century-Old Myth, ed. E.
Webman (New York, 2011), chap. 13.
56. ‘‘Siyonizmin protokolleri,’’ Sebilürreşâd 1 n.s. (1948): 201, quoted in Debus,
Sebilürreşâd, 222.
57. He had already linked Jews with Masons in Dünya nazarında Yahudilik ve
Masonluk (A global perspective on Judaism and Masonry) (Istanbul, 1935). Atil-
han penned numerous articles for Büyük Cihad (The great struggle) in 1951 and
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Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the State of Israel in its former
territory were the result of an anti-Muslim Freemason-Dönme-Jewish
conspiracy.58 In his view, the conspiracy was the result of ‘‘international
Jews’’ dethroning Sultan Abdülhamid II because he rejected Theodor
Herzl’s request to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.59 He articulated
this view explicitly in his 1956 account of the dethronement of Abdül-
hamid II, in which he claims that ‘‘the triumvirate of Dönme, Zionists,
and Freemasons’’ were the real puppet masters ‘‘who prepared the sce-
nario and directed’’ the overthrow of Abdülhamid II ‘‘in order to bring
the entire Turkish nation to its knees, tear our great fatherland into
pieces, and establish their own sultanate on a section of it.’’60 He ex-
plained the role of the Freemasons with the assertion that ‘‘Freemasonry
is wholly the lackey of Zionism.’’61 Other writers expressed the same view
in Sebilürreşâd, especially its publisher and editor Eşref Edib (d. 1971).
Edib argued that ‘‘taking the Turkish nation’s political destiny into its
hands, the Dönme entered the Salonikan branch of the CUP, then they
let the Zionists’ Freemasons into the CUP, and following the 1908 Consti-
tutional Revolution they entered the parliament and administration; after
this they became the group which determines the nation’s political and
economic fate.’’62
Islamist Sebilürreşâd’s extreme right counterpart was Büyük Doğu (The
great East), founded in 1943 by Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (d. 1983), edu-
cated at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1920s. Kısakürek viciously attacked
Jews and Dönme in his writings and promoted the idea that Jews are
the secret rulers of all lands, including Turkey. To Kısakürek, since the
mid-nineteenth century, ‘‘most of the heroes presented as revolutionaries
in the fields of politics, administration, social life, the economy, and the
1952 which maintained ‘‘that Freemasonry was but a front for ‘Zionist imperial-
ism’ that, since the French Revolution, had been determined to conquer the
world.’’ Gavin Brockett, ‘‘Provincial Newspapers as a Historical Source: Büyük
Cihad and the Great Struggle for the Muslim Turkish Nation (1951–53),’’ Interna-
tional Journal of Middle East Studies 41.3 (2009): 446.
58. Debus, Sebilürreşâd, 221–23.
59. Bali, ‘‘Türk anti-semitizmi,’’ 403–4, 406–7; and Bali, ‘‘Cevat Rifat Atil-
han,’’ ibid, 404–7. .
60. Cevat Rifat Atilhan, Ilim ışığında ve tarih önünde 31 Mart faciası (A scholarly
and historical account of the tragedy of March 31) (Istanbul, 1956), 8, 9, 12. On
March 31, 1909, anti-CUP counterrevolutionaries, incited by Derviş Vahdeti’s
Volkan, revolted. The insurrection was quickly suppressed.
61. Ibid., 32.
62. Eşref Edib, ‘‘Dönmeliğin Türkleştirilmesi’’ (The Turkification of the
Dönme), Sebilürreşad 6.140 (December 1952): 228.
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538 JQR 103.4 (2013)
cultural sphere’’ in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey ‘‘have been none
other than puppets of this secret power, whether they know it or not.’’63
He promoted this conspiracy in his commentary to the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion published in serial form in Büyük Doğu in 194664 and three
years later, when the same journal printed a translation of Henry Ford’s
The International Jew.65 By the early 1950s, Kısakürek linked Jews,
Dönme, Masons, ‘‘Jewish capitalism,’’ and Zionists in his conspiracy the-
ories.66 Freemasonry was ‘‘but a tool; for it was the servant of a higher
and more secret organization, that is, the Jew.’’67 He saved his most
vicious attacks for the journalist and newspaper owner Ahmet Emin Yal-
man (d. 1972). In a letter labeled ‘‘Response to a Kike,’’ Kısakürek asked
Yalman ‘‘what gives you the courage to speak in the homeland of the
Muslim Turks, you are a Dönme, your grandfather carries the blood of
Shabbatai Tsevi; you aim to destroy Islam and the Turkish nation!’’68 He
also accused Yalman of being a traitor who desired the creation of an
American mandate over Turkey after World War I.
Attacks on Yalman in Büyük Doğu claimed he prostituted Turkish
women to American Jews by sponsoring beauty contests, graphically
illustrated in a cartoon in which Yalman appears as a spider trapping
63. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, ‘‘Siyon Hakimlerinin Protokolleri,’’ Büyük Doğu 49,
October 4, 1946, republished in Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dön-
melik, ed. S. Ak (Istanbul, 2006), 10–11.
64. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, ‘‘Siyon Hakimlerinin Protokolleri,’’ Büyük Doğu
49–52 and 58, October 4, 1946–December 13, 1946, republished in Kısakürek,
Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dönmelik, 9–29. According to its publisher, the book aims to
‘‘recognize the secret powers that destroy the unity and integrity of the nation
and homeland like a moth eating it from within’’ and ‘‘to realize their influence in
and occupation of the heart of the fatherland.’’
65. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, ‘‘Ford’un kitabı’nda Yahudi’’ (Henry Ford’s Jew),
Büyük Doğu 21–22, 24–25, July 29, 1949–August 26, 1949, republished in Kısa-
kürek, Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dönmelik, 60–81.
66. See Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, ‘‘Tarihi nüfuz ve muvaffakiyetleri’’ (Historical
influence and success) Büyük Doğu 4, November 4, 1949, republished in Kısa-
kürek, Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dönmelik, 113–16; and Necip Fazıl Kısakürek,
‘‘Yahudi davası’’ (The Jewish problem), Büyük Doğu 58, June 1, 1951, repub-
lished in Kısakürek, Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dönmelik, 95–97. This reached culmina-
tion in Son devrin din mazlumları (Oppression of Islam in recent history), which
claims that the CUP, a puppet in the hands of the cabal of Jews, Dönme, and
Freemasons, deposed Abdülhamid II in order to suppress Islam. Necip Fazıl
Kısakürek, Son devrin din mazlumları (Istanbul, 1969), 3, 4, 12.
67. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, ‘‘Masonluk, mutlak Yahudilik müessesesidir!’’
(Freemasonry: Without doubt a Jewish organization!), Büyük Doğu 10, Decem-
ber 16, 1949, reprinted in Kısakürek, Yahudilik-Masonluk, Dönmelik, 137.
68. The letter appears on the web site http://www.necipfazil.com.
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naked women in his web.69 Büyük Doğu published another cartoon of an

