Download PDF | Julia Phillips Cohen - Becoming Ottomans_ Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era-Oxford University Press (2014).
245 Pages
PREFACE
In The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to capture the experience of living as a black man in a racist society by asking “How does it feel to be a problem?”! Although Du Bois posed the question with the racial inequalities of the early twentieth-century United States in mind, it is also an apt point of departure for studies of Jews in modern Europe and beyond.’ Indeed, by the nineteenth century, most states with significant Jewish populations—including a few with hardly any Jews—had developed their own version of a Jewish Question. Long before the rise of Nazism, European politicians, intellectuals, and activists alike debated how the problem Jews posed to their countries could be solved. Yet, for a variety of reasons that I seek to elucidate in the pages that follow, in the context of late Ottoman politics, Jews were rarely singled out as a “problem” community. Indeed, according to various nineteenth-century commentators, there was no Jewish Question in the Ottoman Empire.
The approach I take here is therefore closer to the question Vijay Prashad has formulated about the experience of South Asians in the United States. Turning Du Bois’s question on its head, Prashad asks “How does it feel to be a solution?” The suggestion that South Asian Americans are both hardworking and pliant appears to offer the ultimate proof of the viability of the American dream, Prashad argues. “Successful” immigrant communities become the poster children for the country’s multicultural claims, yet the proposal that certain groups have succeeded often carries with it an indictment of other groups who have not yet arrived. Assuming model status—becoming a solution, as Prashad puts it—makes sense only in relation to others who don’t measure up.°
Rather than inquiring how it feels to be a solution, this book asks, “How does a community become a solution?” It seeks to reveal what the process of becoming a model community in the multi-lingual, multi-religious Ottoman Empire entailed during its final half century of existence. What kind of work, alliances, compromises, and sacrifices did the process involve? How did Ottoman Jews find themselves in a position to claim “model minority” status?°
Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the unparalleled story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839-1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Throughout this period, Jews remained little more than an afterthought in imperial politics. Even Abdiilmecid’s famous 1856 Reform Decree failed to mention them explicitly, referring instead only to “Christians and other non-Muslim communities” of the empire.’ Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet—as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. This book charts this dramatic reversal, following the changing position of Jews in the empire over the course of half a century.
In presenting this story, Becoming Ottomans speaks to the emerging scholarship on modern forms of imperial citizenship. Until very recently, work on the late Ottoman Empire—much like studies of the other land-based empires that disappeared after the First World War—has portrayed the state’s attempts to turn its subjects into imperial citizens as a failed project.* To support this position scholars cite the state’s inability to conscript non-Muslims into the imperial army for over half a century after emancipating them.’ Others point to the limited reach of the new imperial courts and schools, which continued to compete with parallel institutions run by different non-Muslim communities and foreign powers during the final century of Ottoman rule.’” Yet, as this book shows, even in the absence of universal state education, courts, or military conscription—all institutions assumed to be crucial in producing citizens—Ottoman Jews collectively took it upon themselves to learn and teach each other how to become citizens of their empire."
By exploring the kinds of negotiations imperial citizenship involved, this book joins a number of works that have begun to bridge the fields of Citizenship and Empire Studies. Although these fields have not always overlapped— due to citizenship scholars’ tendency to focus on the nation-state and empire scholars’ tendency to speak of subjects rather than citizens—this has recently begun to change: new work on areas ranging from French Mandate Syria to late Ottoman Palestine and the British Raj all reveal local citizenship discourses and practices where they were once ignored or thought impossible.’ This book contributes to this literature by showing that the aspiration to imperial citizenship emerged much earlier than even these studies—which deal almost exclusively with the twentieth century—suggest. Indeed, already by the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman Jews as well as other Ottomans across the empire had begun to attempt to understand, debate, and perform their newly acquired roles of imperial citizens.
Even in places where top-down imperial initiatives for political integration did not reach, I argue, Ottoman Jews—together with other Ottomans— fashioned their own form of patriotism from below." The book therefore trains its focus away from formal state institutions to various other locales—ranging from Jewish communal newspapers, schools, synagogues, and social clubs to sites of inter-communal sociability, such as libraries, coffeehouses, and dance halls—in order to identify emerging forms of imperial citizenship that have escaped the attention of scholarship focused on the state’s role in effecting change. Rather than treat these spaces as sites of resistance to, or apart from, the state, the book furthers recent lines of inquiry that investigate the porous boundaries between state and society in modern Middle Eastern contexts.
