A Messiah in the Ottoman Empire

Islamic tradition contains several warnings about false religious claimants who would appear before the end of time. Most famously, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ warned of al-Masih al-Dajjal, the great false Messiah. Other hadith speak of numerous lesser dajjals—deceivers who would make extraordinary religious claims.

One well-known narration states that the Hour would not come until approximately thirty great liars appeared, each claiming to be a messenger of God. The reports do not say that every false messianic figure in later history must be identified with these particular individuals. Nevertheless, Islamic eschatology clearly recognizes the broader phenomenon of people claiming a divine role in the events leading toward the end of history. ^[1]

One of the most extraordinary such figures appeared not outside the Muslim world, but within the Ottoman Empire itself.

His name was Shabbetai Tzvi.

Born into a Jewish family in Smyrna, modern İzmir, in 1626, Shabbetai received a traditional Jewish education before becoming deeply interested in Kabbalah, the mystical tradition within Judaism. Kabbalists sought deeper meanings within scripture and developed complex ideas concerning God, creation, spiritual worlds and the eventual redemption of humanity.

By the seventeenth century, an especially influential form of Kabbalah was associated with the sixteenth-century mystic Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah described creation as a cosmic drama in which divine sparks had become trapped within a damaged world. Human religious action participated in tikkun, or cosmic restoration.

Such ideas could easily acquire a messianic dimension.

Shabbetai eventually became convinced that he himself was the promised Jewish Messiah.

At first, his claims attracted controversy more readily than mass acceptance. That changed dramatically in 1665, when Shabbetai encountered a young Kabbalist living in Gaza.

His name was Nathan of Gaza.

Nathan became convinced that Shabbetai was indeed the Messiah. More importantly, Nathan provided an elaborate theological explanation for his mission and began announcing it to Jewish communities far beyond Palestine.

Letters travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire and into Europe and North Africa. Expectations grew rapidly. Some Jewish communities began preparing for redemption.

Within a remarkably short period, what had begun around an eccentric Ottoman Jewish mystic became an international messianic movement. ^[2]

Nathan's predictions were not purely spiritual. The coming redemption was expected to overturn the existing political order. Traditions circulated that Shabbetai would receive kingship and that even the Ottoman Sultan would ultimately be subordinated to him.

This transformed the affair from an internal Jewish theological controversy into something the Ottoman authorities could hardly ignore.

In 1666, Shabbetai travelled toward the imperial capital.

He was arrested.

The Messiah who was expected to transform the Ottoman world now found himself in the custody of the Ottoman state.

What followed should have ended his movement completely.

Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam.

He took the Muslim name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and entered Ottoman service. ^[2]

For many of his followers, the conclusion was obvious: their Messiah had been false.

For others, however, his conversion created a very different idea.

The Messiah Who Entered Islam

The followers who remained loyal to Shabbetai faced a serious theological problem.

If he really was the Messiah, how could he abandon Judaism?

The answer emerged from the same mystical world that had helped create the movement.

Some Sabbateans argued that Shabbetai's conversion was not the abandonment of his mission but its continuation. The Messiah, they believed, sometimes had to descend into the realm of spiritual darkness in order to release the holiness trapped within it.

Islam therefore became, within this interpretation, part of the Messiah's mysterious descent.

What appeared to outsiders as apostasy could consequently be understood by believers as sacrifice.

The failure of the prophecy was transformed into another stage of the prophecy.

Shabbetai died in 1676, but this belief survived him.

Several years later, a remarkable development occurred in the Ottoman city of Salonika, modern Thessaloniki.

Groups of Shabbetai's followers converted publicly to Islam.

They followed their Messiah across the religious boundary he had crossed seventeen years earlier.

Yet privately, they did not simply become ordinary Muslims.

They continued to believe in Shabbetai.

A new community had emerged.

It became known as the Dönmeh. ^[3]

Muslims in Public, Sabbateans in Private

The word Dönme is related to the Turkish verb meaning "to turn" or "to convert." The community itself also used other names, including Ma'aminim, meaning "Believers."

To the Ottoman state, its members were Muslims.

They had Muslim names. Their children were registered as Muslims. They participated outwardly in Muslim society, and some attended mosques and performed other public practices associated with Islam.

Their private religious life was different.

The traditional Dönmeh continued to recognize Shabbetai Tzvi as the Messiah. They preserved their own prayers, festivals, teachings and communal gatherings. They also strongly preferred marriage within their own community, helping preserve a separate identity over many generations. ^[3]

For this reason they have often been described as crypto-Jews: people of Jewish origin outwardly presenting themselves as Muslims.