arrow with the newspaper’s name on it piercing the heart of a supine man
wearing a Star of David and labeled a Freemason. Such inflammatory
images, along with reading Derviş Vahdeti’s Volkan, inspired Hüseyin
Üzmez to attempt to assassinate the journalist in 1952. As the columnist
for the radical Islamist daily Vakit (Time) records in his autobiography,
the Dönme had toppled the Ottoman Empire, and ‘‘for almost two centu-
ries they have been running our lives. Today the reins of power are still
in their hands.’’70 Along with Üzmez, Atilhan and Edip were also impris-
oned for their role in the assassination attempt.
Racial thinking was central to these attacks on the Dönme. Kısakürek
used racialized grounds to support his call for the expulsion of the Dönme
from Turkey: ‘‘The central dimension of the demand to cleanse the Turk-
ish homeland of all treasonous and wicked foreign elements consists of
the notion ‘Either be like us or leave us’ and the only class whose wish to
become one of ours would be rejected in advance is the Jew. This is
because the Dönme, after spreading the fantasy that they were basically
like us, have shown over the past centuries that they are not.’’71 The same
worldview—combining the idea of the unconvertible Jew and the ‘‘inter-
national Jew’’—emerges a year later in the foreword to the 1969 edition
of Atilhan’s 31 Mart faciası (The March 31 tragedy), where extreme right
Turkish readers are told that ‘‘the kike Dönme deceiving the noble Mus-
lim Turkish nation for centuries by means of their perfect ‘camouflage
tactics’ have caused us to fall to our present pathetic state.’’72
Atilhan and Kısakürek continued to write on the topic into the 1970s,
a period marked by the Islamist leader Necmettin Erbakan (d. 2011)
speaking out forcefully against Turkey joining the European Common
Market because it was supposedly controlled by Zionist capitalists who
would buy up Turkey one piece of land at a time73 —and, it was under-
stood, settle Jews there, as international Jewry had done in Palestine.

70. Hüseyin Üzmez, Malatya suikastı (Assassination attempt in Malatya)
(Istanbul, 1998), 63, cited in Bali, ‘‘The Dönmes as a Theme of Turkish Anti-
Semitism,’’ 268. .
71. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Ideolocya örgüsü (The weave of ideology) (Istanbul,
1968), 339, quoted in Bali, Appendices, A Scapegoat for all Seasons, 374.
72. Ahmet Kayıhan, Önsöz, Cevat Rifat Atilhan, 31 Mart faciası (Istanbul,
1969).
73. Necmettin Erbakan, Mecliste ortak pazar (The Common Market in Parlia-
ment) (Izmir, 1971), 68–70, quoted in Michelangelo Guida, ‘‘The Sèvres Syn-
drome and ‘Komplo’ Theories in the Islamist and Secular Press,’’ Turkish Studies
9.1 (2008): 47.
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540 JQR 103.4 (2013)
Atilhan and Kısakürek were joined by a parade of other anti-Semites who

carried forward these themes, keeping them alive on the margins of Turk-
ish public opinion, where they had been since 1908. While the arguments
remained the same, the targets of the attacks changed, reflecting who
was in positions of socioeconomic and political power. The anti-Semitic
theories of Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook of the Jewish Question, or Anti-
.
Semitic Catechism (published in Atilhan’s Inkilâp in the 1930s), were
quoted approvingly in dissertations and books written by graduates and
professors of Turkey’s university programs in religious studies.74 Exam-
ples include Tarih boyunca Yahudiler ve Türkler (Jews and Turks through-
out history) by Professor Hikmet Tanyu, dean of Ankara University’s
School of Theology, and a reworking of the dissertation of the School of
Theology’s assistant dean, Professor Abdurrahman Küçük, a former
Ph.D. student of Tanyu’s, Dönmeler ve Dönmelik Tarihi (The Dönme and
the history of Dönme religion).75 Tanyu, who had been arrested and tried
during the 1944 government crackdown on the extreme right, composed
his 1,300-page tome replete with withering personal anti-Semitic attacks
on individual Turkish Jews and Dönme.76 Küçük’s book also rails against
Freemasons and has as its thesis the claim that Jews’ biological makeup
ensures they always maintain the characteristics of deceitfulness and
hypocrisy. The author’s aim is to ‘‘out’’ the Dönme, who, ever since play-
ing an important role in the CUP organization and the deposition of Ab-
dülhamid II have always plotted to ‘‘weaken the Turkish nation’s beliefs,
customs, and moral values.’’77 Küçük’s book was published by the Ötüken
press, whose first publication was a work of Kısakürek, and which con-
tinues to publish the works of Nihal Atsız, including a collection of his
articles from the 1930s.78 Atsız’s ideological inheritor was the far-right
Nationalist Action Party (MHP), established in 1969 by Alparslan
74. The Handbook of the Jewish Question was again translated and published in
1972 as Tarih boyunca Yahudi meselesi (The Jewish problem throughout history)
(Ankara).
75. Hikmet Tanyu, Tarih boyunca Yahudiler ve Türkler, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1976/
77); and Abdurrahman Küçük, Dönmeler ve Dönmelik Tarihi (Ankara, 1979). See
Jacob M. Landau, ‘‘The Dönmes: Crypto-Jews under Turkish Rule,’’ Jewish
Political Studies Review 19.1–2 (2007): www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/Show
Page.asp?DBID⳱1&TMID⳱111&LNGID⳱1&FID⳱388&PID⳱0&IID⳱
1669 (accessed October 5, 2011).
76. It first appeared in two volumes in 1976–77 and was reprinted as one
volume as recently as 2005.
77. Abdurrahman Küçük, Dönmeler ve Dönmelik Tarihi (Ankara, 1979), 460.
78. http://www.otuken.com.tr/tarihce.asp.
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Türkeş (d. 1997).79 While Tanyu was merely a party member, Küçük
became general secretary and a parliamentarian representing Ankara
between 1999 and 2002.
In the wake of the works of Kısakürek, but especially those of Tanyu
and Küçük, in the following decades similar books sought increasingly
merely to ruin the reputation of successful or prominent Turks by tarring
them with the Dönme label. A typical example of anti-Dönme conspiracy
theories from Islamists in the 1980s and 1990s is Yahudilik ve dönmeler
(Judaism and the Dönme) by Yesevizade (pen name of Şakir Alparslan
Yasa).80 It aims like the others to prove ‘‘that many politicians and busi-
nessmen in Turkey are in fact Jews or Dönme, part of a universal plot
(together with Freemasons) to dominate the world.’’81 Yesevizade’s claims
are partly based on those of Tanyu, to whose book he devotes a whole
chapter, and Küçük. Yahudilik ve masonluk (Judaism and Freemasonry)
and Şeytanın dini masonluk (Freemasonry: Satan’s religion) by Harun
Yahya (pen name of Adnan Oktar), books arguing the same case, were
widely disseminated; the former, published in 1986, was distributed gratis
at mosques in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s.82
Ertuğrul Düzdağ, Mehmed Şevket Eygi, and the self-proclaimed
Dönme Ilgaz Zorlu became the main peddlers of these conspiracies in the
1990s and the new millennium. Düzdağ published a transcription into
Modern Turkish of Derviş Vahdeti’s Ottoman-language Volkan news-
paper and published Yakın Tarihimizde gizli gerçekler (Hidden realities in
our recent history) and Yakın tarihimizde Dönmelik ve Dönmeler (Dönme
religion and the Dönme in our recent history).83 The latter two works
echoed earlier Islamist and . extreme rightist conspiracies. The title of
Islamist journalist Eygi’s Iki kimlikli, gizli, esrarlı ve çok güçlu bir cemaat:
Yahudi Türkler yahut Sabetaycılar (A secret, mysterious, and very powerful
community with a dual identity: Turkish Jews or Sabbateans) displays
79. Bali, ‘‘Türk anti-semitizmi,’’ 409; Jacob Landau, ‘‘Muslim Opposition to