My approach has been inspired in particular by Elizabeth Thompson’s concept of the civic order, which she defines as “the arena where state policy and political power are negotiated among soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats, and various social groups.”'* Understanding imperial citizenship as a series of negotiations between different parties, Becoming Ottomans traces the different strategies Ottoman Jewish communal leaders employed in order to promote their new patriotic project within an emerging imperial civic order, while also exploring how different audiences received the lessons in patriotism Jewish elites had to offer. It shows that Ottoman Jews created a mediated form of citizenship that has gone unrecognized by scholars of Ottoman history, who have left untapped a wealth of sources produced by Ottoman Jews during the final half century of the empire’s existence.
Ultimately, the process of becoming a model millet was fraught with contradictions: as Ottoman Jews attempted to teach other Ottoman Jews how to become imperial citizens, they instilled in them the values of love of homeland, serving the greater good, and brotherhood (or less frequently, sisterhood) among Ottomans of all faiths. Yet, as they sought to prove to the authorities and to the Muslims of the empire that they were a model community with a special relationship to the state, they simultaneously competed with other groups for the attention of their government. Gaining visibility brought new complications. On the one hand, moving into the spotlight meant more scrutiny and thus, more pressure to live up to the new expectations of imperial citizenship. On the other hand, succeeding in earning the praise of imperial officials could also put new strains on Ottoman Jews’ relations with other groups in the empire. Being a solution brought with it its own problems.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book would not have been possible without the support of numerous people in various countries over the course of many years. At Stanford, Zachary Baker and Heidi Lerner guided my library searches and generously offered their time and expertise, while Vered Shemtov went above and beyond her role as Hebrew teacher to read and speak the language with me. There are not enough hot chocolates in the world to repay her. In Philadelphia, David and Deborah Sheby opened up their home to me, allowing me to explore the great wealth of soletreo postcards David has collected over the years. Bob Bedford of the Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture also shared his publications and unending enthusiasm for Sephardi history with me since we met many years ago. Anne-Sophie Cras of the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques in Nantes helped me to locate important documents, as did Gerhard Keiper of the Auswartiges Amt, Politisches Archiv in Berlin. Beatrice Schmidt and Manuela Cimeliin Basel gave me access to hard-to-come-by materials from the Viennese Sephardi community, for which I am grateful.
In Paris, Esther Benbassa invited me into her home and offered advice about my project during its earliest stages. Rose Levyne and Jean-Claude Kuperminc guided my research in the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle on various occasions. I am indebted to Gaélle Collin for finding, and helping me find, countless books and documents, as well as for her generosity and friendship over the past decade. Pandelis Mavrogiannis has proved a lively interlocuter on the various occasions we have had to meet in his adopted city. More recently, Marie-Christine Varol shared her research and personal archives with me and regaled me with stories, songs, and jokes culled from her many decades of fieldwork with Ladino speakers in the Balat District of Istanbul and beyond.
In Salonica, Angelos Chotzidis guided me through the collections of the Museum for the Macedonian Struggle, as did Erika Perahia Zemour in the city’s Jewish Museum. Yannis Megas also generously shared with me various citations and rare Jewish periodicals from Salonica that make up part of his private collection. Rena Molho provided advice and insights into Salonican Jewish history. Paris Papamichos Chronakis offered me personalized tours of his country, city, and bookshelves in search of forgotten Sephardi pasts, making my trip to Greece both invaluable and unforgettable. Although I met him in the United States, Isaac Nehama has also opened various Greek pasts for me, not least by translating a number of Greek-language documents that were relevant to this project, but also through the many stories he shared of his own early years in Athens and as a partisan in Thessaly during the Second World War.
My many trips to Turkey over the course of a decade have also been enriched by the support and friendship of numerous people. In Izmir, the Hazan family offered me copies of original newspapers published by their relative Aron de Yosef Hazan over a century ago. In Istanbul, Karen Sarhon at the Research Center for Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture provided assistance early on. My first summers spent in Istanbul were made particularly special by visits to the home of Rifat Birmizrahi and his late wife, who opened up their home and cooked traditional Sephardi meals for me while permitting me to sift through the Hebrew and Ladino library of Rifat’s father. Rifat Bali has guided my research over the course of many years, offering his unmatched bibliographic expertise on modern Turkish Jewish history, providing me with books old and new, and, along with his wife Beti, also becoming a dear friend. More recently, Selcuk Aydin of Atatiirk Kitapligi, Umit Sevgi of the IFEA library, and Fuad Bey of the Basbakanlik Osmanl: Arsivi all facilitated my work in a number of ways. I am extremely grateful to Abdullah Ugur for his many years as my research assistant, Ottoman tutor, tour guide, and friend. Thanks are also due to Sevim Yilmaz Onder, Elif Ozcan, and Esra Derya Dilek for guiding me through the long and often arduous journey of Ottoman paleography and, more recently, to Esra for research assistance as well. Making the acquaintance of Ceyda Arslan and Vangelis Kechriotis while studying Turkish at Bogazic¢i University was fortuitious and has led to many fruitful exchanges. I am also grateful to Vangelis for introducing me to Noémi Lévy, whose work on the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 in Salonica inspired one of the present chapters of this book. Mukaram Hhana, Catalina Hunt, and Alan Mikhail all graciously provided me with archival and bibliographic material from Istanbul when I could not make the journey myself. Thanks are also due to Alan for providing invaluable advice over the years and for inspiring me to cross the bridge from Stanford to U.C. Berkeley many years ago for a graduate seminar with Leslie Peirce—who encouraged and supported me during my early forays into Ottoman history.
