Dönmeh

The Dönmeh are the descendants of the followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi who converted to Islam with him in the 1660s and afterwards, and who then lived for two and a half centuries as outward Muslims and secret Sabbateans, marrying only among themselves. They were centred on Salonica, they were classified as Muslims in the population exchange of 1923–24 and transferred to Turkey, and their descendants live mainly in Istanbul and İzmir.

Why are they on a Sephardic genealogy site?

Because they are of Sephardi descent, and because for some Iberian lineages they may be all that is left.

The Jewish Encyclopedia put the first point plainly in 1906: “the Dönmeh are evidently descendants of Spanish exiles”. Their liturgy says the same thing — it began in Hebrew, moved to Ladino, and only later to Turkish. They came out of the same Iberian expulsion as the rest of Salonica’s Jews, and for two centuries they lived a few streets away from them.

The second reason is sharper. Salonica’s Jewish community was almost entirely destroyed in 1943. The Dönmeh, because the Ottoman and then the Greek and Turkish states counted them as Muslims, had been moved to Turkey nineteen years earlier. For some Iberian Jewish lineages, their Dönmeh descendants may be the only ones remaining.

What does the name mean?

Dönme is a Turkish gerund meaning to turn, and by extension to convert or to go back on — a term of contempt, roughly “turncoat”. The community never used it of itself.

Its own names were ma’aminim, the Believers; ḥaberim, Associates; ba’ale milḥamah, Warriors. In Adrianople they were called sazanikos, Judeo-Spanish for little carps, either after the fish market near their first mosque or after Zevi’s prophecy that the Jews would be redeemed under the sign of Pisces. Many today prefer Selânikli — of Salonica.

Historical timeline

1626 — Sabbatai Zevi born at Smyrna
1665 — proclaimed the Messiah by Nathan of Gaza
September 1666 — Zevi, brought before Sultan Mehmed IV and given the choice of death or apostasy, converts to Islam
1666–76 — the first conversions follow. About 200 families, centred on Adrianople (Edirne), with adherents at İzmir, Bursa and elsewhere in the Balkans
1676 — Zevi dies in exile at Dulcigno. His last wife Ayşe and her father, Rabbi Joseph Filosof, both of Salonica, return to the city
1680 — Nathan of Gaza dies
1683 — some 3,000 further Sabbateans convert. Salonica becomes the centre of the movement, and remains so for 240 years
c.1690 — Jacob Querido, Ayşe’s brother, claims to be Zevi’s reincarnation; the Yakubi sect forms around him
1677–1720 — Berukhiah Russo claims the succession; the Karakaş sect forms
18th–19th centuries — the community consolidates in its own quarter of Salonica, with its own schools, institutions and cemeteries
late 19th century — Dönmeh families prominent in Salonica’s commerce, municipal government and education; the Yeni Cami built as their mosque
c.1900 — about 10,000 Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims in Salonica
1908 — several leading Young Turks are of Dönmeh origin
1912 — Salonica annexed by Greece
1917 — the Great Fire destroys much of the city, almost certainly including any Dönmeh archives
1923–24 — under the Treaty of Lausanne the Dönmeh are classified as Muslims and transferred to Turkey, chiefly to Istanbul and İzmir
1932 — the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports 15,000 Dönmeh in Istanbul
1942–44 — the Turkish capital levy taxes them at a rate between that applied to Jews and to Muslims
1943 — the Jews of Salonica are deported to Auschwitz
1994 — Ilgaz Zorlu begins publishing on his own Dönmeh identity
2000 — Zorlu wins a case in the Istanbul 9th Court of First Instance to change his registered religion from Islam to Jewish
2016 — an estimated 2,000 non-assimilated Dönmeh in Turkey

Where did they come from?

From Sephardi Salonica, and before that from Iberia. This is not in doubt, though the detail is largely lost.

The founding figures are Sephardi and named. Sabbatai Zevi himself was a Romaniote rabbi of Smyrna. His last wife Ayşe and her father Rabbi Joseph Filosof were Salonicans, and it was their return to the city after his death that made Salonica the centre. Jacob Querido was Ayşe’s brother. These are the people from whom the community’s own genealogies descend.

