This is the first study of the modern history, experience, and ethno-religious identity of the Dönme, the descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam, in Ottoman and Greek Salonica and in Turkish Istanbul. "Part detective novel, part historical account, Baer's illuminating study wades through centuries of myth, an ingenious array of sources (archival, oral, architectural, literary, and epigraphic), across the boundaries of nations, and through the life and death of the Ottoman empire in order to reconstruct the history of a misunderstood group-the descendents of the sect of Shabbatai Tzevi, the seventeenth century false messiah and Jewish-to-Muslim apostate. More than the history of a single ethno-religious group, this vivid book meditates on how modern boundaries (those that divide Muslim from Jew, Greek from Turk, secular from pious, nationalist from traitor) are constructed, maintained, and mythologized."