In Israel, Shmuel Rafael and the staff at the Naime & Yehoshua Salti Center for Ladino Studies at Bar-Ilan University always offered a warm welcome. In Jerusalem, I spent many months at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, the Jewish National University Library and—most of all— immersed in Ladino materials at the Ben-Zvi Institute. To all of the staff at these institutions I would like to express my gratitude, but especially to Eli Ben-Yosef, who has the amazing capacity to make a trip to the archives feel like a reunion of old friends, to Dov Cohen, who knows more about Ladino books than anyone I am ever likely to meet, and to Esther Guggenheim, who probably learned more about Ladino materials during my year in the city than she ever would have planned. I would also like to extend my thanks to Avner Perez, who provided me with materials from his collection. I was lucky enough to meet David Ashkenazi, who sat and read through numerous letters contained in the collections of Istanbul’s chief rabbinate with me. Thanks are also due to Professor Yaron Harel, for generously giving me permission to peruse his research team’s catalogued version of this collection. Yaron Ben-Naeh graciously welcomed me into his classroom at the Hebrew University and exposed me to a new world of plurilingual Sephardi texts. I am also grateful for having met Eliezer Papo, a vivacious person and a veritable walking repository of linguistic and cultural knowledge about the Balkan Sephardi world he knows so intimately.
During the many years I pursued this project, I have benefited from the insights and questions of participants in various workshops and conferences. These include the “Bridging the Worlds of Judaism and Islam” conference convened by Michael Laskier and Yaacov Lev at Bar-Ilan University; a Ladino Studies Program talk at the Hebrew University organized by David Bunis; the workshop “Late Ottoman Port Cities and their Inhabitants” at the 8th Mediterranean Research Meeting of the European University Institute organized by Vangelis Kechriotis and Malte Fuhrmann; the Group for the Study of the History of the Jews of Greece, convened by Giorgos Antoniou, Rika Benveniste, Tony Molho, and Paris Papamichos Chronakis in Salonica; the Jewish Studies Series with ME/SA at the University of California, Davis; the Works in Progress Workshop at the Association for Jewish Studies, run by Claire Sufrin and Adam Shear; the “Itinéraires Sépharades” Conference at the Sorbonne convened by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue; the Jewish Studies Program at the University of South Carolina; an Ottoman-Sephardic workshop at Georgetown University organized by Sylvia Onder; the “Jews and Empire” Symposium convened by Sarah Abrevaya Stein at UCLA; the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati; the University of Chicago’s Symposium on Modern Jewish and Israeli History, coordinated by Orit Bashkin and Leora Auslander; an “Ottoman Citizenships” panel at Florida State University organized by Will Hanley; the “Jews and Empire” Lavy Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University convened by Marina Rustow and Kenneth Moss; and the “Sefarad an der Donau” Symposium in Vienna, organized by Michael Studemund-Halévy. I am especially indebted to Michael for bringing me to Vienna and introducing me to the world of Sephardi Studies in Europe.
I am grateful to my many, wonderful colleagues at Vanderbilt, who have offered me their support and invaluable advice since I joined the faculty in the fall of 2008. Special thanks are due to Allison Schachter and Catherine Molineux for invaluable input and to Leah Marcus, Shaul Kelner, Liz Lunbeck, and Jim Epstein, my chairs in the Program in Jewish Studies and the Department of History. Jim Toplon and the entire Interlibrary Loan staff at Vanderbilt have been tremendously helpful in aiding me in searches that often spanned the globe. Tamesha Derico and Nick Schaser provided research assistance and spent long hours in front of microfilm machines. Lindsey Bunt helped catch errors at the eleventh hour.
For their generous support of this project, lam thankful to the Taube Center at Stanford University, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Stanford Humanities Center and Mellon Foundation, the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University, the Institute for Turkish Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant for Turkish study at Bogazici University, a UCLA Maurice Amado Program Faculty Incentive Grant, and Vanderbilt’s RSG summer and fellowship funding.