Freemasonry,’’ Die Welt des Islams 36.2 (1996): 186–203; Landau, ‘‘Farmāsūniy-
ya,’’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed., Leiden, 1960–2005), vol. 12 (Supplement),
ed. P. J. Bearman, et al., 296–99.
80. Yesevizade, Yahudilik ve Dönmeler (Istanbul, 1994).
81. Landau, ‘‘The Dönmes.’’
82. Yahudilik ve Masonluk and Şeytanın dini Masonluk are available on the
author’s webpage (www.harunyahya.org/ . . . /YahudilikveMasonluk/yvm7.
html).
83. Düzdağ, Yakın tarihimizde gizli gerçekler (3rd printing; Istanbul, 2004), and,
Yakın tarihimizde Dönmelik ve Dönmeler (Istanbul, 2004).
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542 JQR 103.4 (2013)
the author’s contempt for both Jews and Dönme and belief in conspirac-
ies concerning their alleged influence.84 Zorlu’s, Evet, ben Selanikliyim: Tür-
kiye Sabetaycılığı üzere makaleler (Yes, I am a Salonikan: Articles
concerning Turkish Sabbateanism), a collection of articles published in
the 1990s, is an alleged insider account of how Dönme secretly practice
Judaism and have dominated Ottoman and then Turkish politics from
the era of the CUP to the present.85 From its opening paragraph, the
author confirms the worst fears of Turkish anti-Semites:
The subject of this book is the strange history of a group of people who
live among us as if there are no differences between us, not indicating
any peculiarities in religion, language, and traditions in public, but who
in fact are members of a secret religious community who have exerted
great effort to maintain their own mystical tradition and kept it alive
for three centuries in private.86
The author gives voice to some of the most bizarre allegations about the
corrupt morals of the Dönme, the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes, and
perpetuates the conspiracy theory that the Dönme destroyed the Otto-
man Empire so that the ‘‘secret Jew’’ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular
state could oppress Muslims, while Dönme continue secretly to rule.
According to Rifat Bali, with the appearance of Zorlu, the Dönme
began to be ‘‘discussed, written about and debated at levels unprece-
dented since the founding of the Republic.’’87 The book quickly went
through several reprintings, lasted several months on the best-seller list,
and was even named book of the month in November 1998 by the now
defunct literary journal Matbuat (The press). Zorlu gained national and
international press attention partly for his claims that 100,000 Dönme
live in Turkey, among them the head of the Turkish armed forces Çevik
Bir and Tansu Çiller (prime minister 1993–96; deputy prime minister
.
84. Mehmet Şevket Eygi, Iki kimlikli, gizli, esrarlı ve çok güçlu bir cemaat: Yahudi
Türkler yahut Sabetaycılar (Istanbul, 2000).
85. Ilgaz Zorlu, Evet, ben Selanikliyim: Türkiye Sabetaycılığı üzere makaleler
(Istanbul, 1998).
See Rifat Bali, ‘‘Evet, ben Selânikliyim,’’ Virgül 15 (1999): 44–47; and Marc
David Baer, ‘‘Revealing a Hidden Community: Ilgaz Zorlu and the Debate in
Turkey over the Dönme/Sabbateans,’’ Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 23.1
(1999): 68–75.
86. Zorlu, Evet, Ben Selanikliyim, 1.
87. Rifat Bali, ‘‘A Scapegoat for all Seasons: The Dönmes, or Crypto-Jews of
Turkey,’’ in Bali, A Scapegoat for all Seasons, 69.
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with Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, 1996–97).88 Zorlu and Eygi

appeared frequently together in the Islamist, extreme rightist, and even
occasionally mainstream media, and the former established a publishing
house to publish his own work, that of his supporters, such as Abdurrah-
man Küçük, and translations of foreign works on the Dönme. But these
writers and the conspiracy theory they promoted remained marginal in
Turkey outside of Islamist and extreme right circles. Zorlu’s fame did not
last long, and he soon ceased appearing in the media.
LEFTIST AND SECULARIST ANTI-DÖN M E CO N S P I R ACY

THEORIES IN THE ERDOĞ AN ERA
Since the general election of 2002 brought the Islamist Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan to the office of prime minister in 2003, self-declared leftists and
secular nationalists have borrowed the main anti-Semitic trope of the
Islamists and extreme rightists: namely, that Dönme, acting on behalf of
world Jewry, conspired to destroy the Ottoman Empire and to this day
control Turkey. Unlike their anti-Semitic predecessors, these writers have
alleged that it is the Islamists who are the Jewish agents of ‘‘international
Jewry’’ intent on destroying the Turkish Republic.
That secret Jews have been placed in influential positions in order to
carry out an international Jewish plot against Turkey and that an interna-
tional network of Jews establishes Turkish political parties and controls
them are major themes in the work of Ergün Poyraz. In Musa’nın çocukları
(Moses’ Children), Poyraz claims:
The Jewish Mason Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. ambassador to

Ankara and simultaneously CIA station chief for Turkey and the Mid-
dle East, discovered Tayyip Erdoğan when he was the Refah Party’s
Beyoğlu district chairman in Istanbul. After being discovered, Erdoğan
began his meteoric rise from district to provincial chairman, and from
there to the office of Istanbul mayor and then on to suddenly establish
a political party and being named its candidate for prime minister.89
Elsewhere Poyraz expands the circle of those allegedly tutoring and

advising Erdoğan to include a prominent Turkish Jew and an Israeli
intelligence agent.90 The same author’s Musa’nın AKP’si (Moses’ AKP, the
88. Ibid., 130, 148.

89. Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları, 70.
90. Ibid., 12.
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544 JQR 103.4 (2013)
ruling political party headed by Erdoğan) ‘‘proves’’ how Jews allied with
the U.S. and British intelligence services founded the party.91
In a section of Musa’nın çocukları crudely titled ‘‘Jew,’’ Poyraz explicitly
refers to Islamist anti-Semitic anti-Dönme conspiracy theories, trac-
ing the history of the supposed Jewish-Dönme conspiracy to the late
Ottoman Empire. He quotes Sebilürreşâd founder Eşref Edib’s quatrain
expressing how people of Jewish background dominated the Committee
of Union and Progress: ‘‘Because of the Dönme our government / Turned
into a kind of Jewish state. / They also jewed [cheated] the office of the
mufti, / And in the end gave it to Moses.’’92 He adds: ‘‘In fact, institutions
such as these [the Young Turks and CUP], which sheltered copious num-
bers of Jews, were the cause of the continuous Ottoman loss of territory
and the empire’s eventual destruction. The Jews, whom we embraced in
1492, now engage in every type of wicked ruse and are expending all of
their power to destroy the current state.’’
Soner Yalçın repeats the same themes. According to him, ‘‘If a Turk
wishes to establish a political party or be the candidate for the leadership
of a political party, then without fail he has to go to the United States,
where he needs someone who is especially close to the Jews, someone
who has won their trust, a person who can establish relations for him
with powerful people and lobbies.’’93 He sees an Ottoman precedent, as
did his Islamist and extreme rightist counterparts, for it was supposedly
the Dönme who were the driving force bringing the Sufis and Masons
together, and in turn, due to their common political interests, the three
united in founding the CUP.94 The main argument of Soner Yalçın’s
Efendi is that the Dönme have dominated Ottoman and Turkish political,
economic, and cultural life, while serving an international ‘‘Jewish inter-
est’’ to the detriment of Turks for the past century. The Evliyazade family
of Izmir and their relatives have ‘‘always kept a secret . . . What was the
91. Poyraz, Musa’nın AKP’si (Istanbul, 2007). The claim that the United States
was behind the AK Party was subsequently made in Merdan Yanardağ, Bir ABD
projesi olarak AKP (The AKP as an American project) (Istanbul, 2007); and Erol
Manisalı, AKP, ordu, Amerika üçgeninde Türkiye (Turkey in the triangle of the AKP,
army, and America) (Istanbul, . 2008). Many other books, such as Bahadir Selim
Direk, Küresel tuzak: Ilımlı Islam (Global trap: Moderate Islam) (Istanbul, 2008),
also allege that the United States created a moderate Islam to undermine the
secular Turkish Republic. Perhaps the most prominent person among those artic-
ulating this view is the popular secular theologian and Kemalist Yaşar Nuri Öz-
türk. See his Allah ile aldatmak (To cheat with God) (Istanbul, 2008).
92. Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları, 77–78.
94. Ibid., 262–63.
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secret of the Evliyazade family of Izmir?’’ The author wastes no time

revealing it: according to Yalçın, the Evliyazade family traces its roots to
Jews who migrated from Spain following the expulsion of 1492.95
Having established that the family is essentially Jewish, the author
then focuses on the history of the Evliyazades from 1875 to 1961, spin-
ning a web of family relations that includes everyone influential in late
Ottoman and republican politics, beginning with the leading Ottoman
CUP ideologue and government minister Doctor Nâzım (d. 1926) and
ending with Prime Minister Adnan Menderes (prime minister, 1950–60;
hanged by a military junta in 1961). Along the way, he leads the reader
to conclude that the CUP leader Talat Pasha (interior minister, 1913–17;
grand vizier, 1917–18; d. 1921), founder of the Turkish Republic and
its first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (president, 1923–38; d. 1938),
Atatürk’s foreign minister Tevfik Rüşdü Aras (foreign minister 1925–38,
. .
d. 1972), the second president Ismet Inönü (president 1938–50; d. 1973),
third president Celal Bayar (president, 1950–60; d. 1986), Prime Minister
Adnan Menderes, Menderes’s foreign minister Fatin Rüşdü Zorlu (for-
eign minister, 1957–60; hanged in 1961 along with Menderes), and Prime
Minister Bülent Ecevit were all members of the extended Dönme Evliya-
zade family, or related to it through marriage.96 Thus according to this
conspiracy theory the most influential member of the Evliyazades in the
CUP period was Doctor Nâzım; in the Atatürk era it was Tevfik Rüşdü
Aras, and with the arrival of multiparty democracy, it was Adnan Mend-
eres.97 Serving as mayors, parliamentarians, cabinet ministers, prime min-
isters, and presidents, establishing political parties to serve their own
interests, running governments with a cabinet full of relatives, ‘‘some fam-
ilies have always been in power!’’98 Hence, Jews have been the real ‘‘mas-
ters’’ of Turkey.
In the section of the book titled ‘‘Jews, Dönme and Masons,’’ Yalçın
claims Dönme and Jews made up the core of the CUP in Salonika.99 As
British diplomats had argued nearly a century earlier, Yalçın also claims
that the person introducing the CUP to Masons in Salonika was the Jew
Emmanuel Carasso.100 Later in the book, the author exclaims there was
truth to the claim that the CUP was a puppet in the hands of the Dönme
95. Yalçın, Efendi 1, 14. .

