Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (49 page)

In addition, after World War I the Ottoman possibility of a mixed civic political organization was jettisoned in favor of Lord Curzon's “unmixing of peoples” and the colonial powers' promotion of “traditional” tribal and sectarian differences in the Middle East. In Palestine, Great Britain's support for a Jewish National Home (as opposed to Palestine as a state of all its citizens) guaranteed the clash of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. Ethnic “unmixing” has had a bloody history in the former Ottoman world over the last century—from the League of Nations-sponsored Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which legitimized and completed the forced transfer of Ottoman Christians to Greece and of Ottoman Muslims to the new Republic of Turkey, through the 1948 and 1967 Israeli-Arab wars, the Lebanese civil war, the ongoing Greek-Turkish battles over the island of Cyprus, and the current dismantling of Iraq.

Moreover, struggles over citizenship continued throughout the post-Ottoman twentieth century, and significant aspects of the particular contours of and struggles over the Ottoman citizenship project echoedinto the colonial and postcolonial Middle Eastern successor states: the possibility of a “civic” collectivity and the relationship of religious and ethnic groups to it; the nature of political enfranchisement and representation; and the relationship between secular and religious sources of political legitimacy and mobilization. For all these reasons, this history of a shared civic project and a shared homeland, though short-lived and incomplete, could not be more relevant to the present historical moment.

Reference Matter

Abbreviations

AAIU         Archive of the Alliance Israélite Universelle

BNR          Bibliothèque Nationale Manuscripts Division, Richelieu

BOA          Başbakanlik Osmanli Arşivi

CAHJP      Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People

CDGODF  Centre de Documentation du Grand Orient de France

CZA          Central Zionist Archives

ISA            Israel State Archives

JMA          Jerusalem Municipality Archives

JNUL-M   Jewish National and University Library Manuscripts Division

MAEF       Ministère des Affaires Étrangères de France, Quai d'Orsay

NACP       National Archives, College Park

TAMA      Tel Aviv Municipal Archive

Introduction

^1.
CZA A412/29. In Arabic and Ottoman Turkish documents Shlomo signed his name “Suleiman,” the Islamic equivalent of Shlomo or Solomon.
Effendi
denoted men of a certain class, education, and worldview—in other words, gentlemen.

^2.
CZA A412/13. The pamphlets he wrote were S. Yellin,
Les Capitulations et la juridiction consulaire
and
Une page d'histoire Turque.

^3.
CZA A412/21. “Noble Ottoman nation” =
Millet-i Osmaniyye necibe-yi
; “different peoples” =
milel-i muhtelife
; “divide according to race” =
tefrik-i cinsiyet.

^4.
“Our beloved nation” =
sevgili milletimiz
; “sacred homeland” =
vatan-i mukaddes
; “martyrdom” =
fedaya.
On the importance of martyrdom for modern nationalism see Mosse,
Fallen Soldiers
; and Smith,
National Identity.

^5.
“New conquest” =
feth-i cedid. Feth
in the Ottoman context clearly refers to the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, in 1453 by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conquerer (known in Turkish as Fatih Mehmet); the word is derived from the Arabic
fat
(sing.),
futū
(pl.) which refer to the
wars of conquest that spread Islam in its earliest centuries. As the CUP “conquered” Istanbul a second time not for Islam but for constitutional liberalism, this is another example of the ways in which religious discourse penetrated Ottoman nationalism. “Holy constitution” =
dustur-i mukaddes
; “constitutional state” =
devlet-i meşrute.

^6.
This was a decade of revolutions: 1905 in the Russian Empire, 1906 in Qajar Iran, 1910 in Mexico, 1911 in Qing China. For a comparative study of revolutions see Sohrabi, “Global Waves”; and Kurzman,
Democracy Denied.

^7.
Surprisingly, this active, dynamic process of making an “Ottoman nation”
(millet-i Osmaniyye
, Ott. Tur.;
umma ‘Uthmāniyya
, Ara.) remains on the margins of the history of the modern Middle East as well as of the modern history of empires and nations more broadly. Despite the fact that virtually every book on late Ottoman history mentions the nineteenth-century project of fostering imperial loyalty (known as Ottomanism, Osmanlilik or Osmanlicilik), Ottomanism remains widely underestimated, considered either an official state project alone or as the nucleus of an Islamist or Turkish ethnic nationalism. See Masters,
Christians and Jews
; Karpat,
Politicization of Islam
; Mardin, “Some Consideration”; and Canefe, “Turkish Nationalism.” Several important studies on the overlapping Ottoman loyalties of outstanding Arab notables and intellectuals have addressed this gap to some extent, but the spread, content, and power of Ottomanism are still not well understood. For a focus on the intersection of Arabism and imperial loyalty, see Dawn, “Origins of Arab Nationalism”; R. Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism”; Cleveland,
Islam Against the West
; Cleveland,
Making of an Arab Nationalist
; Blake, “Training Arab-Ottoman Bureaucrats”; and the contributions in Jankowski and Gershoni,
Rethinking Nationalism.
Hasan Kayali rightly argues for a need to focus on the provincial “consent” to the Ottoman imperial system rather than simply the rejection and opposition to it. Kayali,
Arabs and Young Turks
, 12–13.

^8.
This last point reflects Hannah Arendt's view of revolution as
both
liberation from oppression
and
freedom to enter into political life. Arendt,
On Revolution
, 25. See the distinction Bryan Turner makes between active and passive citizenship and citizenship from above or below. Turner, “Islam, Civil Society, and Citizenship.”