It was a tremendous privilege to have the chance to work with a number of wonderful mentors during the formative stages of this project. Aron Rodrigue has remained a dedicated teacher and inspiring interlocutor for over a decade, and I owe him my sincerest thanks for his time, insights, and continued encouragement and support. Steve Zipperstein has trained me not only to bea Jewish historian, but also to search for ways to bring creativity and the beneficial influences of other disciplines into the writing of history. Together, he and Aron have been a wonderful team and a source of incessant support to me. Toward the end of my graduate career, serendipity brought me a third advisor, Elizabeth Frierson, who, like Aron and Steve before her, I count as a lifelong mentor. Elizabeth’s incisive and careful readings of my work have pushed me in new directions and forced me to ask new questions and will, no doubt, continue to do so in the future.
I am also indebted to Sebouh Aslanian, Olga Borovaya, David Bunis, Michelle Campos, Paris Papamichos Chronakis, Paula Daccarett, Michal Friedman, Emily Greble, Esther Juhasz, Matthias Lehmann, Amalia Skarlatou Levi, Lital Levy, Nazan Maksudyan, Vivian Mann, Bedross Der Matossian, Kenneth Moss, Devin Naar, Derek Penslar, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Darin Stephanov, and Claire Sufrin, as well as two anonymous readers, all of whom have provided me with countless references, suggestions, and questions during different stages of this project. Olga in particular has been there from the earliest stages—although we still can’t settle on the exact date—first as a teacher and mentor, more recently also as a co-author, and always as a cherished friend. During the final stages of this project, I also had the great pleasure of working with Susan Ferber. I could not have asked for a more engaged or insightful editor and I am deeply indebted to her for her careful readings and guidance throughout the publication processs. Max Richman and Smita Gupta were instrumental in shepherding the book through production. Iam grateful to both of them for their input and help preparing my manuscript. My mother, Margaret Phillips, has offered detailed readings of much of my work, and has been a source of constant support, as has my father, Ronald Cohen, and the rest of my family and friends. For enriching my life in ways I cannot even begin to enumerate, I extend my sincerest gratitude to all of them. Finally, I would like to thank Ari Joskowicz, who joined my life partway into this project but whose role in helping me advance it has been tremendous. For your intellectual companionship, thoughtful questions, and so much more, thank you.
NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION
For over four centuries, Jews in Ottoman southeastern Europe and the Levant spoke and wrote in an Ibero-Romance language grammatically akin to fifteenth-century Castilian but encompassing loan words from various other languages, including Italian, Portuguese, French, Hebrew, and Turkish. Traditionally printed in the Rashi Hebrew script and penned in the soletreo handwriting style, it has been known by different names, including Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo, and Ladino. I employ the term Ladino here, as has become common practice in English-language works on the subject. I have chosen the Aki Yerushalayim transcription system, which reflects Ladino pronunciation— with the exception of names that commonly appear in scholarly works in other forms (e.g., Fresco rather than Fresko). In transliterating Ottoman Turkish sources, I use a simplified version of the system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For Hebrew and Greek, I use the Library of Congress system, but without diacritics and applying phonetic guidelines.
Where relevant, place names have been rendered according to their modern Turkish variants but in the English alphabet (e.g., Istanbul rather than Constantinople; Izmir rather than Smyrna) or according to commonly accepted English versions of place names (e.g., Salonica instead of Thessaloniki). In cases where Ottoman words are widely used in English, I have opted for the English version (e.g. Pasha rather than Pasa).
Unless otherwise noted, all dates are in the Gregorian calendar. Those dates that appear in either the Hebrew, Islamic, or Ottoman fiscal calendrical systems are followed by their Gregorian equivalents in brackets.
