In 1665, a young rabbi named Sabbatai Zevi announced himself the Jewish Messiah and gathered a following that spanned the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Threatened with execution, he converted to Islam rather than face it, and several thousand of his followers did the same within the year, adopting Muslim names and Muslim practice in public while, by every account historians have since gathered, keeping something of their original faith alive in private.
Their descendants, known as the Donmeh, carried that dual inheritance for three centuries in and around Salonika and later Istanbul. Sazanikos, les derniers Donmehs, a 1992 French television documentary directed by Michele Blumenthal and Michel Grosman for the channel La Sept, is built around exactly that inheritance: the filmmakers travel to modern Turkey to sit with descendants of Sabbatai's community and ask what it means to be, in the words the film uses, "Muslims in appearance, but hidden Jews," living between two cultures rather than fully inside either.
The documentary does not treat the Donmeh as a historical curiosity sealed off in the seventeenth century. Its subjects are contemporary people describing a lived, ongoing negotiation of identity, secularism and memory, which is a different kind of record than a scholarly monograph can provide even as scholarship, including a peer-reviewed review of the film itself, has independently taken it seriously as a documentary source.
What makes Sazanikos worth recording here is that it treats the Donmeh's defining condition, an identity built from concealment, as a subject that can still be filmed and spoken about openly, without resolving the tension the community itself has carried for three hundred years.