What’s Globalization? Let’s ask the Dönme

What’s cosmopolitanism?

Today, cosmopolitanism denotes a supranational existence. In the modern period, however, prior to the development of nation states, cosmopolitanism meant being connected to more than one place, perhaps to several places at once. Cosmopolitans had allegiances that extended beyond political boundaries. And yet they didn’t just belong everywhere, they were situated in certain places and participated in networks that extended beyond their political identity. In large empires, cosmopolitans had an advantage: they brought together disparate cultures, religions, and languages through their mobility and connections. The knowledge cosmopolitans fostered through their educational and civic institutions was stopped short by nationalist movements of the late 19^th and 20^th century.

The Dönme as a case study:

They were on the outside of the religious norm in the Ottoman Empire. The story goes that they were originally Jewish and claimed to be descended from the followers of Sabbatai Zvi. Luckily for them, they were officially recognized as the same as the majority Muslim culture in the Ottoman Empire because they had converted from Judaism to Islam.  Still, their diaspora was maintained because of endogamy and they maintained separate beliefs and practices from the majority Muslim population in the Ottoman regions. In their commercial lives, the Dönme participated in the flow of capital and information from one region to the next. And this included knowledge and technology that flowed from the West as well as the East.  Living in the “European” provinces of the Ottoman state (ie. Salonica) the Dönme were well positioned to act as catalysts for the flow of Western ideas eastward. Marc David Baer calls the Dönme globalizers of the Ottoman Empire and argues that it was a process of globalization of the Ottoman areas, not an arbitrary, top-down Westernization, which led to the formation of the Turkish nation state.

Though they were instigators of the blending of Eastern and Western ideas of the construction of the state, the Dönme were not nationalists. Rather, they had a “religiously inflected” idea of cosmopolitanism and fostered society of urban multiplicity in the late 19^th century. Salonica blossomed into an important port city and tripled its population in the last quarter of the 19^th century. It was not merely a copy of a Western city but a unique expression of Eastern values and Western technologies (Baer uses the example of the segregation of the sexes on imported Belgian streetcars in Salonica as an example).[1]

The Dönme’s greatest impact seems to be in their modernized education system that combined European-style secular subjects (including the study of French) with a moral/religious education. The Dönme religious leader Şemsi Efendi supported this new, non-traditional type of education (which was different than traditional Islamic learning) and worked to support its spread in the Salonica region. French pedagogical theory seems to have been the driving force behind the education offered in these Dönme schools, while a cosmopolitan worldview rooted in religious knowledge (the schools taught Islam, even to girls!) was the bulk of the progressive curriculum. Atatürk himself was a pupil at a Dönme school as a youth and his project of reforms known as Kemalism that helped to found the modern nation state of Turkey bears many similar features to the reformist ideals of the Dönme education system. In fact, Atatürk broke from the Dönme when he advocated secularization and nationalism, neither of which mirrored the Dönme education of his youth. Once Salonica was made Greek and Turkey became a nation state, the globalization message of the Dönme was largely replaced. The Dönme became pariahs in Salonica and were moved to Istanbul where they were occasionally victims of state violence since they were viewed as “foreign” in the new nation state of Turkey. The globalized, trans-regional identity of all Jews in Europe (including Jews who converted to other religions) during the shift from empire to nation-state in the interwar period put them at odds with the new homogenous reality of nationalism.  Whatever elite role the Dönme were able to play in the Ottoman Empire as networked galvanizers of Eastern and Western knowledge and technology, they were no longer needed in the context of the anti-globalization movement of nationalism.

Today:

Is the story of the Dönme interesting to us today in the context of globalization? We live after the establishment of the nation state, and the post-WWII formation of international organizations that concern themselves with the management of the globalization process in the world (e.g. the flow of global capital and labor). The affluent, mobile world citizenry that has emerged in certain parts of the world should be aware of the story of this people and their fate as harbingers of globalization. Particularly interesting for today’s globalization is the fact that their religious identity remained intact even as they came in contact and forged connections with different religious groups and secularists.