96. For Ecevit, see ibid., 255; for Inönü, see ibid., 373, 377.
97. Ibid., 401.
98. Ibid., 308. Menderes allegedly ruled his government with ‘‘a cabinet of
relatives.’’ Ibid., 468–69.
99. Ibid., 83.
100. Ibid., 85.
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546 JQR 103.4 (2013)
and Masons.101 For confirmation of this thesis, taken from Islamists and
extreme rightists, he notes that Dönme, who reached the highest level in
the Masonic hierarchy, were among the CUP politicians who overthrew
Abdülhamid II.102 Moreover, most of the CUP leadership consisted of
Dönme.103 As minister of the interior, one of the leaders of the CUP, the
alleged Dönme, Sufi, and Mason Mehmet Talat Pasha (assassinated in
Berlin in 1921), became one of the triumvirate ruling the Ottoman
Empire during World War I.104
In the wake of World War I, Yalçın adds Zionist to this triumvirate of
troublemakers in Turkey. He asks whether it is a coincidence that most
of the founders of the ‘‘Wilson Principles Society’’ were Dönme educated
in American missionary schools.105 Wilson is labeled a devoted Zionist.
‘‘During World War I, Zionism became the state policy of the American
administration,’’ Yalçın writes. ‘‘Without a doubt, the fact that Jews in
the United States dominated finance and the media played a great
role.’’106 In order to bring its Zionist policies to fruition, the United States
took special care in selecting its ambassadors to Istanbul. During World
War I, the two ambassadors were Jews. By the end of the war, the Zion-
ists no longer had any need for Abdülhamid II and the CUP. To reach
their goals, they continued their lobbying in the United States, England,
France, and the USSR. What they depended on most was American
Jewish capital, and, of course, their local lackeys. After the war, pro-
English leading Evliyazades were sympathetic to the United States, sup-
ported the Wilson Principles, and represented American firms in Tur-
key.107 The reason Turkey supported the creation of an independent
Jewish state and was one of the first states to recognize Israel is obvious
to the author: its leading policymakers were secret Jews.108
Yalçın implies that the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa
Kemal, was a Dönme closely connected to the Evliyazade family.109 After
repeating the claim that the Dönme never married their daughters to
outsiders, the author asserts that Mustafa Kemal’s wife Latife was a
descendant of the group, since her Uşakizade family was related to the
101. Ibid., 153–54.

102. Ibid., 155.
103. Ibid., 211.
104. Ibid., 79.
105. Ibid., 245.
106. Ibid., 246.
107. Ibid., 247.
108. Ibid., 454–55.
109. For one such hint of a relationship, see ibid., 295.
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Evliyazade family.110 Moreover, ‘‘the Evliyazade’s little girl Beria and the
Uşakizade’s tiny baby Latife would one day both marry Salonikans. And
the day would come when one of the Salonikan grooms would sign the
execution orders for the other.’’111 The reader later discovers that Yalçın
is referring to Doctor Nâzım and Mustafa Kemal, the former hanged for
not supporting the war for independence and for his supposed role in an
alleged assassination plot against the Turkish leader in Izmir, in 1926.112
Explaining the continuing Dönme dominance of politics from World War
I to the early republican era, the author claims that ‘‘when the CUP was
in power between 1913 and 1918, Evliyazade Refik, the father-in-law of
CUP leader Doctor Nâzım, was mayor of Izmir. When Mustafa Kemal
came to power [in 1923], his father-in-law, Uşakizade Muammer Bey,
became mayor. Actually nothing had changed: the Uşakizades and Evliy-
azades were relatives! The mayor’s office in Izmir was always in the
hands of certain families!’’113
Carrying his history into the post-Atatürk period, Yalçın discusses how
Mahmud Celal Bayar (d. 1983) was an intimate friend of the Evliya-
zades.114 The former CUP member Bayar founded the Demokrat Parti,
an economically liberal party, along with Adnan Menderes and Fuad
Köprülü, in 1946, and was Turkish president from 1950 to 1960, when
Menderes served as prime minister. The author uses genealogical excur-
sions—based partly on the claims of Ilgaz Zorlu—to link Menderes’s
(and Köprülü’s) ancestors to Jews and Dönme and marriage into the
Evliyazade family,115 in order to demonstrate that these men were
Dönme, and that Dönme control of Turkey lasted at least until the 1960
military coup. The author also quotes approvingly a key argument of
Kısakürek’s study of Menderes published by the Ötüken press:
The party’s name was far from Turkish, but close to the language of
the Dönme: Demokrat Parti. Is the party itself a democrat, or is it the
110. Ibid., 29, 303.

111. Ibid., 45.
112. Ibid., 324–43.
113. Ibid., 302.
114. Ibid., 107.
115. Ibid., 183–200; 216–21; 409–10. Köprülü is a descendant of Köprülü
Fazıl Ahmet Paşa, who as grand vizier in 1666 honored rather than executed
Shabbatai Tzevi. The author concludes that the tolerant treatment of the messiah
was due to the powerful Jewish-Dönme lobby in the palace. In the fantasy world
of Yalçın, the Ottoman Empire was run by Jews: the elite infantry known as the
Janissaries were the puppets of Jewish usurers; grand viziers were converted
Jews; and since palace women were converted Jews, their sons born in the
harem, who would grow into sultans, were Jews as well. Ibid., 414–18.
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548 JQR 103.4 (2013)
democrats’ party? This name offending the genius of the Turkish lan-
guage must have sprung from the mouth of a Dönme. According to
proper Turkish [usage], the name should have been either Demokrat
Partisi [Democrat Party] or Demokrasi Partisi [Democracy Party].116
The essential Jewish nature of the Dönme and the Dönme identity of the
most influential people in Turkey is thus revealed for both Islamist and
extreme rightist and leftist writers. Menderes and his foreign minister
Fatin Rüşdu Zorlu appear in the Evliyazade family tree inside Efendi’s
front cover (as does Atatürk’s foreign minister Tevfik Rüşdü Aras). To
substantiate the conspiracy theory that the Dönme have controlled Tur-
key from the late Ottoman to the republican era, the author adds the
supposition that many Evliyazades helped found the Demokrat Party to
his claim that they were behind the CUP and the Republican People’s
Party, in other words, the political parties that ran Turkey in turn from
1908 to 1960. The ‘‘smoking gun’’: Mustafa Kemal and Adnan Menderes
were supposedly relatives.117
THE APPROPRIATION OF ISLAMIST A ND EXTREME