The term requires some qualification.

The Dönmeh were not simply Jews secretly practising ordinary rabbinic Judaism. Their belief in Shabbetai had already separated them from mainstream Judaism. It is therefore more precise to describe their traditional religion as crypto-Sabbatean: a secret Jewish-derived messianic religion concealed beneath a public Muslim identity.

Their unusual position placed them between communities.

Mainstream Jews regarded Sabbateanism as heresy.

Muslims generally regarded them publicly as Muslims.

Yet within their own circles, the Dönmeh preserved a religious memory reaching back to the failed Messiah of 1666.

The movement also divided internally. Several branches emerged, particularly the Yakubi, Karakaş and Kapancı groups.

But despite these divisions, one geographical center remained especially important.

Salonika.

Salonika

Few cities in the late Ottoman Empire resembled Salonika.

It was a major Mediterranean port and commercial center. Muslims, Sephardic Jews, Orthodox Christians, Europeans and other communities lived alongside one another. Newspapers, foreign schools, merchants, consulates and new political ideas connected the city closely with Europe.

Salonika was also one of the world's great Jewish cities.

And within its officially Muslim population lived the Dönmeh.

Over generations, some Dönmeh families became successful merchants, bankers, educators, journalists and professionals. They established modern schools and participated actively in the city's commercial and intellectual life. ^[4]

Their community was also changing.

The descendants of seventeenth-century mystical believers did not necessarily possess the religious intensity of their ancestors. By the nineteenth century, parts of the community had become increasingly secular and Western-oriented.

Some became enthusiastic advocates of modern education.

Some became constitutionalists.

And some eventually became Turkish nationalists.

The transformation was striking. A community originating in Jewish mysticism and messianic expectation was becoming increasingly visible within one of the Ottoman Empire's most modern political environments.

At almost exactly the same time, Salonika was becoming a center of opposition to the Ottoman Sultan.

The Young Turks

Sultan Abdülhamid II had ruled the Ottoman Empire since 1876.

Although an Ottoman constitution had been introduced at the beginning of his reign, Abdülhamid suspended parliament in 1878 and subsequently ruled through a highly centralized monarchy.

By the late nineteenth century, opposition was growing among Ottoman intellectuals, students, bureaucrats and military officers.

These opposition currents eventually became known collectively as the Young Turks.

The most important organization to emerge from them was the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP.

Salonika became one of its principal centers.

This was not accidental. The city's military population, European connections, newspapers, schools and relatively cosmopolitan social environment made it particularly suitable for underground political organization.

The Young Turks did not initially seek the abolition of the Ottoman Empire or the Caliphate.

Their immediate political objective was constitutional government.

They believed that restoring parliament and limiting the Sultan's personal authority could modernize—and perhaps save—the Ottoman Empire. ^[5]

The Dönmeh now entered the story again.

Members of the community participated in the Young Turk political environment, although the CUP was far broader than the Dönmeh and included Muslims and members of other Ottoman communities.

One important example was Mehmed Cavid Bey, a prominent politician from the Salonikan Dönmeh milieu who became an influential CUP figure and later served as Ottoman finance minister.

Dönmeh businessmen, educators and intellectuals also belonged to the wider modernist environment from which Young Turk politics developed. ^[3]

This documented participation later became the foundation for much larger claims that the Dönmeh secretly controlled the entire Young Turk movement.

The evidence establishes influence and participation.

It does not, by itself, establish secret control.

Nevertheless, the political transformation that followed was enormous.

The Revolution of 1908

In July 1908, Young Turk officers in Ottoman Macedonia rebelled.

Abdülhamid II was forced to restore the constitution and parliament.

The Sultan remained on the throne, and the Caliphate survived, but the political balance had changed.

The Sultan-Caliph could no longer exercise authority in the manner Abdülhamid had previously done.

Another crisis followed in 1909. Forces associated with the constitutional order marched from Macedonia toward Constantinople, and Abdülhamid was eventually deposed.

His brother Mehmed V became Sultan.

The Ottoman dynasty still existed.

The Caliphate still existed.

But political power was increasingly moving away from the personal authority of the Sultan and toward parliament, political organizations, military officers and eventually the CUP.

Then the empire suffered a series of disasters.

Italy attacked Ottoman Libya.

The Balkan states attacked the empire.

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 removed almost all remaining Ottoman territory in Europe.

And among the cities lost was the birthplace of the Young Turk revolution itself.

Salonika became Greek Thessaloniki.

The consequences reached far beyond territorial loss.

