Cengiz Sisman

The Burden of Silence (eBook, ePUB)

Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Burden of Silence is the first monograph on Sabbateanism, an early modern Ottoman-Jewish messianic movement, tracing it from its beginnings during the seventeenth century up to the present day. Initiated by the Jewish rabbi Sabbatai Sevi, the movement combined Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religious and social elements and became a transnational phenomenon, spreading througout Afro-Euroasia. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666, his followers formed messianic crypto-Judeo-Islamic sects, D?nmes, which played an important role in the modernization and secularization of Ottoman and Turkish society and, by extension, Middle Eastern society as a whole. Using Ottoman, Jewish, and European sources, Sisman examines the dissemination and evolution of Sabbeateanism in engagement with broader topics such as global histories, messianism, mysticism, conversion, crypto-identities, modernity, nationalism, and memory. By using flexible and multiple identities to stymie external interference, the crypto-Jewish D?nmes were able to survive despite persecution from Ottoman authorities, internalizing the Kabbalistic principle of a "burden of silence" according to which believers keep their secret on pain of spiritual and material punishment, in order to sustain their overtly Muslim and covertly Jewish identities. Although D?nmes have been increasingly abandoning their religious identities and embracing (and enhancing) secularism, individualism, and other modern ideas in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey since the nineteenth century, Sisman asserts that, throughout this entire period, religious and cultural D?nmes continued to adopt the "burden of silence" in order to cope with the challenges of messianism, modernity, and memory.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. September 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780190463809
• Artikelnr.: 43404766

Autorenporträt

Cengiz Sisman is Professor of History at University of Houston, Clear Lake.

Inhaltsangabe

* List of Tables and Illustrations
* Acknowledgments
* List of Abbreviations
* Notes on Transliteration
* Introduction
* Chapter I: Remapping a Messianic Movement in the Early Modern World
* Chapter II: The Rise and Fall of the Sabbatean Movement in the
Eurasian World
* Chapter III: From a Global Movement to an Ottoman Sect: The Birth of
a Crypto-Messianic Community
* Chapter IV: Authority, Authenticity, and Leadership: Failed Prophecy
and the Emergence of Post-Messianic Sects in the Ottoman Empire and
Eastern Europe
* Chapter V: Politics of Crypto and Hybrid Identities among the Jews,
Christians and Muslims
* Chapter VI: Religious Beliefs and Practices in Parallel Space and
Time
* Chapter VII: The Experience of Modernity: The Emergence of Orthodox,
Reformist and Liberal Dönmes
* Chapter VIII: From Empire to Nation-State: Resettlement in Modern
Turkey
* Conclusion: Passion for the Waiting
* Bibliography
* Index