R I G H T I S T C O N S P I R AC Y T H E O R I E S
The secularists are the latest victims of radical cultural, political, and eco-
nomic change.118 Although Islamist parties first joined coalition govern-
ments in the 1970s, it was especially with the 1980 coup, when the
military promoted an ideology of ‘‘Turkish-Islamic synthesis,’’ that Tur-
key’s political field became open to Islamist-leaning parties. A second
major transformation introduced in the wake of the coup was the incre-
mental freeing from state planning of the economy, converted to a market
economy marked by privatization and financial liberalization, and finally
opened to global capitalism. The introduction of new capital in Turkey
has led to the creation of a new Muslim wealthy class. These Muslims,
including women who wear the headscarf, have found their voice in
Islamist political parties, or in parties dominated by religious Muslims.
The Muslim nouveau riche and Muslim politicians are the new elite in
Turkey. Through their decade-long absolute majority in parliament and
116. Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Benim gözümde Menderes (My opinion of Men-
deres) (Istanbul, 1970), 59, quoted in Yalçın, Efendi 1, 421.
117. Yalçın, Efendi 1, 304, 408.
118. On the secular elite deploying Kemalist symbolism in their private lives
as a response to the perceived threats of political Islam, Kurdish separatism, and
neoliberalism, see Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and
Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, N.C., 2006).
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holding of the office of the president, they have dislodged the secular elite
old guard from their hold on the political system and have begun to dilute
the power of the judiciary and army, the secular pillars of the state they
constructed. Out of power, secularists accuse those in power of being
Dönme.
In the face of profound cultural and political change, ‘‘conspiracy
thinking proves an antidote to powerlessness. It lifts the despair of vul-
nerability and arms believers with the knowledge to understand and
defeat the enemy.’’119 The enemy of the anti-Semite is ‘‘constituted author-
ity.’’120 The main audience of Küçük, Poyraz, and Yalçın is made up of
secular nationalist republicans who are graduates of prestigious second-
ary schools and universities, members of the upper middle class, and pro-
fessionals. This class as a whole imagines its values and lifestyle under
siege and threatened by the social, economic, and political changes that
Turkey has undergone in the past decade.121 It exhibits especially great
fear of and hostility toward Kurds and Islamists, and such fears lend
credence to conspiracy theories that can explain how the first group has
been able to reassert its identity and the second, which appeared to have
offered an olive branch to the first, has risen to power. The Kemalist
upper class mourns the apparent failure of the secular nationalist project,
which was an attempt to make Kurds into Turks and Muslims into secu-
larists. It grieves a collective loss of confidence in its elite place in society,
its status, and its political power. It nurses feelings of exclusion and
wrong by the rise of identity politics. As a first defensive reaction, the
secular elite has sought to define and reassert its own identity and politi-
cal positions vis-à-vis all other groups, especially Armenians, Greeks, and
Kurds, which are seen in essentialized or racist ways. Scared secularists
emphasize the assumed differences between its class and its nightmare
others.122 Thus its first reaction was to recycle the myths of the founding
of the republic and see every development through the prism of 1918–
23—endlessly rearticulating the fears of an Ottoman Empire besieged by
imperial powers and their local Christian lackeys, bent on the annihilation
of the Turks.
The pattern repeats itself. Secularists then turned against the supposed
119. Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern
America (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 240.
120. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 32.
121. Füsun
. Üstel and Birol Caymaz, Seçkinler ve sosyal mesafe (Elites and social
distance) (Istanbul, 2009), available at www.aciktoplumvakfi.org.tr/pdf/seck
inler-ve-sosyal-mesafe.pdf.
122. Ibid., 52–53.
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550 JQR 103.4 (2013)
secret Jew hiding within the religious Muslim and behind other internal
enemies. The Kurds were turned into secret Jews. In the wake of the
establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region in post–Saddam Hussein
northern Iraq, conspiracy theories were launched regarding not only the
alleged Jewish origins of leading Kurdish intellectuals and politicians in
Turkey and Iraq but ‘‘Jewish’’ (i.e., Israeli) plans to colonize Israeli
Kurdish Jews in northern Iraq to create a ‘‘Judeo-Kurdistan.’’123 Jewish
Kurds were then allied with evil Zionists in the popular imagination. The
top-grossing film in Turkey in 2006, Kurtlar Vadisi: Iraq (Valley of the
wolves: Iraq), features as a main character a Jewish doctor who harvests
Iraqi organs to sell to wealthy Israelis.
Why the Jews? The changed politico-economic field of the past decade
speaks to the anxiety of this class and the reasons pushing it to believe in
conspiracies against it. But these explanations cannot inform us why this
class would for the first time see the stock figure of the Jew in Turkey,
the Dönme, the ‘‘secret Jew’’ within, as its enemy. Turks had many other
scapegoats from which to choose. Why not a conspiratorial figure of
another ethnic or religious or national background? Much has been made
of President Gül allegedly being an Armenian, and of Prime Minister
Erdoğan being a Georgian, and thus not ethnic Turks; the latter is also
supposedly a U.S. citizen.124 Erdoğan’s national origins have been used
to explain why he offered cultural freedoms to Kurds, allowed a medieval
Armenian church to be rebuilt and used as a house of prayer, and other
policies that an ethnic Turk would supposedly never consider, for they
betray Turkish interests. But none of the best-selling books emphasize
that he is merely a Georgian. Rather, they imagine him to be a Jew.
Those disenfranchised by the rise of a new elite in Turkey express
their fears by articulating anti-Semitism, just as their counterparts in the
Ottoman Empire did a hundred years ago. Doing so, they borrow a page
from European anti-Semitism, for like the first anti-Semitic political par-
ties in Germany in the 1880s, ‘‘by attacking the Jews, who were believed
to be the secret power behind governments, they could openly attack the
state itself.’’125 Moreover, it is striking how the conspiracy theories in
which the Dönme figure are, from the perspective of the history of anti-
Semitism, quite conventional. Kısakürek in the 1950s and Poyraz fifty
years later posit that there is an ‘‘international Jew’’ who secretly runs the
123. See Mesut Yeğen, ‘‘ ‘Jewish-Kurds’ or the New Frontiers of Turkish-

ness,’’ Patterns of Prejudice 41.1 (2007): 4, 18.
124. Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları, 13–20, 122–24.
125. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 39.
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world.126 The International Jew is the title of a series of articles published by

the American anti-Semite Henry Ford in the 1920s, first in his The Dear-
born Independent and then as a four-volume set of booklets. The first book-
let is titled The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem and is mainly
based on the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That there is a secret cabal
of Jews who control world politics for their own interests, that Jews act
through the Masons and control the media, and that international capital
means Jewish capital or that Jewish bankers control the world economy
are all claims that have been made in Europe since the late nineteenth
century.127 As Arendt observes, Jews are always represented as ‘‘an inter-
national trade organization, a world-wide family concern with identical
interests everywhere, a secret force behind the throne which degrades all
visible governments into mere façade, or into marionettes whose strings
are manipulated from behind the scenes . . . they were invariably sus-
pected of working for the destruction of all social structures.’’128
Leftist and secular nationalist writers in today’s Turkey are also reviv-
ing late nineteenth-century European anti-Semitism by tapping into anti-
Dönme conspiracy theories—a current of thought present in Turkey
since the early twentieth century, when hatched by protonationalist reli-
gious Muslims, such as Ebüziyya Tevfik, who approvingly cited anti-
Semitic works of French authors.129 The main arguments of Édouard
Drumont’s racist best-seller La France Juive (1886) have been resurrected
in today’s Turkish best seller Tekelistan and its extension, Efendi. The
author of Efendi, Soner Yalçın, cites Drumont as a source. As Rifat Bali
points out, ‘‘By merely substituting the word ‘Jews’ for ‘crypto-Jews’
and ‘France’ for ‘Turkey’ we can find the same claim’’ in Drumont.130 And
as is common in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, here, too, there is ‘‘the
assumption that there exists a ‘world Jewry’ that secretly conspires to
attain power in all political, societal, and economic sectors in order to rule
the world.’’131
126. Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları, 110.