The idea that Muslims, Christians and Jews could remain united indefinitely under a common Ottoman political identity was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Within parts of the Young Turk movement, another identity was becoming more powerful.

Turkish nationalism.

From Ottomanism to Turkish Nationalism

The early Young Turks had generally hoped to preserve a multi-ethnic Ottoman state.

But successive territorial losses, nationalist rebellions, refugee movements and wars transformed the political atmosphere.

Thinkers such as Ziya Gökalp increasingly developed ideas centered on Turkish national identity.

The empire still contained Arabs, Kurds and many other peoples, and Ottomanism and Islam remained politically important. The transition therefore cannot be reduced to a simple overnight replacement of Islam with Turkish nationalism.

Nevertheless, the direction of intellectual change was significant.

Political legitimacy was increasingly being imagined through the nation, rather than exclusively through dynasty or religion.

The First World War accelerated everything.

The Ottoman Empire entered the war in 1914 under a government dominated by CUP leaders.

Four years later, it was defeated.

Its armies were disbanding.

Its territories were being occupied.

The CUP leadership fled.

The Ottoman political order appeared close to destruction.

Then another Ottoman officer emerged.

He had been born in Salonika in 1881.

His name was Mustafa Kemal.

Mustafa Kemal of Salonika

Mustafa Kemal's birthplace is important not because being born in Salonika proves any secret identity, but because it places him inside the social environment already described.

He grew up in one of the Ottoman Empire's most cosmopolitan and politically restless cities.

His early education also provides a direct connection with its modernist culture.

As a child, Mustafa Kemal attended the Şemsi Efendi School, one of Salonika's progressive modern schools. Its founder, Şemsi Efendi, came from the Dönmeh community.

This fact later became one element in claims that Mustafa Kemal himself was secretly Dönmeh.

Such allegations are older than the modern internet. Claims concerning his family background circulated historically among some contemporaries and political opponents.

Yet no conclusive documentary evidence has established that Mustafa Kemal himself belonged to the Dönmeh.

The distinction is important.

His exposure to a Salonikan environment in which Dönmeh educators and intellectuals participated is documented.

His personal Dönmeh identity is not established historical fact. ^[3]

What is established beyond serious dispute is Mustafa Kemal's later political program.

And it went considerably further than the original Young Turk demand for constitutional government.

The Turkish National Movement

Following the Ottoman defeat in 1918, Allied powers occupied strategic parts of the empire. Greek forces landed at İzmir in 1919.

Mustafa Kemal became the central leader of the nationalist resistance that developed in Anatolia.

At first, the nationalist movement did not present itself simply as a campaign against the Sultanate or Caliphate.

Islamic language and religious legitimacy remained important during the War of Independence. The movement could still speak of rescuing the Sultanate and Caliphate from foreign domination.

But once the nationalist forces had defeated their principal enemies, the political direction changed rapidly.

In 1922, the Sultanate was abolished.

Sultan Mehmed VI left Constantinople.

For the first time, the offices of Sultan and Caliph were separated. Abdülmecid II remained Caliph, but without the Ottoman throne.

In 1923, the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed.

Mustafa Kemal became its first president.

The Caliphate survived for only a few months more.

On 3 March 1924, it too was abolished.

The Ottoman dynasty was expelled from Turkey.

The political institution that had connected the Ottoman ruler with the wider Muslim world had disappeared.

But Mustafa Kemal's transformation did not stop with political institutions.

Reshaping Religion and State

The new republic systematically dismantled much of the institutional structure through which Islam had operated within the Ottoman state.

The Ministry of Sharia and Pious Foundations was abolished.

Traditional religious schools lost their independent position.

Sharia courts disappeared.

Sufi lodges and orders were officially closed in 1925.

European-inspired civil and criminal laws replaced much of the remaining Islamic legal structure.

At the same time, the government established the Presidency of Religious Affairs—the Diyanet.

This reveals an important feature of Kemalist secularism.

The new state did not simply separate itself from religion and leave religious institutions alone.

Instead, it weakened Islam's independent institutional authority while placing officially recognized Sunni religious life under government administration.

Islam would continue to exist in Turkey.

But the Turkish Republic would determine its institutional place.

A New Turkish Identity

Mustafa Kemal's project was also intensely nationalist.

The Ottoman Empire had been a multi-ethnic Islamic empire whose elite language contained extensive Arabic and Persian vocabulary and whose written script was derived from Arabic.

The new republic wanted to construct a distinctly Turkish national identity.

In 1928, the Arabic-derived Ottoman alphabet was abolished and replaced by a Latin-based Turkish alphabet.

