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A Jewish Newspaper published in New York.January 28, 1994
WHEN KEMAL ATATURK RECITED SHEMA YISRAEL
"It's My Secret Prayer, Too," He Confessed
By Hillel Halkin
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.
wa-(A)llaahu-aa'lam.
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