127. On the world order supposedly envisioned in the Protocols of Zion, see
Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and the
‘‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’’ (New York, 2000), 99–154.
128. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 28.
129. Türesay, ‘‘Antisionisme et Antisémitisme dans la Presse ottomane d’Is-
tanbul,’’ 171–72.
130. Rifat Bali, ‘‘What Is Efendi Telling Us?,’’ 333.
131. Juliane Wetzel, ‘‘Verschwörungstheorien,’’ in Handbuch des Anti-
Semitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3: Begriffe, Theorien, Ideolo-
gien, ed. W. Benz (Berlin, 2010), 335.
................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:09 PS PAGE 551

552 JQR 103.4 (2013)
What Klaus Holz argues characterizes anti-Semitism in general is

applicable to Turkey. ‘‘Jewish society’’ allegedly annihilates ‘‘our commu-
nity’’ through media and finance and imposes another social form.132
What is allegedly ‘‘Jewish’’ is contrasted to what is supposedly ‘‘local’’ in
the economy (circulation versus production), politics (internationalism
versus nationalism), culture (subversion versus creativity), and the social
(immoral versus moral). A distinction is made between the community
made up of ‘‘working people’’ and ‘‘Jewish capital.’’ ‘‘The Jew’’ is made
to personify materialism and irreligion, and to Marxists, capitalism, impe-
rialism, and the bourgeoisie. ‘‘The Jew’’ embodies all of the menaces the
national community faces. According to this way of thinking, ‘‘we’’ are
the victims and ‘‘the Jew’’ is the perpetrator. Impersonal extranational
institutions are imagined to be the tools of ‘‘the Jew,’’ the threat to the
national community. To first expose and then to oppose ‘‘the Jew’’ is to
defend the nation. For anti-Semites in the late Ottoman Empire and Tur-
key, whereas in 1908 the ‘‘parasitical’’ Jew was seen to embody a ‘‘nation-
less’’ threat, after 1948 that threat was allegedly manifested in Israel. In
the past decade, ‘‘the international Jew’’ has also been located in the
United States. Thus opposing the United States and Israel is to defend
the nation from ‘‘the international Jew’’ in all of its forms: Jew, Zionist,
Dönme.
Yalçın Küçük is today’s Derviş Vahdeti. Like his disenfranchised and
later executed Muslim predecessor, this persecuted Marxist also focuses
great attention on the Dönme press, an alleged Dönme finance minister,
and the morals of the ‘‘foreign-educated’’ elite guiding the country
through radical change. He assumes that the new elite cannot have the
interests of the nation at heart and links them to the leading world power
of the day, the United States. He is suspicious of their values and fears
changes in public morality as expressed by the ostentatious display of
piety and the proliferation of headscarves and turbans. Küçük also shares
a methodology with Vahdeti. He uses linguistic ruses to ‘‘uncover’’ the
hidden Jews who run Turkey, in his opinion, on behalf of world capital,
which is in the hands of the international Jew, today based in New York.
Throughout his book, Soner Yalçın also deploys the anti-Semitic trope
that cosmopolitan Jews—here actually Dönme—had loose morals, were
sexually permissive, and responsible for eroding national values by in-
troducing everything foreign, alien, and detrimental to authentic local
culture. These innovations range from horse racing, tennis, and Free-
masonry in the late nineteenth century to Rotaries, jazz, cinemas, and
132. Klaus Holz, Nationaler Anti-Semitismus: Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschau-

ung (Hamburg, 2001), 157–60.
................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:09 PS PAGE 552

beauty pageants in the 1950s.133 Beauty pageants had been a main motif
of the anti-Dönme rhetoric of extreme rightists in the 1950s, which led to
the attempted assassination of Ahmet Emin Yalman.
C O N C L US I O N
Why have anti-Semitic views become so popular and acceptable in Tur-

key since 2003? Why do leftist Turkish secularists espouse anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories today? For Rifat Bali, what made Efendi in particular
so popular was partly its methodology.134 Efendi’s author would seem to
agree. According to Soner Yalçın, unlike the Islamists and extreme right-
ists, who have failed to reach a large audience or gain widespread accep-
tance of their theories, despite writing on the topic for a century, the
secret of the leftist nationalist writers’ success is that they pursue their
aims ‘‘with the irrefutable fastidiousness of scholars’’ and have ‘‘estab-
lished a scientific foundation’’ for the study of the Dönme influence in
Turkey. Moreover, one might add, they have published books in the
mainstream press, sold in major bookstore chains in the ‘‘investigation/
research’’ section.135 According to the outspoken secularist journalist
Emin Çölaşan, ‘‘Ergün Poyraz is a magnificent researcher. He dives head
first into unimaginable archives and reveals unbelievable documents and
information.’’136 One might add that these authors make the unbelievable
believable and palatable for their readers. Instead of explicitly stating
crude, anti-Semitic views, Yalçın and Küçük enable the reader, ‘‘after
having been bombarded with literally hundreds of names and a web of
family connections, with numerous opinions and analyses that are replete
with not-so-subtle hints and insinuations of Dönme and Jewish conspir-
ing, disloyalty and duplicity, to arrive at his or her own conclusions.’’137
Whether the author explicitly labels Erdoğan a Jew (Poyraz), or claims
that Turkey’s leaders from 1960 to 2002 (Küçük) or 1923 to 1960 were
Dönme (Yalçın), in the face of hundreds of pages of leading information,
it is practically certain that the conclusion reached by the Turkish reader
will be that ‘‘the Dönmes run the Turkish Republic.’’138
If their form is the first explanation for their widespread acceptance,
133. Yalçın, Efendi 1, 392, 463–66.

