ZICHRON YAAKOV - There were two questions I wanted to ask,
I said over the phone to Batya Keinan, spokeswoman for Israeli
president Ezer Weizman, who was about to leave the next day, Monday,
Jan. 24, on the first visit ever made to Turkey by a Jewish chief of
state. One was whether Mr. Weizman would be taking part in an
official ceremony commemorating Kemal Ataturk.
Ms. Kenan checked the president's itinerary, according to which he
and his wife would lay a wreath on Ataturk's grave the morning of
their arrival, and asked what my second question was.
"Does President Weizman know that Ataturk had Jewish ancestors and
was taught Hebrew prayers as a boy?"
"Of course, of course," she answered as unsurprisedly as if I had
inquired whether the president was aware that Ataturk was Turkey's
national hero.
Excited and Distressed
I thanked her and hung up. A few minutes later it occurred to me to
call back and ask whether President Weizman intended to make any
reference while in Turkey to Ataturk's Jewish antecedents. "I'm so
glad you called again," said Ms. Kenan, who now sounded excited and
a bit distressed. "Exactly where did you get your information from?"
Why was she asking, I countered, if the president's office had it
too?
Because it did not, she confessed. She had only assumed that it must
because I had sounded so matter-of-fact myself. "After you hung up,"
she said, "I mentioned what you told me and nobody here knows
anything about it. Could you please fax us what you know?"
I faxed her a short version of it. Here is a longer one.
Stories about the Jewishness of Ataturk, whose statue stands in the
main square of every town and city in Turkey, already circulated in
his lifetime but were denied by him and his family and never taken
seriously by biographers. Of six biographies of him that I consulted
this week, none even mentions such a speculation. The only scholarly
reference to it in print that I could find was in the entry on
Ataturk in the Israeli Entsiklopedya ha-Ivrit, which begins:
"Mustafa Kemal Ataturk - (1881-1938), Turkish general and statesman
and founder of the modern Turkish state.
"Mustafa Kemal was born to the family of a minor customs clerk in
Salonika and lost his father when he was young. There is no proof of
the belief, widespread among both Jews and Muslims in Turkey, that
his family came from the Doenme. As a boy he rebelled against his
mother's desire to give him a traditional religious education, and
at the age of 12 he was sent at his demand to study in a military
academy."
Secular Father
The Doenme were an underground sect of Sabbetaians, Turkish Jews who
took Muslim names and outwardly behaved like Muslims but secretly
believed in Sabbetai Zevi, the 17th-century false messiah, and
conducted carefully guarded prayers and rituals in his name. The
encyclopedia's version of Ataturk's education, however, is somewhat
at variance with his own. Here is his account of it as quoted by his
biographers:
"My father was a man of liberal views, rather hostile to religion,
and a partisan of Western ideas. He would have preferred to see me
go to a * lay school, which did not found its teaching on the Koran
but on modern science.
"In this battle of consciences, my father managed to gain the
victory after a small maneuver; he pretended to give in to my
mother's wishes, and arranged that I should enter the [Islamic]
school of Fatma Molla Kadin with the traditional ceremony. ...
"Six months later, more or less, my father quietly withdrew me from
the school and took me to that of old Shemsi Effendi who directed a
free preparatory school according to European methods. My mother
made no objection, since her desires had been complied with and her
conventions respected. It was the ceremony above all which had
satisfied her."
Who was Mustafa Kemal's father, who behaved here in typical Doenme
fashion, outwardly observing Muslim ceremonies while inwardly
scoffing at them? Ataturk's mother Zubeyde came from the mountains
west of Salonika, close to the current Albanian frontier; of the
origins of his father, Ali Riza, little is known. Different writers
have given them as Albanian, Anatolian and Salonikan, and Lord
Kinross' compendious 1964 "Ataturk" calls Ali Riza a "shadowy
personality" and adds cryptically regarding Ataturk's reluctance to
disclose more about his family background: "To the child of so mixed
an environment it would seldom occur, wherever his racial loyalties
lay, to inquire too exactly into his personal origins beyond that of
his parentage."
