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, Doenmes, 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 Doenmes 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 Doenmes 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 Doenmes continued to adopt
the "burden of silence" in order to cope with the challenges of
messianism, modernity, and memory.
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