Note: The historical essay presented here is extracted from a chapter of my book, Zionism vs. the West. For the sake of brevity, I have not included the complete set of footnotes in this version of the essay. However, all footnotes appear in the corresponding chapter of the book. To assist readers and researchers, I have included at the end of this essay a bibliography of the principal sources consulted in the preparation of that chapter.
When the Jewish false messiah Shabbetai Zevi converted to Islam on September 16, 1666—the year his followers believed the Messiah would bring redemption—his followers split into three groups. One of the groups actually believed that Shabbetai did not fail by converting to Islam; they believed that “one cannot know the mysteries of God’s chosen.” A large number of Jewish families, about three hundred of them, followed him. Those became known as Donmeler or Donme, meaning converts, and they didn’t mix with other Muslims until the twentieth century. They had their own schools, mosques, and even their own cemeteries, indicating that they were like the conversos of Europe. Jewish historian Marc David Baer writes, “Shabbetai Tzevi’s conversion was not profound, in the sense that it was not based on profound belief in Islam, and that rather, it was quite superficial, because he had been compelled to change religion.” The Donme proved this point when they migrated to Salonika, a cosmopolitan Jewish city in the empire.
One of the groups that followed Shabbetai actually believed that his conversion to Islam was the right move. “They found ample justification in Judaism for this double play. Moses, after all, with whom Shabbetai Tzevi compared himself, remained for a long time in disguise in Egypt. Shabbetai Tzevi’s order not to intermarry with Muslims is a near-literal rendering of a passage from the corpus of Jewish law, the Talmud.” The disciples of Shabbetai were commanded not to mingle with other Muslims or to intermarry, and superficially “avoided relations with Jews,” but the end result was “public secrecy,” a key aspect of Freemasonry. Endogamy was so strong that Donme leaders threatened those who intended to leave with the death penalty.
In a nutshell, they converted for good reason. “But their religion was not the religion of Islam…They became Muslim, but not in order to fulfill its commandments and believe in its faith.” The same people “continued to believe in his messianic calling and his religious beliefs and practices, which emerged at the intersection of Kabbalah and Sufism.” Shabbetai died in 1676, and by 1683, not even ten years, Shabbataeans began to emerge as a force to be reckoned with.
Baer compares Shabbetai to Jesus in that Jesus put an end to the Old Testament law. For their turn, Shabbetai and his followers “established a breakaway movement that emphasized divine renewal, which derived from Judaism but radically diverged from it, abrogating the original laws and becoming something quite different, even if like the first Christians, they too claimed to have discovered the true understanding of the religion and the means of fulfilling divine purpose.” But their conversion was allowed because in 1454, minority groups, known as millet, were permitted to form their own enclaves and pursue their own interests. Later, in the seventeenth century, the Ottomans gave permission to European states to protect non-Muslims in the empire.......