Introduction
Becoming a Model Millet
In the spring of 1992, a foundation headed by Turkish Jewish and Muslim entrepreneurs organized various public events and sponsored a host of publications, lectures, and travel itineraries marking five hundred years of Turkish-Jewish “friendship.”! Calling their new organization the Quincentennial Foundation, its members suggested that their aim was to “broadcast as fully as possible, both at home and abroad, the humane approach the Turkish nation [displayed] in opening its arms” to the Jews who fled the Spanish expulsion in 1492 and who “chose to make their new homeland on Turkish soil.”” In the words of one of the Quincentennial Foundation’s publications, the Jews of Turkey felt profound gratitude to the Turkish state because its Ottoman predecessor had “extended the hand of friendship to a persecuted minority of faith and culture different from its own.”*
Jews and others have been telling different versions of this story of Ottoman-Jewish relations for a very long time. In a sense, it is recognizable even beyond its specific Ottoman context, as Jewish expressions of attachment to the empire’s sultans over the ages offer an example of the royal alliance scenario so familiar to Jewish history.* More concretely, the narrative of a special Ottoman-Jewish relationship dates to the early modern era, when different Jewish chroniclers praised the empire for receiving Jewish refugees when no one else would have them.° For these authors, the idea of a special OttomanJewish relationship forged in the wake of the Spanish expulsion was a story of redemption meant to console those who had lived through the trauma. Starting in the nineteenth century, the same narrative became central to Ottoman Jews’ attempts to turn their coreligionists into model Ottoman patriots during a period of dizzying change. In an era marked by the social and political reordering of Ottoman society, territorial losses, and the empire’s increasing incorporation into the global economy, the idea of the unbreakable bond Ottomans and Jews had forged in the wake of 1492 was particularly appealing to Ottoman Jewish elites, who sought to smooth over the ruptures their relationship with the state had suffered in the interim. Today, once again, political tensions and opportunities in modern Turkey and beyond have made it opportune to speak of the long continuities of Turkish Jews’ love for their state.
For all its changing uses, the narrative of Ottoman-Jewish (and later Turkish-Jewish) friendship is built upon a set of common tropes, the most important of which is the image of the Ottoman Empire as a safe haven for Jewish refugees and a place of unprecedented tolerance where Jews and Muslims formed a special bond during centuries of coexistence. Through their frequent repetition, these tropes of Ottoman-Jewish history have not only taken on the aura of unquestionable truth, they have also concealed other stories that have not served the agendas of different authors throughout the ages. The historian Yosef Hacker has made this point forcefully by demonstrating that Ottoman and Jewish historians’ continued reliance on the writings of a small number of early modern Jewish chroniclers who were sympathetic to the Ottoman state has obscured Jews’ negative experiences of Ottoman rule during the empire’s earliest centuries. Having uncovered forgotten accounts of Jews who lamented their treatment at the hands of Ottoman authorities—including those who suffered from the state’s attempts to repopulate newly conquered areas through forced relocation policies—Hacker suggests that later authors silenced such stories because they seemed less threatening than the challenges facing their community during their own lifetime. Subsequent depictions of the Ottoman Empire as a place of refuge were always simultaneously a denunciation of the Christian kingdoms that had chased Jews out of their realms. Portraying the Ottomans as a foil to the persecutory regimes of Europe left little room for nuance.°
As a result, most histories of the Ottoman-Jewish encounter have focused on the Jews who arrived in the empire as refugees from Iberia rather than the Jewish communities who lived in the region prior to Ottoman rule. This selective approach to Ottoman Jewish history has reinforced the impression that the empire served as a haven for Jews—a country they encountered by choice rather than by conquest. This narrative also largely effaced the history of the Jewish communities that had lived in the area before the Ottomans arrived on the scene—such as the Greek-speaking Romaniot Jews of the eastern Mediterranean basin and the Arabic-speaking communities spread across the empire—as well as those who found their way to the empire for reasons entirely unrelated to the Iberian expulsion. It also allowed the Judeo-Spanish communities of the empire’s European and Anatolian provinces to stand in for Ottoman Jewry as a whole, permitting authors who spoke of a special Jewish relationship to the Ottoman Empire to conjure visions of an imagined special Sephardi relationship to the empire, and vice versa.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish scholars and communal elites from the predominantly Sephardi centers of Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica drew upon this small repertoire of historical narratives in order to convince their coreligionists of their longstanding special relationship to the Ottoman state. This chain of transmission—from early modern chroniclers to modern Ottoman Jewish scholars and constituencies—created the illusion of a static story. It conveniently placed Jews at the center of an unchanging alliance with their state, masking what was in fact a complex, multi-layered, and constantly changing dynamic between the Ottoman authorities and Jewish communities over the many centuries of the empire’s existence.
Contrary to the statements modern Ottoman Jews pronounced time and again—and to the impression that has remained largely undisturbed until this day—there were moments when the bonds Jews had with the Ottoman government were by no means guaranteed. This was certainly the case during the reign of Bayezid II from 1481 to 1512—the very same sultan who welcomed Iberian Jewish refugees “with open arms,” as so many versions would have it. Bayezid II not only encouraged Jewish refugees to settle in his domains, but also spearheaded campaigns directed against newly opened synagogues and applied significant pressures on Jews to convert to Islam.’
