Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (18 page)

In other national projects, in particular in territorial nations, two important state-led institutions historically have played a central role in forging the nation—schools and the army.
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Likewise, these two institutions were seen as critical to the success of the Ottomanization project. We have already seen that from the mid-nineteenth century there was an emergent discourse that saw schools as central to creating Ottoman patriots; in the post-revolutionary period, the schools once again became a focus of national attention. In the CUP's view, Ottomanization would
be facilitated through the teaching of the Ottoman Turkish language, the official language of the state.
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From 1894, Ottoman Turkish language teaching was mandatory in all schools of the empire, including private and
millet
schools, but the practical application of this requirement varied widely. It seems that most schools taught the minimum required hours, since Ottoman Turkish had to compete against vernacular languages, sacred languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek), and international languages like French, English, and German as the language of instruction in foreign-sponsored schools. As a result, unless they continued on to higher education in a state school, few Ottoman schoolchildren attained functional literacy in Ottoman Turkish.

This seems to be corroborated by notices in the press advertising private adult education evening classes in Ottoman Turkish. However, these courses generally were undersubscribed; one program in Jerusalem in 1897 only succeeded in recruiting three students.
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It seems that in practice given the rare occasions on which knowledge of Ottoman Turkish was required, most people simply preferred to hire the translation services of knowledgeable professionals such as Nissim Effendi, an Izmiri Jew who worked out of the store of Mercado Habib, the Baghdadi Jew who prepared documents in Arabic across from the saray (government building).
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After the revolution these night schools proliferated and were joined by civil society organizations whose aims were to support language education and other citizenship efforts.
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For communal leaders the knowledge of Ottoman Turkish was considered a real asset, in particular as it was a requirement for election to the Ottoman parliament; in addition, it was important in facilitating interpersonal exchange with local Ottoman officials. For that reason Albert Antébi argued that knowledge of Ottoman Turkish should be a prerequisite for candidates to the office of chief rabbi, and he repeatedly publicly promoted candidates who knew Ottoman Turkish and denigrated those who did not.
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Beyond the language question, intellectuals and journalists focused on the school system's potential role in carrying out Ottomanization in the broadest sense. Aside from the famous Galatasaray Lycée and the prestigious military, medicine, law, and civil service imperial academies, state institutions primarily educated Muslim students, whereas Christian and Jewish students by and large attended their own confessional or foreign-run schools. For example in 1907 the Schneller School, a German-sponsored Lutheran institution in Jerusalem, enrolled ninety boys (including eleven Muslims) and fifty-nine girls (including nine Muslims) in kindergarten; the day school, however, included only four Muslims (out of 108 total), and the boarding school had only five non-Christians
out of 264 male students.
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It is true that some Muslim notable families in Jerusalem sent their sons to the St. George Anglican School and their daughters to the Evelina de Rothschild School, hoping to give them the perceived benefits of a Western education, but this was not an extensive practice at the time.