Learning Hebrew
Did Kinross suspect more than he was admitting? I would
never have asked had I not recently come across a remarkable chapter
while browsing in the out-of-print Hebrew autobiography of Itamar
Ben-Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the leading promoter of the
revival of spoken Hebrew in late 19th-century Palestine. Ben-Avi,
the first child to be raised in Hebrew since ancient times and later
a Hebrew journalist and newspaper publisher, writes in this book of
walking into the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem one autumn night in
1911 and being asked by its proprietor: " 'Do you see that Turkish
officer sitting there in the corner, the one* with the bottle of
arrack?' "
" 'Yes.' "
" 'He's one of the most important officers in the Turkish army.' "
" 'What's his name?' "
" 'Mustafa Kemal.' "
" 'I'd like to meet him,' I said, because the minute I looked at him
I was startled by his piercing green eyes."
Ben-Avi describes two meetings with Mustafa Kemal, who had not yet
taken the name of Ataturk, 'Father of the Turks.' Both were
conducted in French, were largely devoted to Ottoman politics, and
were doused with large amounts of arrack. In the first of these,
Kemal confided:
"I'm a descendant of Sabbetai Zevi - not indeed a Jew any more, but
an ardent admirer of this prophet of yours. My opinion is that every
Jew in this country would do well to join his camp."
During their second meeting, held 10 days later in the same hotel,
Mustafa Kemal said at one point:"
'I have at home a Hebrew Bible printed in Venice. It's rather old,
and I remember my father bringing me to a Karaite teacher who taught
me to read it. I can still remember a few words of it, such as --' "
And Ben-Avi continues:
"He paused for a moment, his eyes searching for something in space.
Then he recalled:
" 'Shema Yisra'el, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad!'
" 'That's our most important prayer, Captain.'
" 'And my secret prayer too, cher monsieur,' he replied, refilling
our glasses."
Although Itamar Ben-Avi could not have known it, Ataturk no doubt
meant "secret prayer" quite literally. Among the esoteric prayers of
the Doenme, first made known to the scholarly world when a book of
them reached the National Library in Jerusalem in 1935, is one
containing the confession of faith:
"Sabbetai Zevi and none other is the true Messiah. Hear O Israel,
the Lord our God, the Lord is one."
It was undoubtedly from this credo, rather than from the Bible, that
Ataturk remembered the words of the Shema, which to the best of my
knowledge he confessed knowing but once in his adult life: to a
young Hebrew journalist whom he engaged in two tipsily animated
conversations in Jerusalem nearly a decade before he took control of
the Turkish army after its disastrous defeat in World War I, beat
back the invading Greeks and founded a secular Turkish republic in
which Islam was banished - once and for all, so he thought - to the
mosques.
Ataturk would have had good reasons for concealing his Doenme
origins. Not only were the Doenmes (who married only among
themselves and numbered close to 15,000, largely concentrated in
Salonika, on the eve of World War I) looked down on as heretics by
both Muslims and Jews, they had a reputation for sexual profligacy
that could hardly have been flattering to their offspring. This
license, which was theologically justified by the claim that it
reflected the faithful's freedom from the biblical commandments
under the new dispensation of Sabbetai Zevi, is described by Ezer
Weizman's predecessor, Israel's second president, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi,
in his book on lost Jewish communities, "The Exiled and the
Redeemed":
'Saintly Offspring'
"Once a year [during the Doenmes' annual 'Sheep holiday'] the
candles are put out in the course of a dinner which is attended by
orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. ... The rite is
practiced on the night of Sabbetai Zevi's traditional bithday. ...
It is believed that children born of such unions are regarded as
saintly."
Although Ben-Zvi, writing in the 1950s, thought that "There is
reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned
and continues to this day," little is known about whether any of the
Doenmes' traditional practices or social structures still survive in
modern Turkey. The community abandoned Salonika along with the
city's other Turkish residents during the Greco-Turkish war of
1920-21, and its descendants, many of whom are said to be wealthy
businessmen and merchants in Istanbul, are generally thought to have
assimilated totally into Turkish life.
After sending my fax to Batya Keinan, I phoned to check that she had
received it. She had indeed, she said, and would see to it that the
president was given it to read on his flight to Ankara. It is
doubtful, however, whether Mr. Weizman will allude to it during his
visit: The Turkish government, which for years has been fending off
Muslim fundamentalist assaults on its legitimacy and on the secular
reforms of Ataturk, has little reason to welcome the news that the
father of the 'Father of the Turks' was a crypto-Jew who passed on
his anti-Muslim sentiments to his son. Mustafa Kemal's secret is no
doubt one that it would prefer to continue to be kept.
