Save Sabbatai Sevi House from Oblivion [IJMES 2008] (original) (raw)
Related papers
Socio-political challenges of marginal religious groups: the Sabbatean movement as a case study
2018
perspective. 13 The circumstances of Tzvi's conversion will be further elaborated on in Chapter four. Since that time, Shabbetai Tzvi's movement has been viewed as a marginal sect by the followers of majority religions. Elkan Adler remarks that, When Shabbetai Tzvi returned to the city in 1666, heads of oriental Jews and others lived in Salonica. I saw Donmes smoking outside their open shops on Saturday but was assured that they were Crypto-Jews and practised all they could of Judaism at home. I spoke to one of them in Hebrew and he evidently understood though he protested he was a Turk [Muslim]. 14 Certainly, Adler was not the only eye witness of these members of the Sabbatean movement at that time. There are still numerous misconceptions about the life of Shabbetai Tzvi. For instance, according to Turkish writer, Fırat, "There are Kurdish Dönmes, Laz Dönmes, Albanian, Arab, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish Dönmes" which shows how some writers misappropriated the term Donme, to apply to converts of any faith, rather than Sabbateanism. 15 Other authors sought to provide reasons for the emergence and flourishing of the Sabbatean Movement. According to renowned Jewish Ottomanist Lewis, the appeal of Shabbetai Tzvi's movement was linked to the Jewish massacre in Russia. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire never had to face anything like the Khmelnitsky massacres. They were, however, profoundly affected by one of its indirect consequences. In 1648, the year when the Khmelnitsky massacres began, a young Jew in Izmir, a student of the cabbala called Shaptay Sevi, proclaimed himself to be the awaited Messiah. There had been many false messiahs during the centuries of Jewish exile. None was so well heralded, nor so widely accepted as Shaptay Sevi. The Shabtay Sevi affairs had a tremendous impact. It left a double legacy on the one hand, discouragement verging on despair among the Jews, on the other, reinforcement, of rabbinical authority among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire. 16 On the other hand, Scholem noted that Tzvi's messianic declaration was based on the popularity of Lurianic Kabbalah in the seventeenth century. From this perspective, Scholem rejected hypotheses about the Jewish massacre as the reason for the messianic expectation of 13 llgaz Zorlu, Evet, Ben bir Selanikliyim, (Istanbul: Zvi Geyik Yayınları, 1999), 48. 14 In the middle of sixteenth century, the Jewish suburb of Salonica was destroyed by a great fire. There were eight thousand houses and eighteen synagogues that were decimated in the process.
2016
On Sept. 17, 1666, Sabbatai Sevi (1626-1676), the founder of one of the most influential messianic movements in Jewish and world history, converted to Islam. An apostate messiah was a greater paradox for believers than that of a crucified messiah. Only a small group of dedicated believers overcame this cognitive dissonance and established a crypto-messianic sect, better known as the Sabbateans or Dönmes, which sustained their enigmatic identity throughout the centuries and left a deep imprint not only in Judaism but also in Islam, via the Dönmes in the Ottoman Empire, and among Christians, via the Frankists in Poland and Eastern European countries. To some observers, the Sabbatean movement and Sabbateans were the forerunners of Zionism and hence Jewish nationalism; to some others, they were the actors behind Jewish and Turkish modernity and secularism; yet to some others, they were the founder of a new form of Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbala.
Of Messiahs and Sultans: Shabbatai Sevi and Early Modernity in Morocco
Modern Jewish Studies, 2013
Moroccan Jews became “modern” through a complex process of cultural and legal changes resulting in large part from their close encounter with imperial Europe. Institutions like the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the protégé system had an undeniable influence on the transformation of Moroccan Jewish identity and expectations during this period. In order to fully historicize Moroccan Jewish modernity, however—to locate its beginnings as well as its ending (not to mention its myriad meanings)—this article argues for broadening our inquiry to encompass earlier time periods, alternative geographies, and deeper registers of change than those imposed by an exclusive focus on a European impact followed by a local response. To that end, it analyses a cataclysmic event in Jewish history during the period prior to colonial penetration: the rise and fall of the messianic movement known as Sabbateanism, so-named after its founder, Shabbatai Zevi the “false Messiah” [1626–1676] of Izmir. Inspired by current trends in Ottoman history, this article attempts to locate Sabbateanism within contemporary social and political developments in Morocco during a formative period that witnessed both the integration of the Sephardim and the rise of the Alawi state. Such a contextualization begins sketching the parameters of an early modern period in Moroccan Jewish history at the same time as it compels us to recognize the consistencies in Moroccan Jewish society that survived the subsequent colonial period in North Africa, when seemingly everything changed.
The Dönmeh: Sabbataist legacy in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey
The aim of the article is to introduce to the foundation and the history of the Sabbataist community in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The article is focusing on a relatively small number of Jewish descendants in the mid-17th century whose community could survive and their members managed to reach high societal and administrative positions by the late 19th century. The Dönmehs later played a key role in reform movements which led to a political transition in the 1920s. This paper analyses the relation of the Dönmeh’s identities and the community’s preferences regarding the form of government.
(Un)covering the past: Levantine Houses in İzmir
Social changes, brings with it new human needs and activities in every era, so people build new spaces and structures according to these needs and activities, or re-function the existing ones. The constructions built with the needs and technology of the period, they may become out of the developmental period and may fail to respond to performance and needs. Due to many effects such as time-dependent wear, damage caused by climate and environment, abandonment, changing and developing technology, many historical buildings reflecting the cultures of societies are unavailable. Designing and using a new function of historical buildings provides protection of the building as well as preservation of social and cultural values. However, the new function that is designed may cause physical damage to the structure when it is passed to the application phase, or may cause the structure to change its identity and lose its original existence. Such problems are important when it comes to cultural heritage and historical buildings. Although the conservation consciousness is more widespread in monumental buildings, it is seen that the concept of protection is neglected in examples of civil architecture such as Izmir Levantine Houses. If the function doesn't match the identitiy of the building, it is possible to lose the original fiction and architectural elements in a way that is not recycled. The levantines have built many mansion, trade buildings and created many investments such as dock and railways in lzmir. In the period when the modernization movements of the Ottoman Empire, they have brought European tourism and architecture to this region which is far from the countries with the buildings they have built. Levantines have contributed to Bornova's attainment of a modern center. A large part of the Levantine, even if they have migrated for various reasons especially with the population exchange after the War of Independence, many years they lived in prosperity in Turkey. This article includes the adaptive reuse of historical buildings and the protection of the cultures through the İzmir Levantine Houses. Some of the historical Levantine structures that reflect the cultures of minorities continue to live in the direction of new functions and many of them are ruined by abuse or weariness of time. Constructions belonging to the Levantines, which are sometimes accepted, sometimes excluded and otherized, should be marginalized like these communities? In this article, interventions made with conservation principles without harming the identity of the building and tracing of the Levantine cultures, designing with new functions will be evaluated.