Placeholder text

Go to cart

Burden of Silence

By Cengiz Sisman

Burden of Silence

By Cengiz Sisman

0 - Default Title
Description
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, Donmes, 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 Donmes 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 Donmes 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 Donmes continued to adopt the "burden of silence" in order to cope with the challenges of messianism, modernity, and memory.
Product details
Edition:
illustrated
Number of Pages:
340
Release Date:
2015-08-31
Publication Date:
2015-09-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0190244054
ISBN13:
9780190244057
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
738 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
25 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out