The messianic fervor that surrounded Shabbatay Sevi in the seventeenth century offers yet another example of uneasy relations between the Ottoman state and its Jewish population. It was not simply the hubris of the messianic pretender that so disturbed Sultan Mehmed IV, but also the fact that his numerous Jewish followers—the sultan’s own subjects—had taken to calling Sevi their king and to disregarding the laws of the land.* The messianic hopes surrounding Sevi reportedly led Jews to expect the imminent fall of not only “all of the crowns of Christendom” but also “of the Crescent.”° Indeed, historian Marc Baer has suggested that Shabbatay Sevi’s appearance “could not have come at a worse time for the Jewish elite in Istanbul” since it “confirmed for the Ottomans that Jews were untrustworthy and helped convince them to turn to the Jews’ rivals, Orthodox Christians, as the two groups struggled for positions of power and influence.”'° The precariousness of Ottoman Jews’ position in the midst of the Sabbatean upheaval was not lost on them. Some began to suggest that they faced an impending massacre unless they turned their new leader over to the authorities. Although “sundry miracles and celestial warning” saved them from this gruesome fate, even by their own accounts, Jews’ positions in the empire had clearly been compromised in the process.'! Taken together, these examples make clear that Ottoman-Jewish relations were more complex—and at times significantly more troubled—than the most popular versions of their history have made them out to be.
Put simply, the story of the special Ottoman-Jewish relationship is a myth. By labeling it thus, I do not mean to suggest that those who penned the myriad documents or gave the countless speeches testifying to the special nature of Ottoman-Jewish relations were insincere. Rare glimpses into the private lives of late Ottoman Jews indicate the extent to which they internalized their identification with the empire. Ritual objects featuring the crescent and star of the empire and stylized representations of the sultan’s calligraphic Arabic signature, or tugra, bear witness to this trend (Figures 0.1-0.4).'°
Yet the aim of the book is to present the story of Jewish allegiance to the Ottoman state not as the history of a sentiment, but rather as the history of a process and a project. That project was born in the nineteenth century in response to a complex set of new socio-political and legal realities, even as it borrowed from earlier narratives of Ottoman-Jewish history. Indeed, even the habit of integrating crescents and tugras into the design of Jewish ceremonial art appears to have been a modern phenomenon sparked by the new expectations and promises of imperial citizenship; no examples of this style are known to date before the nineteenth century. Neither the historical narratives nor the material culture that Ottoman Jews left behind offer evidence of their uninterrupted love affair with the Ottoman state. Patriotism had to be taught and learned, and, later, maintained and managed.
In order to explore the ways that different Jewish elites—including lay and religious leaders, journalists, schoolteachers, merchants, and charitable women—crafted an ideal image of their communities in response to their new patriotic project, Becoming Ottomans analyzes a series of historical moments (two wars, an invented holiday, a world’s fair, and a sultan’s tour) that provide important clues about the worlds of late Ottoman Sephardi communities. It sets out to understand how Jews in Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul—the three largest Judeo-Spanish population centers of the empire—chose to represent themselves in print and in public at various moments, and the messages they sent about their place within their empire as they did so.'*
The book also examines how these Jewish leaders were received by Jewish audiences of different cities, ages, classes, genders, and political persuasions, as well as by non-Jews within the empire and abroad. Drawing upon such a wide array of perspectives and sources allows for an analysis of what anthropologist James Scott has called the “public transcripts” of the different events under study as well as the “hidden transcripts” that inevitably accompany them."* The various political performances explored in the book provide rich examples of the public image different historical actors crafted and labored to uphold while also offering hints about what happened offstage. Imperial citizenship, as it emerges in the pages that follow, was not merely a legal category, but also a process of continual individual and collective self-invention. The forces that set this process in motion converged in the early nineteenth century, as the Ottoman government began the dramatic reorganization of its state administration and as Jewish leaders in the empire sought new means of raising the public profile of their community.
