A Funny Story Related to My Lifelong Search for Fellow Crypto-Jews

As many of you may know my family has some connection to crypto-Jewry. In any event, I am walking my dog (Lucy is pictured here) with my wife the other night.  We rarely walk the dog together. All by a sudden I see the most beautiful woman I have seen in some time walking her dog. Turns out she is my new neighbor. She's from Lima Peru. Seriously a spitting image of Penelope Cruz.

What are the odds of meeting a Penelope Cruz-look-a-like and then having this happen the one time I walk the dog with my wife?  Anyway, I digress ...

She speaks in a seductive Spanish accent and says she is having all the neighbors over this weekend.  When it turns out we live right beside one another, she extends a last minute invitation to my wife and me over for drinks and dinner.

Needless to say, I am quite excited by this development.  I grew up Toronto watching Italian movies starring Ugo Tognozzi where he and his wife strangely end up in house with four other couples and everyone ends up sleeping with each other's wife.  Not pornography, but pointless Italian fare from the 1970's. 

In any event, not being able to separate fantasy from reality when struck by beauty.  I spend sometime getting ready for the evening.  In order to make my interest in our neighbor seem less noticeable, I keep saying things to my wife like, 'God, she could be your sister.' 

We go over to their house and I meet her boyfriend - a handsome thirty-something (sort of the way I looked before the monotony of married life, children and all-night blogging turned me into a troll). 

We join the other couples and engage in typically uninteresting 'couple' conversation.  Everyone here works at Microsoft, so the company of origin is no surprise.  The one interesting discovery is that Penelope's boyfriend turns out to be Turkish from Izmir (Smyrna).

He's talking about growing up in Smyrna, his experiences. I am getting bored of talking to computer people so I try to change the topic saying that I have always wanted to go to Izmir because they have a lot of Dönmeh there and I am going on and on about my interest in Dönmeh (the 5000 or so surviving followers of Sabbatai Zevi)

Now I don't say I am Jewish because that's always bad news. So as I am talking about my interest in Dönmeh he almost chokes on the chicken he is eating.

I am surprised by the reaction. I ask 'are you a Dönmeh?'

He gets a flushed look on his face. His eyes start to look me over with this puzzled annoyance.

I am thinking to myself, 'have I broken some social taboo?' Is this still a secret society (contrary to all I have learned - i.e. that it is a fully integrated community).

I start to gesture and say, 'you know the Dönmeh the one's with the strange dress' and by now he is just about beside himself.

He says, 'do you know what a dönmeh is?'

I am nod my head and say that I come from a related tradition.

He stops and stares at me again and looks at everyone at the table and says - in Turkish dönme means 'transvestite'

I assure him he must be confused or maybe I am saying it wrong so I spell it out. He nods his head, this is exactly the spelling.

Turns out that in modern Turkish the name for the followers of Sabbatai Zevi now means 'transvestite'
The word "dönmeh" is from Turkish dön- which means "to turn", i.e., "to convert," but in a pejorative sense. They are also called Selânikli (person from Thessaloniki) or avdetî (in Arabic-Turkish, عودة awda "return"), a Turkish word for a religious convert. Members of the group refer to themselves as ma'aminim, Hebrew for believers.