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Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul
MARC BAER
University of California, Irvine
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Introduction: Cosmopolitanism and the Dönme | |
Nazmi Efendi settled into a chair at his favorite café at the quay. While sipping his coffee he watched the ships entering and exiting the harbor. Most were merchant vessels. Horse carts carrying goods to the customs office buzzed by him. This was his world. Since the time he had been Director of the Customs Office he had become familiar with the goods and people of this city. How lively was Salonica's harbor!1
To this very day the followers of the old Sebi, known as Donmah, live in Salonica and play an important part in the commercial life of the city; on the other hand, they live among themselves, marry among themselves, and keep to their own private customs, although publicly and openly they say they are Turks or Mohammedans. They are very rich and form among themselves a kind of Ghetto into which no outsider has yet been allowed to enter.2
You are sponging parasites who do not consider sacrificing even an insignificant part of your blood, wealth, or riches for the country [Turkey] or nation [Turks].... Do you imagine living as a sponging parasite as in former times, maintaining your old traditions and ambitions? Do you imagine living in prosperity and affluence without objections arising from any direction?3
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| Statements such as these, the first two concerning the economic role of the Dönme religious community in imperial Ottoman Salonica and the third in nationalist Turkish Istanbul, usually do not make it into debates on the "global city." I intend to show why they have a place there, and why taking seriously the roles that religious actors living in the past deserves our attention when thinking about the links between cities and the flows that make cosmopolitan culture. This article provides a narrative of the rise and fall of two global cities, the experience of a marginal religious group in both cities, and the interrupted trajectories of indigenous globalization. It argues that more than a century ago indigenous religious groups with transregional connections created alternate nodes of globalization in marginal spaces at the fringes of empire, such as Salonica, but that nation-states limited their abilities by controlling the flow of finance and people, making their resources useless even in global cities, such as Istanbul. After World War II, transnational corporations and not formerly well-connected families and religious groups played the leading role in globalization. |
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In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Ottoman Salonica was converted from sleepy borderland Macedonian town to major cosmopolitan port.4 Yet abruptly in 1913 the city returned to provincial mode. The second city, Turkish Istanbul, went through similar transformations at the turn of the twentieth century, but also witnessed provincialization following World War I. The relatively unknown group thatlinks these two cities together, and whose modern history illustrates other globalizations either forgotten or unrecognized, is known as the Dönme, descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who were a peculiar group of Muslims. The Dönme played the key role in promoting global cosmopolitanism in Salonica. Yet the emergence of modern nation-states led to the demise of globalizing trends in the city and the disappearance of the Dönme from the historical record. When the Dönme were expelled by the Greek government and sent to Istanbul, secular nationalism erected roadblocks to their recreating a familiar cultural space in their adopted city, whose links to the global economy were cut, which points to an unnoticed trend in the literature on global cities: namely, the rise and fall of indigenous globalization led by unrecognized groups in marginal zones of the world. |
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