From Rupture to Rapprochement
By the eighteenth century, Ottoman Jews had begun to lose hold of many of the economic niches they had filled during earlier centuries, including their once important role in textile production, international commerce, and at court.'* Various accounts also suggest that in the hierarchy of Ottoman religious communities, Jews often ranked at the bottom.'” The demographic situation of Ottoman Jews no doubt contributed to their relative invisibility to imperial state administrators. Compared to the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities, composed of some 2,000,000 and 2,400,000 souls, respectively, in the mid-nineteenth century, the number of Jews in the empire never reached above 500,000.!8 Smaller than other non-Muslim communities, impoverished, and lacking foreign protectors, Ottoman Jews do not seem to have garnered either the particular favor or the special concern of the Sublime Porte during this period.’” Indeed, various contemporary anecdotes reinforce the impression that, by the early nineteenth century, Jews were often little more than an afterthought in imperial politics.”°
‘There were exceptions to the Porte’s benign neglect of the Jews, however. In the 1820s, Istanbul’s Jewish community saw a number of leading Jewish businessmen murdered at the behest of the sultan, Mahmud II.”’ The first of these was Yehezkel Gabbay, Mahmud II’s chief moneychanger, who was an ally of the increasingly unwieldy Janissary Corps. His connections with the Janissaries, together with his ongoing rivalry with the lessee of the royal mint, an Armenian Ottoman subject named Kazaz Artin led to his demise. In 1823 Gabbay was exiled to the Ottoman city of Antalya, where he was killed.”* Then, in 1826, as Sultan Mahmud II took steps to streamline the Ottoman military, he purged the infamous Janissary Corps and had two other Jewish communal leaders who were financially attached to the institution executed.”’ For a community already struggling economically, this spelled disaster.** Thousands of Jews who had in one way or another been tied to a Janissary-based economy were left without a livelihood, while the Jewish community lost its most prominent leaders almost overnight.”
There may have been more to the murder of the Jewish leaders than their connection to the Janissary Corps. Certain scholars indicate that the Ottoman government did away with the Jewish bankers in order to transfer their substantial wealth to the coffers of the imperial treasury.*° Others have attributed the murders to ongoing competition between influential members of different Ottoman religious communities, noting that Armenian bankers moved in to fill the positions of the executed Jews.”” Yet it is difficult to know if the Jews of the Ottoman capital who tried to grasp the events that unfolded before their eyes were privy to the inner-palace intrigues or the treasury concerns of the state.
The evidence Ottoman Jews left behind suggests that they considered the death of their leaders at the hands of the government inexplicable and unjust. This interpretation can be seen in a dirge Ottoman Jews produced in the wake of the murder of the Jewish bankers. In the capital’s synagogues, the reading of the dirge on Tisha B'Av, a somber day of mourning in the Hebrew calendar, became an annual ritual. “We have been orphaned,” it proclaims, noting that Chelebi Behor Carmona (one of the three executed men) “was famous throughout the world, and the crown of the Jews. Adjiman [yet another of those executed] came second only to him.” The elegy continues, “You were not ill, my precious Behoradji / you left ... so quickly, for no sin of your own, you were not guilty.” The tradition treated the betrayal of the leaders as entirely senseless. So, the dirge explained, Ottoman Jews turned “to the Heavens, asking for justice.” However subtle, there was something potentially subversive in this last line. Calling upon a higher authority, the lamentation asks that justice might be meted out. But to whom? ‘The state? Or to some of its representatives? Another verse conveyed just how powerful and lasting the events of 1826 appeared to the Jews of the Ottoman capital who composed the poem: “We cry and lament, the evil that befell us,” it read, “Even if we live 1,000 years, we will not forget this.””*
The memory of these events clearly persisted well beyond the generation that lived through them. The dirge was reportedly still circulating around the city’s synagogues when the Ottoman Jewish scholar and schoolteacher Moise Franco recorded it in the late nineteenth century. Those who visited the Jewish cemetery in the Kuzguncuk district of Istanbul could similarly find reference to the trauma Mahmud II had inflicted upon Ottoman Jews during his purges. Making reference to Psalms 94:1 and 79:10, the tombstone of the murdered Yehezkel Gabbay called for revenge: “Wreak your vengeance, O God! / Avenge the blood of Your servant, which has been spilt,” it read. His son Nissim’s grave also points to the continuing disquiet felt by the Jewish community after the unnatural deaths of so many of their leaders, bearing the words: “Blessed be He who decrees, God who knows [all] / But I shall investigate the cause of these tribulations that have befallen us / Why the light of my sun no longer shines.””? Meanwhile, across the city, in the Jewish cemetery of Balat, local Jews maintained a special plot said to hold the bodies of “those murdered by the sultan.”*°
The execution of their leaders served as a cautionary tale to Jews in the empire. The historian Salomon Rosanes, writing in the early part of the twentieth century, explained Ottoman Jews’ response to the 1826 trauma thus: “From that time on, the Jews, in their fear [of the authorities], excused themselves from assuming dangerous responsibilities for the government. ... Many days passed without one Jew in the service of the state.”*' The rupture of 1826 clearly left a scar on the leadership of the Jewish community and also damaged its standing vis-a-vis the Ottoman government.* Later attempts to forge ties with the Sublime Porte and at the same time to claim their unbroken nature were thus attempts at rapprochement with the state dressed up in the guise of continuity.