What we cannot yet supply is where in Spain or Portugal the founding families originated. That information may exist in the private family genealogies described below, and if any reader can supply it we would be glad to hear from them.

How was the community organised?

Around endogamy, and around three subsects — and the arrangements explain why so few records exist.

The organising principle was endogamy, and it was maintained for roughly ten generations. Zevi’s Eighteen Precepts — published in Ladino by Danon — forbade intermarriage with Muslims outright, and the community also avoided marriage with Jews. Marriage was within the sect, and after the schisms, within the subsect.

The three subsects

This is the essential structure, and it is the thing most often got wrong.

İzmirli — the original, undivided community, taking its name from Zevi’s own city. The others split from it.

Yakubi — followers of Jacob Querido, Zevi’s brother-in-law, who claimed to be his reincarnation. Historically the lower-status group. Now orthodox Sunni Muslims, associated with a lower middle class in İzmir. The 1906 estimate was 4,000.

Karakaş, also called Konioso — formed around the claims of Berukhiah Russo (1677–1720), and the largest and strictest branch. Largely artisans in Salonica. They proselytised among Jews in Poland, Austria and Germany, which is the link to Frankism. The 1906 estimate was 3,500.

Kapancı — the merchant and intellectual class, culturally and economically dominant in Salonica, and the most assimilated into Turkish society. This is the group with the strongest surviving genealogical documentation.

Older sources including the Jewish Encyclopedia treat İzmirli as one of the three surviving groups; the modern scholarly usage, following Baer, gives Yakubi, Karakaş and Kapancı as the three subsects and İzmirli as the parent body. Both terminologies circulate, and a researcher will meet each.

Each subsect had its own prayer community, organised as a kahal, its own hierarchy, and its own cemetery. There was an internal economic network that supported poorer members across the branch divisions.

Why there are so few records

The practical arrangements are worth knowing, because they explain the absence.

They lived in blocks of contiguous or secretly connected houses, with a concealed meeting place for each block. Men had two names — a religious one kept secret, and a secular one for business. Children were not told what they were until thirteen, or among the Yakubi until marriage.

A community organised for two hundred and fifty years around not being documented did not leave documents.

What they practised

Both religions. They observed Ramadan and attended the mosque, and some made the hajj; they also kept Shabbat, circumcised on the eighth day, and celebrated festivals marking events in Zevi’s life, the most sacred being the Ninth of Av, his birthday, and the Sixteenth of Kislev. Liturgy moved from Hebrew to Ladino to Turkish.

Rabbis appointed by an av beit din administered the communities, knew the Zohar largely by heart, and regarded Judeo-Spanish as a holy tongue. They maintained quiet contact with rabbinic Jews who were secretly Sabbatean, and Jewish rabbis are recorded settling their disputes in Jewish law.

Occupationally they were distinctive: expert scribes and clerks in the bazaars and in government, with a near-monopoly of the barber shops in Salonica, and later merchants, bankers, textile manufacturers, newspaper publishers and industrialists.

Where did they go?

Adrianople first, then Salonica from 1683 for two and a half centuries — and then Turkey, in a single movement.

Under the Treaty of Lausanne the exchange of populations was decided by religion, not language or ethnicity. The Dönmeh were registered as Muslims. In 1923–24 they were removed from Salonica along with the city’s Turkish Muslims and resettled in Turkey — Istanbul above all, with a significant group in İzmir. Some 10,000 to 15,000 people.

That transfer is why they survived. Nineteen years later the Jewish community they had lived beside was deported to Auschwitz, and 90 per cent of it was murdered. The classification that had marked the Dönmeh out as apostates for two and a half centuries removed them from the city in time.

In Istanbul they prospered — businessmen, publishers, industrialists, diplomats — while their distinctive institutions eroded under the Turkification policies of the new republic. Intermarriage with non-Dönmeh followed, and the community has largely assimilated. Around 2,000 non-assimilated Dönmeh were estimated in 2016.

One further avenue has not been traced at all: the community’s trade networks are described as reaching beyond the Mediterranean into western Europe and into North and South America. Where those branches went, and whether descendants remain, appears to be unstudied.

What survives in the cemeteries?

One exceptional burial ground in Istanbul, and three in Salonica whose fate is unknown.