^9.
To be clear, I mean citizenship in its sociological sense as a “practice through which individuals and groups formulate and claim new rights or struggle to expand or maintain existing rights,” rather than simply as a political or legal status or condition of membership. Isin and Wood, eds.,
Citizenship and Identity
, 4. See also Turner, “Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship”; and van Steenbergen, ed.,
The Condition of Citizenship.
This book is directly informed by culturalist readings of revolution and anthropological studies of political culture which argue that “publics are not mere passive recipients or consumers of symbols, or mere ‘material creatures, but also symbolic [and ritual] producers and symbol users.'” Formisano, “The Concept of Political Culture,” 419. For the distinction between a structuralist and culturalist reading of revolution, see Goodwin, “State-Centered Approaches to Social Revolutions”; and Selbin, “Revolution in the Real World.” See also Hunt,
Politics, Culture
,
and class
72. Some recent works have taken a similar grassroots approach to the Ottoman revolution, such as Kansu,
Revolution of 1908 in Turkey
; Kansu,
Politics in Post-Revolutionary Turkey
; Brummett,
Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press
; Frierson, “Unimagined Communities”; and Watenpaugh,
Being Modern in the Middle East.

^10.
For critiques of the nationalist literature in the Ottoman case, see the introductions of Gelvin,
Divided Loyalties
; Kayali,
Arabs and Young Turks
; Todorova,
Imagining the Balkans
; and Reinkowski, “Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine.”

^11.
For an analysis of this argument, see Kasaba, “Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations.” Andreas Kappeler has written that while Enlightenment scholars wrote often about the multiethnicity of the Russian Empire, by the nineteenth century the history of that empire was nationalized by Russian and Western scholars. Kappeler,
Russian Empire
, 8. See also the critique in King,
Budweisers into Czechs and Germans
, for the Habsburg Empire.

^12.
As the French intellectual Alan de Benoist writes, “In terms of its birth and foundations, the nation has been an
anti-empire.”
De Benoist, “The Idea of Empire,” 91. For a discussion of the value-laden character of the empire-nation distinction throughout the twentieth century, see Lieven,
Empire
, xvi.

^13.
See the introduction to Esherick, Kayali, and Van Young, eds.,
Empire to Nation.
The editors, however, also make the leap from imperial subjects to national citizens (26).

^14.
My work is clearly influenced by sociological theories that focus on the “rhetoric” and “form” of nationalism. See Calhoun,
Nationalism
; and Brubaker,
Nationalism Reframed.

^15.
My thinking has been influenced by the insightful framework offered by Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled about the interplay of different citizenship discourses within a single state setting. Shafir and Peled,
Being Israeli.
My thoughts on multicultural citizenship have been influenced by Kymlicka,
Multicultural Citizenship
; and Isin and Wood, eds.,
Citizenship and Identity.

^16.
Abbott,
Turkey in Transition
, 29–30.

^17.
Aflalo,
Regilding the Crescent
, 31.

^18.
The sociologist Rogers Brubaker calls this “groupism.” Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” 164. For a more dynamic view of ethnicity see Barth, “Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity.”

^19.
In the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Russia earned recognition as protector of the empire's numerous Orthodox Christians; France earned similar recognition over the empire's Maronite and Roman Catholic Christians, and Great Britain sought to stake claim over the empire's Protestants and, at times, its Druze and Jews.

^20.
I take this term from Aron Rodrigue, in “Interview with Nancy Reynolds.” On an everyday basis the Ottoman hierarchy marked non-Muslims' subordination in court documents and through special taxation
(cizye).
Several studies have shown that Islamic courts subordinated non-Muslims textually in several ways. Strauss, “Ottomanisme et ‘Ottomanité'”; and al-Qattan, “Litigants and Neighbors.”

^21.
Braude and Lewis, eds.,
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.
Mark Cohen makes a similar point for medieval Islamic civilization as a whole. Cohen,
Under Crescent and Cross.

^22.
Issawi, “Transformation of the Economic Position of the Millets.”

^23.
Kasaba, “Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations,” 204–5.

^24.
O. Barkan, “Essai sur les données statistiques des Registres de recensement dans l'empire Ottoman aux XVe et XVIe siècles,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
1 (1957): 9–36, cited in Kabadayi, “Inventory for the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, 1500–2000.”

^25.
Population figures for the late Ottoman Empire are notoriously unreliable, as individuals and communities often underreported themselves and their family members in order to avoid taxation and conscription. They are also highly politicized, as later nationalist movements and states used demographic figures to advance their own political claims. These figures are based on the 1906–7
tahrir.
Karpat,
Ottoman Population
, 167–68. Justin McCarthy has argued that Karpat's figures must be corrected to account for significant undercounting of women and children; Karpat himself suggests that the population figures reflect a 20 percent undercount. Karpat,
Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History.

^26.
On ethnic types in the popular Karagöz shadow-puppet theater tradition, see Brummett,
Image and Imperialism
, 434n14.

^27.
Shaw, “Population of Istanbul in the 19th Century.” Unfortunately, the census records did not identify the ethnic origins of Muslims. Also there is significant undercounting of women among all population groups.

^28.
The census also found 6.7 percent belonged to “others.” Rena Molho,
Oi Evraioi tis Thessalonikis: Mia idiaiteri koinotita
[The Jews of Salonica: An Exceptional Community] (Athens: Themelio, 2001), 43. My thanks to Paris Papamichos-Chronakis for this citation.