Forum Signs of the Last Day Jews Waiting for the Messiah

SIIR2011 Sponsorship/Donations

Sponsor a delegate (US$40) or donate towards the costs for the next retreat. Any amount appreciated!

Please use your debit card as per this FAQ

Login and Register

2nd International Islamic Retreat

Register early to avoid disappointment!
 INH Forum :: Signs of the Last Day
Welcome Guest   [Register]  [Login]
All posts are the opinion of the posters.
To make a post enter the forum you wish to post in.
REPOST- Refutation of the Refutation   by admin on 2009-10-22 13:07:45
 Subject :Jews Waiting for the Messiah.. 2010-01-07 18:16:44 
mirza
Joined: 2009-07-02 11:29:07
Posts: 1
Location
As Salamu Alaikum !
I have found a interesting article about the 'Donmeh' ( Meaning 'apostates' in turkish). the article goes as follows:
"A Scapegoat for All Seasons 
The Donmes or Crypto-Jews of Turkey 
by Rifat Bali, Isis Press, 418 pages
Three and a half centuries ago, a young, charismatic rabbi, Shabbetai Zevi, declared himself to be the Messiah and promised that the Jewish people would soon be redeemed and would return to Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland. Masses of Jews believed in him, and the events of that epoch, which are among the most turbulent in Jewish history, culminated in tragedy: In 1668, forced by the Ottoman sultan to choose between death and conversion to Islam, Shabbetai Zvi opted for the latter. Although most of his disciples abandoned him after his conversion, several thousand emulated their leader by outwardly accepting, though they continued to see themselves as Jews. 

The historical and theological aspects of this episode in Jewish history have been extensively discussed by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, including Gershom Scholem. However, little is known about the present-day descendants of the Sabbateans. 

During my last visit to Istanbul, I met Rifat Bali, the author of "A Scapegoat for All Seasons," through a mutual friend. A distinguished scholar who has written articles and books about Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, Bali leans more toward documentation than analysis in his historical studies. In the book's 400 pages, he cites hundreds of historical documents depicting the past and present vicissitudes of the Sabbateans' descendants, who in Turkey are called the Doenmeh. 

The book's first part describes the status and history of the Sabbateans in contemporary Turkish society, while the second part contains verbatim testimony that Bali has collected from various individuals, most of them descendants of the Sabbatean sect; the testimony is presented with minimal appendices or comments. 

The complexity of the descendants' situation is reflected in the very meaning of the term "Donmeh," which is translated as "convert," in a pejorative sense (the members of the sect refer to themselves as ma'aminim, Hebrew for believers). A tendency toward self-imposed segregation and extreme secrecy characterizes the succeeding generations of this unique community of crypto-Jews, who willingly converted to Islam but continued to see themselves as Jews at the same time. Most of the testimony Bali offers is from men and women who are identified only by their initials. 

The present generation may well be the last one to retain the fragmented memories of the living members of this sect. A Doenmeh friend of mine told me his father had informed him that his father's mother used to go to the beach every Friday to recite a prayer in Ladino. My friend's father remembered only the phrase "Esperano a-te" (I will wait for you [O Messiah]). 

Bali himself displays an ambivalent attitude toward the ma'aminim and their future in Turkey. In his view, some are doing their utmost to assimilate into Turkish society, while others, especially members of the younger generation, are trying to return to the ranks of the Jewish people though they are greeted largely with a cold shoulder. Both groups are being motivated by the ever-increasing anti-Semitism in Turkey, caused by a rise in Islamism and by the concomitant dwindling of the prestige of Kemalism, the movement that was headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular and Westernized modern-day Turkish republic. 

An intriguing question is whether Ataturk himself was a Doenmeh. An entire chapter is devoted to this issue, though no clear-cut conclusions are drawn. Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence supports the assumption that he was of Jewish descent (this point in itself is of little importance except for the fact that it has helped fuel Turkish anti-Semitism). Nonetheless, it can be stated with certainty that most members of Ataturk's inner circle were declared or clandestine Doenmeh. 

There continues to be immense interest in the Doenmeh in Turkey today, from the extreme right to the extreme left, largely driven by a penchant for conspiracy theories that want to see the Jews as being behind many of the state?s problems. Since its publication in 2004, more than 150,000 copies have been sold of a book by Soner Yelcin whose Turkish title translates as "Effendi: The Deep, Dark Secret of the White Turks," which makes the claim that much of the ruling elite in modern-day Turkey, from its early days to the present, has been made up of Doenmeh. That book even argues that modern Turkey itself is a "Jewish invention" whose goals included liberating Palestine from the grips of the Ottoman Empire and turning it into a Jewish state. 

Another theory, referred to in Bali's book, discusses the role of the Doenmeh in preventing Turkey from aligning with Hitler's Germany during World War II. According to this theory, the Doenmeh, as the country's rulers, knew that if the Nazis entered their country, they themselves would be annihilated together with the members of Turkey's Jewish community. 

Another popular conspiracy theory argues that the Doenmeh were responsible for initiating the Armenian genocide. This is a convoluted conspiracy theory intended to exonerate the Turkish nation from the charge of having carried out the mass murder of the Armenians and to shift the blame to the "scapegoat for all seasons," the Doenmeh. 

Most of today's Doenmeh are descendants of 20,000 Doenmeh residents of Salonica who were exiled to Turkey in the 1920s as part of a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Their exile came in the wake of a ruling of that city's rabbis, who refused to recognize them as Jews, something that would have allowed them to remain in Greece as a minority. The historical irony of that decision is that it actually saved their lives; nearly every member of the Jewish community of Salonica was ultimately annihilated in Auschwitz or Majdanek. 

Dan Yardeni, a manager of firms dealing with high-tech materials and processes, researches and writes on Jewish history. "

Yet another interesting thing is that the 'donmeh' have stolen the sword of the prohet known as Al Battar.

The al-Battar sword was taken by the prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) as booty from the Banu Qaynaqa. It is called the "sword of the prophets" and is inscribed in Arabic with the names of David, Solomon, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Zechariah, John, Jesus, and Muhammad. It also has a drawing of King David when cut off the head of Goliath to whom this sword had belonged originally. The sword also features an inscription which has been identified as Nabataean writing.

The blade of the sword is 101 cm in length. It is preserved in the Topkapi Museum, Istanbul. Some report that it is this sword that Jesus will use when he returns to Earth to defeat the anti-Christ Dajjal.

An interesting video The sword of Prophet (s.a.w) stolen by Dajjal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jzAgVMftmc
please also refer to : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dönmeh
IP Logged
Page # 


Powered by ccBoard


Newsletter

Newsletter

Subscribe to be notified of website updates.