For their part, the Jewish schools in Jerusalem were divided into traditional theological schools (the
eder/meldar
and Talmud Torah), philanthropic schools established by European Jews, and new nationalist-Zionist schools with a Hebraic agenda. The school of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Ezra), a school with philanthropic origins and a German-language curriculum, enrolled only one Muslim student.
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Even in the case of the famed schools of the French-Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle, which had educated notable figures in the CUP in other parts of the empire, the schools in Palestine had a mixed record. The vocational school in Jerusalem included 10 Muslim apprentices in addition to 128 Jewish apprentices, but the AIU's agricultural school, Mikveh Israel, enrolled only four non-Jewish students between 1900 and 1908, each of whom remained only a year, and another four Muslim students from 1908 to 1915. In fact the strikingly low enrollment of Muslim students became a sticking point between the director of the AIU's Jerusalem school, Albert Antébi, and the governor of the province, Subhi Bey, who made it clear to Antébi that he wanted to see equal numbers of Jewish and Muslim students in the AIU schools.
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Needless to say, the new Hebraist schools, which by 1913 had grown to sixty institutions with thirty-six hundred students, had no intention of enrolling non-Jewish students.
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Given this state of affairs, Ottoman intellectuals attributed an important role to education in the revolutionary era. In the view of Husayn Wasfi Rida, “national schools” were needed to operationalize liberty: “We need national schools that will ignore differences and personal attributes, and [instead] will raise its students with the same spirit, whose aims are elevation of the interests of the homeland and the protection of liberty.”
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However, the state school system was severely handicapped, structurally speaking, largely as a result of severe underfunding. In 1913, for example, the Beirut province spent only 2.95 percent of its budget on education, a fact prompting Salim ‘Ali Salam, a member of the Ottoman parliament representing Beirut, to call for new taxes to finance investment in the educational system. As a result of this systemic underfunding, in Beirut and Jerusalem three times as many students studied in private schools as in state schools.
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One Palestinian educator, Khalil al-Sakakini, took matters into his own hands and established the Patriotic Constitutional School (Al-madrasa al-dūsturiyya al-wataniyya) in Jerusalem in 1909, a private school that he
saw as a model for reform-minded Ottomans. He envisioned a school that would cater to the city's youth of the three religions and imbibe in them the spirit of the constitution and of the liberal empire.
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Combining Ottoman patriotism with modern notions of pedagogy, the Constitutional School set out to “honor the student and to support his spirit.” To that end, the school did away with punishment, prizes, and grades; set aside regular class time for sports, nature, and music; and focused on “strengthening the brain” rather than simply filling it with details.
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Al-Sakakini also sought to undermine the traditional hierarchy of teacher and student and encouraged his staff to participate in games and activities with their charges. He himself seems to have taken this informal mentor role seriously; he regularly held salons and discussion circles at his home, often reading aloud from his journals to his students as a way of encouraging them to think and write about their experiences in an authentic and independent voice.
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Visitors to the Constitutional School were uniformly impressed by its mission and its modern appearance. The first three guests of honor after its opening were Hafiz al-Sa'id, Ruhi al-Khalidi, and Faid Allah (Faidi) al-'Alami, two parliamentarians and the mayor of Jerusalem, respectively. Al-Sa'id thanked the school for the “national service” it was rendering while al-Khalidi praised the school's “new methods and organization.” Other visitors were more emotional and verbose in their responses. One guest shared his feelings of deep joy upon seeing the modern pedagogical methods and the energy and devotion of the teaching staff; another visitor argued that there was no true progress outside of education, and yet another praised the school's noble aims in cultivating the youth in the spirit of liberty and self-reliance and true brotherhood. Two visitors from Qalqiliya praised the honorable “national beginning” and “blessed renaissance” that the school represented, and prayed for its success in the cause of advancing and elevating the
umma
by educating the men of the future.
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In addition to the efforts of the Constitutional School, other private schools played important roles in Ottomanizing their student body. Newspaper reports indicate that schoolchildren often sang the liberty anthem or read patriotic poems at official events, and in general youth were targeted for special attention by the state, the CUP, and interested intellectuals empire-wide. Several children's and youth newspapers and magazines were published throughout the period before the First World War, which included patriotic anthems and parables.
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In addition to the schools, imperial attention turned to the army as a potential arm for Ottomanizing the population. When mandatory universal conscription was announced in 1909 in the Ottoman parliament, ending non-Muslims' exemption from conscription in exchange for paying the
bedel-i askerî
tax, it was seen as integral to the literal mixing of the peoples of the empire.
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Universal conscription was talked about as a tool of social engineering, a universalizing experience that would unite the empire's polyglot communities. As one foreign journalist characterized the attitude dominant in the capital at the time, “the barracks are to complete the assimilation begun by the schools.”
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In the prevailing euphoria of the early revolutionary days, when the Ottoman military was praised for its role in bringing liberty and while the Ottoman public was still eager to participate in the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship, universal conscription took its place among the slogans of a changing empire. One event participant, the Christian Jerusalemite Shibli Nauphal, described this as a necessary step for true equality: “Equality is the aim of justice and its true foundation, and if the Ottoman peoples will not be equal and mix their blood on the soil
of the homeland in defense of it, then equality will not come about, and we will not have glory but through broadening the military and defense of the land.”
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Indeed, various groups and individuals proclaimed their willingness to serve in the Ottoman army. One Armenian member of parliament, Krikor Zohrab, proclaimed that given that “military service for the various elements of the nation is the fundamental condition of safeguarding civil equality under the constitution,” the Armenian community was committed to “serv[ing] the Motherland as citizen-soldiers.”
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Likewise, the Sephardi Jewish press in Jerusalem trumpeted, “We the Jews were always loyal to our homeland and to our enlightened government, and it is incumbent upon us to fulfill our holy duty especially according to the laws…[and] to give the last drop of blood for the good of the home-land.”
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Another newspaper editorialized that “all Ottomans, Muslims, and non-Muslims, should enter under the Ottoman flag.”
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For its part, the CUP saw universal conscription as the final test of the empire's non-Muslim communities' commitment to Ottomanism. While the legitimate concerns of non-Muslims (such as issues relating to religious practice) would have to be addressed, they could not claim to be Ottoman citizens without contributing to the national effort. The pro-CUP newspaper
Tanin (Dawn)
argued:

Is it to be conceived that, under a constitutional government, any section of the nation is going to refuse to submit to the decision of the National Assembly? Apart from such an absurdity, it is a simple fact that Greeks, Bulgars and Armenians are all anxious to bear their share of the defence of the Ottoman fatherland, and consequently, in spite of such objections as may be made, the institution of military service for all creeds may be regarded as an accomplished fact.
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