The Dönmeh had their own burial grounds, separate from both Muslim and Jewish ones, and separate from each other by subsect. This was already recorded in 1906: “each subsect has its own cemetery.”

Bülbüldere (Bülbülderesi) Cemetery, Üsküdar, Istanbul is the principal surviving Dönmeh burial ground and by some distance the best genealogical source for the community. It is divided into sections by subsect — the Karakaş section is identified as such. Three features make it exceptional.

Inscriptions are in Ottoman Turkish and carry genealogical data.

Many headstones bear portrait photographs of the deceased, most of them the work of the photographer Osman Hasan. A photographic memorial practice of this kind is close to unknown in a Muslim cemetery, and it is one of the clearest surviving markers of the community’s separateness.

And the dates tell the story of the transfer directly. A great many of those buried there were born in Salonica around 1880 and buried in Istanbul in the 1930s — one generation, two cities, and the 1924 exchange in between.

Marc David Baer used photographs and transcriptions from Bülbüldere in his study of the community, and C. M. Kösemen has written specifically on Osman Hasan and the tombstone photographs.

Salonica. Three subsect cemeteries existed there. We have found no account of what became of them. The Muslim population left in 1924 and the Jewish cemetery was destroyed in 1942, so the probability is that the Dönmeh grounds were built over at some point in the intervening decades — but we do not know, and we should like to. Any surviving photograph, transcription, map or municipal record of the Dönmeh cemeteries of Salonica would be a significant find.

What records can you actually reach?

The Dönmeh are among the hardest communities on this site to research, for reasons that follow directly from their history. They were organised around secrecy for two hundred and fifty years. Their Salonica archives, if any survived that long, almost certainly burned in the fire of 1917. Their own family records are private and, given the hostility the community still attracts in Turkey, unlikely to be opened soon.

What exists is this.

Record type	Years	Where	Online
Mübadele files — property and family claims from the population exchange	1923–1925	Republic of Turkey State Archives, Ankara	No
Bülbüldere cemetery inscriptions and tombstone photographs	c.1900–	Üsküdar, Istanbul	No
Private family genealogies (soyağacı)	17th c.–	Held privately within each subsect	No
Salonica property registers	1906	Historical Archive of Macedonia, Thessaloniki	No
Ottoman kadi (sharia court) records, Salonica	pre-1912	Historical Archive of Macedonia / Ottoman State Archives	No
Greek administration records of the former Dönmeh quarter and schools	post-1912	Greek State General Archives, Thessaloniki	No
Salonica communal records and Sabbatean references	various	CAHJP, National Library of Israel	Partly

The Mübadele files are the single most important source. Formally the Muhtelit Mübadele Komisyonu Tasfiye Talepnameleri, they are the property and family claims filed under the 1923–25 population exchange. Because the Dönmeh were exchanged as Muslims, they are in these files — with family composition, place of origin in Salonica, residence and assets. They are held at the Republic of Turkey State Archives in Ankara. They are not digitised and not name-searchable online; access is through the archive catalogue after registration, and in practice requires on-site research.

For a community whose own records are closed and whose communal archive burned, a state-generated file naming families, their origins and their property at the moment of transfer is close to irreplaceable.

The private genealogies are the community’s own memory. Each subsect maintained detailed family trees — in Turkish soyağacı — precisely in order to police endogamy: you cannot marry within a closed group over ten generations without knowing exactly who is related to whom. They commonly begin with a seventeenth-century progenitor and record both paternal and maternal lines. Baer describes them at pp. 8–13 and 85–92 of The Dönme. They are not public.

What can Y-DNA answer?

More here than almost anywhere else on this site, for the reason set out at the top of this page.

Y-DNA results indicate shared ancestry between individual Dönmeh and Sephardi families. That is what the documentary evidence would predict, and it matters more here than it usually would: because the Jewish community of Salonica was destroyed, and because Dönmeh genealogical records are closed, DNA may be the only route by which a particular Iberian lineage can be shown to continue at all.

The Avotaynu DNA Project is the relevant undertaking. It is a large-scale study of Jewish Y-DNA which aims to map paternal lineages across Jewish populations, and which is of particular value where paper records have been destroyed. For anyone with Dönmeh ancestry, or with a Salonican Sephardi line that appears to end, it is worth considering.

