Besides the great colony of Orthodox Jews in Salonika, there is a sect of renegades known as Dounme, or Deunmeh, who number perhaps 20,000 in all.  These had their beginnings in the Annus Mirabilis, when a Jewish Messiah, Sabatai Sevi of Smyrna, arose in the Levant.  He preached a creed which was a first cousin of those believed in by our own Anabaptists and Seventh Day Adventists.  The name and the fame of him spread across the Near East like fire in dry grass.  Every ghetto in Turkey had accepted him; his ritual was adopted by every synagogue; the Jews gave themselves over to penance and preparation.  For a year honesty reigned in the Levant.  Then the prophet set out for Constantinople to beard the Sultan in his palace and, so he announced, to lead him in chains to Zion.  That was where Sabatai Sevi made his big mistake.  For the Commander of the Faithful was from Missouri, so far as Sabatai Sevi’s claims to divinity were concerned.

“Messiahs can perform miracles,” the Sultan said.  “Let me see you perform one.  My Janissaries shall make a target of you.  If you are of divine origin, as you claim, the arrows will not harm you.  And, in any event, it will be an interesting experiment.”

[Illustration:  THE ANCIENT WALLS OF SALONIKA

Before us we saw the yellow walls and crenellated towers of that city where Paul preached to the Thessalonians]

Now Sabatai evidently had grave doubts about his self-assumed divinity being arrow-proof, for he protested vigorously against the proposal to make a human pin-cushion of him, whereupon the Sultan, his suspicions now confirmed, gave him his choice between being impaled upon a stake, a popular Turkish pastime of the period, or of renouncing Judaism and accepting the faith of Islam.  Preferring to be a live coward to an impaled martyr, he chose the latter, yet such was his influence with the Jews that thousands of his adherents voluntarily embraced the religion of Mohammed.  The Dounme of Salonika are the descendants of these renegades.  Two centuries of waiting have not dimmed their faith in the eventual coming of their Messiah.  So there they wait, equally distrusted by Jews and Moslems, though they form the wealthiest portion of the city’s population.  But they live apart and so dread any mixing of their blood with that of the infidel Turk or the unbelieving Jew that, in order to avoid the risk of an unwelcome proposal, they make a practise of betrothing their children before they are born.  It strikes me, however, that there must on occasion be a certain amount of embarrasment connected with these early matches, as, for example, when the prenatally engaged ones prove to be of the same sex.