134. Rifat Bali, ‘‘What Is Efendi Telling Us?,’’ 321–24, 347.
135. Soner Yalçın, Bu dinciler o Müslümanlara benzemiyor . . . Isim isim . . . Olay
olay (These Islamists Do Not Resemble Those Muslims . . . Name by Name . . .
Event by Event) (Istanbul, 2009), 324.
136. Hürriyet, April 18, 2007.
137. Bali, ‘‘What Is Efendi Telling Us?,’’ 347.
138. Ibid.
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554 JQR 103.4 (2013)
then the context in which their authors are writing is the second. The
‘‘particular cultural and social conditions’’ Bali notes that lay the ground-
work for publications on the Dönme becoming best-sellers among secu-
larists in the new millennium includes the rise of Islamists to power; the
popularity of conspiracy theories about unelected power brokers, or a
‘‘deep state’’ within Turkey controlling its politics; belief that a ‘‘white’’
Turkish elite dominates political, social, economic, and cultural life;
acceptance of anti-American, anti-Zionist, and anti-Jewish sentiment;
and belief that Israel is behind the establishment of a Kurdish state.139
The extraordinary events at the start of the new millennium—the attack
on the Twin Towers, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, deteriorat-
ing relations between the United States and Turkey, anti-Americanism
reaching the extent that less than 10 percent of those polled had a favor-
able view of the United States, ruptured relations between Turkey and
Israel, a renewed Kurdish rebellion in Turkey and the creation of an
autonomous Kurdish province in Iraq, the ever worsening, ever deadlier
Israeli repression of Palestinians, and financial crises in Turkey—all
served to radicalize public discourse.
In the past decade, following the rise of Islamists to power in Turkey—
Tayyip Erdoğan’s AK Party has ruled with an absolute majority since
2002, promoting policies supporting the United States and international
capital—secularists have resuscitated the theories first enunciated by
Derviş Vahdeti and expressed by Turkish anti-Semites, including Atilhan,
Atsız, Kısakürek, and Tanyu, from the 1930s to the 1970s, Yesevizade in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Ertuğrul Düzdağ, Mehmet Şevgi
Eygi, and Ilgaz Zorlu in the 1990s and new millennium. Küçük, Yalçın,
and Poyraz have adapted the conspiracy theories expressed by Islamists
and extreme rightists and made them conform to their worldview. While
Küçük and Poyraz do not often openly acknowledge their debt to their
Islamist and extreme rightist predecessors, Küçük only mentioning a debt
to Zorlu, and Poyraz quoting a poem of Edib, Yalçın includes a bibliogra-
phy in his works, which allows one to trace the source of his ideas. The
bibliographies of Efendi 1 and 2 read as a Who’s Who of Turkish anti-
Semites and their conspiracy theory focusing on the Dönme. They
include Büyük Doğu (The great East) from 1952, the year of the assassina-
tion attempt on Yalman, Atilhan’s Siyonizm ve Protokoller (Zionism and the
Protocols),140 and the same author’s Yahudiler dünyayı nasıl istila ediyorlar?
139. Rifat Bali, ‘‘A Delusional Obsession: The ‘Dönme Question,’ ’’ in A Scape-
goat for All Seasons, 91–98.
140. Siyonizm ve Protokoller (Istanbul, 1955).
................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:10 PS PAGE 554

(How do the Jews take over the world?), whose cover depicts a globe
trapped within a Star of David,141 as well as works by Kısakürek, Tanyu,
Düzdağ, and Eygi. Zorlu’s Evet, ben Selanikliyim (Yes, I am a Salonikan)
and Derviş Vahdeti’s Volkan are referred to in the body of the texts, dis-
playing familiarity with their main arguments.142
Such secular opponents of the current regime charge that the religious
Muslims who are Turkey’s political and business leaders are really Jews
and part of a secret Jewish plot, working through Freemasons and
backed by Jewish capital in league with the United States, to put in place
a Jewish political party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), dis-
solve the secular Turkish Republic, and replace it with an antisecular
republic led by a secret Jew—Erdoğan.
141. Yahudiler dünyayı nasıl istila ediyorlar? (Istanbul, 1962).

142. Efendi 1, 127, 218–21.
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An Enemy Old and New: The Donme, Anti-Semitism and Conspiracy Theories in The Ottoman Empire and The Turkish Republic

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An Enemy Old and New:

T H E IN T E RN ATI O NA L J E W controls the Freemasons.1 The Freemasons,

1. Ergün Poyraz, Musa’nın çocukları Tayyip ve Emine (Istanbul, 2007), 110.

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2013)

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:53 PS PAGE 523

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:53 PS PAGE 524

by the widespread dissemination of the claims of these books through

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:53 PS PAGE 525

and original history of anti-Semitism in Turkey. It argues that rather than

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:54 PS PAGE 526

by Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to define the modern, racist form of hostility to

Violence of Religious Imagination: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in France

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:54 PS PAGE 527

of the secular Turkish Republic—that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:55 PS PAGE 528

23. Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam, 136.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:55 PS PAGE 529

history, it is human history’’ through which Ottoman and Turkish history

27. Yalçın, Efendi 2, 363.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:56 PS PAGE 530

possibility that the anti-Semitism propagated in the capital could also

32. Baer, The Dönme, 101–8.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:56 PS PAGE 531

35. Baer, The Dönme, 98.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:57 PS PAGE 532

39. Ibid., 161.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:57 PS PAGE 533

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-DÖ NME CONSPIRACY T HEORIES

Turkish anti-Zionism fed into Turkish anti-Semitism, as did Nazism, and

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:58 PS PAGE 534

to 1945. The influence of this seven-hundred-page conspiracy theory

Atilhan was an honored guest in Nazi Germany, where he praised the

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:58 PS PAGE 535

anti-Semitic turn-of-the-twentieth-century forgery Protocols of the Elders of

52. Hatice Bayraktar, ‘‘Stereotypes of Jews in Turkish Caricatures, 1933–

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:59 PS PAGE 536

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 12:59:59 PS PAGE 537

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:00 PS PAGE 538

naked women in his web.69 Büyük Doğu published another cartoon of an

69. Baer, The Dönme, 260.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:01 PS PAGE 539

Atilhan and Kısakürek were joined by a parade of other anti-Semites who

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:02 PS PAGE 540

79. Bali, ‘‘Türk anti-semitizmi,’’ 409; Jacob Landau, ‘‘Muslim Opposition to

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:03 PS PAGE 541

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:04 PS PAGE 542

with Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, 1996–97).88 Zorlu and Eygi

LEFTIST AND SECULARIST ANTI-DÖN M E CO N S P I R ACY

The Jewish Mason Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. ambassador to

Elsewhere Poyraz expands the circle of those allegedly tutoring and

88. Ibid., 130, 148.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:05 PS PAGE 543

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:05 PS PAGE 544

secret of the Evliyazade family of Izmir?’’ The author wastes no time

95. Yalçın, Efendi 1, 14. .

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:06 PS PAGE 545

101. Ibid., 153–54.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:06 PS PAGE 546

110. Ibid., 29, 303.

................. 18464$ $CH8 10-30-13 13:00:07 PS PAGE 547

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