Two cautions. Y-DNA traces the paternal line only, and tells you about a surname’s descent rather than a whole family’s. And a genetic match is evidence of shared ancestry, not a substitute for the documentary chain — it will tell you that two lines converge, not when or where or through whom.

Are the Dönmeh recognised as Jewish?

Not by the rabbinate, in most cases — and researchers with Dönmeh ancestry should understand the position before they invest in it.

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel does not regard Dönmeh as Jewish without a full conversion, and the Hakham Bashi of Turkey has taken the same view. Dönmeh are not recognised under the Israeli Law of Return. The reasoning turns in part on the perception that the original conversion to Islam was voluntary, rather than forced as with the Iberian conversos — a distinction that is contested, and that carries a great deal of weight in practice.

Turkish civil law has moved differently. Ilgaz Zorlu, an accountant of Dönmeh descent on his mother’s side, applied to the Istanbul 9th Court of First Instance in 2000 to have his registered religion changed from Islam to Jewish, and won; the Turkish Beth Din subsequently accepted him.

For the Portuguese law of return, the decision on whether Dönmeh qualify as of Sephardi descent was devolved to local Jewish communities, and at least one Kapancı descendant is documented as having obtained Portuguese citizenship in 2018 on the strength of family documents demonstrating Iberian Jewish ancestry — while being unable to convert to Judaism in Turkey. That case is a fair illustration of where things stand: the documents were accepted as proof of Sephardi descent for one purpose and not for another. Note that the Portuguese route has since been closed; our page on Spanish and Portuguese nationality sets out the current position.

The practical consequence for genealogy is that Dönmeh families do in some cases hold documentary evidence of their Iberian origins, assembled for citizenship applications. That is a body of material which may in time become available.

A note on conspiracy theories

Anyone reading about the Dönmeh will quickly meet a large literature alleging that they secretly controlled the Young Turk movement, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the Turkish Republic, and that Atatürk was one of them. This material is antisemitic conspiracy theory, it is false, and it has nothing to do with genealogy. We mention it only so that researchers recognise it for what it is when they encounter it, and know to set it aside.

It has one real consequence for research. The hostility it generates is a substantial part of why the community’s own genealogical records remain closed, and why descendants are often reluctant to discuss their ancestry.

Organisations and repositories

Republic of Turkey State Archives, Ankara — the Mübadele files.

Historical Archive of Macedonia, Thessaloniki; Greek State General Archives, Thessaloniki branch.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), National Library of Israel.

Bülbüldere Cemetery, Üsküdar, Istanbul.

Avotaynu DNA Project.

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Any index or transcription of the Mübadele files relating to Dönmeh families from Salonica
Transcriptions or photographs of the Bülbüldere cemetery inscriptions, and of the Osman Hasan tombstone portraits
Any record of the fate of the three Dönmeh cemeteries of Salonica — photographs, transcriptions, maps, or municipal records of their clearance
Any information on the Iberian origins of the founding Dönmeh families, including the Filosof and Querido families
Records of the Dönmeh schools of Salonica, which taught in Turkish and were part of the city’s Muslim educational expansion
Any trace of the Dönmeh commercial networks in western Europe and the Americas, and whether descendants remain there
The 1906 Salonica property registers, and any identification of Dönmeh quarter properties within them
Any family genealogy (soyağacı) that a descendant is willing to share, on whatever terms
Documentation assembled by Dönmeh families for Spanish or Portuguese citizenship applications, which necessarily addresses Iberian descent

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

We are conscious that this is a community which has had good reason to be private, and we would not wish to press anyone. If you would prefer to share material anonymously, or with restrictions on how it is used, we will work to whatever conditions you set.

Research services

Dönmeh research means a community that organised itself around secrecy for two and a half centuries, whose Salonica records burned in 1917, whose family genealogies remain private, and whose surviving documentation is split between a Turkish state archive that is neither digitised nor name-searchable and a cemetery in Üsküdar. Records are in Ottoman Turkish, modern Turkish, Ladino, Hebrew and Greek. It is difficult work and it is not always possible. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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