Mustafa Kemal personally promoted the new script across the country.

The language itself then became the object of reform. During the 1930s, scholars and government institutions attempted to replace large numbers of Arabic and Persian words with words regarded as Turkish in origin. ^[6]

These reforms can readily be understood as part of Turkish nationalism.

A Turkish nation was being given a new alphabet, a purified national language and a historical identity increasingly separated from the Ottoman past.

Then the nationalist project entered a more sensitive area.

The language of Islamic worship itself.

The Adhan in Turkish

In 1932, the Islamic call to prayer began to be recited officially in Turkish rather than Arabic.

This was not merely the publication of a translation so Turkish Muslims could understand its meaning.

Mosque officials were instructed to use the Turkish version.

The Diyanet circulated instructions requiring the adhan and iqamah to be recited in Turkish, and officials who resisted could face punishment. Police and gendarmerie were involved in enforcing the policy when opposition occurred.

Mustafa Kemal himself took an interest in the wider project of Turkish-language Islamic expression. Official Turkish historical material records his involvement in discussions concerning translations of the adhan, iqamah and takbir and the public use of Turkish Qur'anic recitation. ^[7]

There were also experiments and proposals concerning the greater use of Turkish within salah.

A completely Turkish ritual prayer was never successfully imposed throughout Turkey in the same permanent manner as the Turkish adhan. Nevertheless, attempts to introduce Turkish Qur'anic recitation and Turkish elements into worship were real.

This represented something different from abolishing the Sultanate or replacing Sharia courts.

The state was no longer dealing only with the political authority of Islam.

It was intervening in the form in which Muslims publicly practised their religion.

For traditional Muslims, this distinction was significant.

A government could argue that the Caliphate, courts or constitution belonged to the political sphere.

The adhan came directly from the religious life of the mosque.

Compelling the mu'adhdhin to abandon its traditional Arabic wording therefore brought the nationalist reform project directly into Islamic ritual.

The objective can be understood partly through the wider Kemalist attempt to create a national form of public life: Turkish state, Turkish history, Turkish language—and increasingly a public Islam expressed through Turkish.

Yet whatever its ideological justification, the policy demonstrates that Kemalist secularism went considerably beyond simply declaring that religion and government should occupy separate spheres.

The state sought not only to remove Islam as an independent source of political authority, but also to manage and reshape its public institutional expression.

An Unexpected Historical Journey

The story had begun almost three centuries earlier with a Jewish mystic in Smyrna.

Shabbetai Tzvi proclaimed himself the Messiah and gathered followers across the Jewish world.

The Ottoman authorities arrested him.

He converted to Islam.

Some of his followers refused to abandon him and eventually followed him across that religious boundary.

Their descendants became the Dönmeh: publicly Muslim, privately Sabbatean, and centered especially in Salonika.

Over generations, parts of that secretive messianic community became increasingly involved in modern education, commerce, constitutional politics and Turkish nationalism.

Salonika then became one of the principal centers of the Young Turk movement.

The Young Turks challenged Abdülhamid II and weakened the old concentration of authority in the Sultan-Caliph, although they initially sought to preserve rather than abolish the Ottoman state.

War and territorial collapse subsequently weakened Ottomanism and strengthened Turkish nationalism.

And from that same Salonikan political world emerged Mustafa Kemal.

His own alleged Dönmeh ancestry remains unproven.

But the environment connecting him with Dönmeh educators, Salonikan modernism and the broader Young Turk world is historical fact.

Once victorious, his movement went further than the Young Turks had originally gone.

The Sultanate disappeared.

Then the Caliphate.

Then much of the independent Islamic legal and educational order.

The Arabic-derived Ottoman alphabet was replaced.

The language was aggressively nationalized.

And eventually even the Arabic adhan was replaced by a compulsory Turkish version.

It is tempting to connect these events into a single hidden plan stretching from Shabbetai Tzvi to Mustafa Kemal.

The evidence does not establish such a conspiracy.

But dismissing the entire subject because later conspiracy theories grew around it would obscure an equally remarkable piece of documented history.

A secretive community descended from the followers of a seventeenth-century Jewish Messiah really did become an influential part of Salonikan society.

Members of that community really did participate in the political and intellectual environment of the Young Turks.

Mustafa Kemal really did grow up in that environment and attend a school established by a Dönmeh educator.

And the Turkish nationalist state he later created really did undertake one of the most radical transformations of the relationship between Islam, state and national identity in modern Muslim history.

The historical connections are therefore significant enough without turning uncertainties into certainties.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the story is that no secret master plan is necessary for it to be extraordinary.