Nineteenth-Century Reforms and New Ottoman Jewish Realities
Legend has it that sometime in the early nineteenth century the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) announced his vision for the future of his empire with the words “Muslims in the mosque, Christians in the church, and Jews in the synagogue,” implying that the public differences between the Ottoman communities were destined to recede with time, as the spirit of a new era overtook his realm.** Although scholars differ as to exactly when (and whether) Mahmud II pronounced these words, their vision of a shared imperial identity did make its way into a sumptuary law Mahmud II promulgated in 1829.** The law dictated that all civil servants should from that point on wear a fez, frock coat, and tailored pants as a new, official uniform designed for men across the empire.
The new dress code promised to make the differences between different Ottoman groups invisible in public.** By attempting to erase the visual distinctions that had once separated imperial subjects according to religion, class, and profession, the law offered new possibilities to non-Muslim men, many of whom reportedly adopted the fez with great enthusiasm.*° Not all imperial subjects were so eager to change their sartorial patterns; many resisted the new measure, from the lower and working classes, who often retained their professional or religious headgear, to the upper classes, who preferred to flaunt the latest fashions from Europe.*’ Although the effects of the decree remained limited, the concept of equality and the impulse to erase difference reflected in Mahmud I1’s clothing laws represented a radical departure from previous imperial policies.
Within a decade, in 1839, Mahmud I1’s successor Sultan Abdiilmecid promulgated the Hatt-1 Serif of Gulhane, or the Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber, inaugurating the Tanzimat (“Reordering”) period of reforms.** Drafted by the influential Ottoman reformer and bureaucrat Mustafa Resid Pasha, the decree guaranteed the life, honor, and property ofall Ottoman subjects regardless of religion. It also boasted a new vocabulary of patriotism and imperial citizenship, signaling the state’s concern with assuring its subjects’ attachment to “state and nation,” and to fostering within them “a growing zeal” and “rising affection” for their fatherland.*® Although this language pointed to the Ottoman authorities’ interest in widening the imperial body politic to include non-Muslims, certain passages in the edict remained ambiguous, leaving open the question of whether the “nation” to which subjects owed their loyalty was a newly imagined Ottoman community or their particular religious group.*° Later bureaucratic and administrative reforms of the Tanzimat period would never completely resolve this tension, as they often reinforced rather than unraveled the corporate existence of the non-Muslim millets, even as they asked their members to announce their allegiance to the state as individuals. Such tensions notwithstanding, Abdtilmecid’s decree offered new possibilities for thinking about equality and imperial belonging for all groups in the empire.”
In 1856, Abdiilmecid introduced a second Reform Decree, the Islahat Ferman (also known as the Hatt-1 Hiimayun), which was significantly more wide ranging and radical in the changes it announced for Ottoman society. Appearing in the final stages of the Crimean War, the decree took shape in part due to internal pressure for reform at the Porte and in part due to the pressures the Ottomans’ French and British allies exerted on the empire in exchange for their support in the empire’s fight against Russia. Written in the form of an address by Sultan Abdiilmecid to his Grand Vizier Mehmed Emin Ali Pasha, the edict bore the imprint of European statesmen who hoped to obtain new rights for Ottoman Christians.” Fearing that their coreligionists in Ottoman realms might be left out of the process, European Jewish leaders interceded to ensure that any new measures taken on behalf of Christians would include Jews as well.
The resulting edict not only proclaimed all Ottoman subjects to be “united ... by the cordial ties of patriotism” and equal in the sultan’s eyes, it also offered practical solutions for how equality might be measured and regulated.** Among these was its announcement that any “distinction or appellation tending to render any class whatsoever. ..inferior to another class because of religion, language, or race, shall be forever erased from administrative protocol.”*S The decree similarly declared government schools and service open to all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religion, “providing they otherwise satisfy the conditions of age and examination requirements,” including knowledge of the language of the state. In the midst of the reforms, non-Muslims also gained the right to serve in the Ottoman army on a voluntary basis.*° New legal definitions of Ottoman citizenship emerged soon after, first in select Ottoman provinces and later as an empire-wide measure with the 1869 Citizenship Law, which declared all those born in the empire Ottoman citizens unless they offered proof to the contrary.” That same year the Regulation of General Education outlined a new civil school system open to all Ottomans.**
All of these developments laid the foundation for the creation ofan equal Ottoman citizenry undifferentiated by religion. In their wake, inhabitants of the empire found themselves confronted with a new framework for understanding their world. This framework—often referred to as Ottomanism—was based on the assumption that all of the various religious and ethnic communities of the empire would unite in support of their homeland.
Although the new legal reforms applied equally to all non-Muslims in the empire, the situation of Ottoman Jews was unique in one important respect. The pressures Ottoman Jews felt from the state coincided with other forces that encouraged them to consider serving their country in new ways. Unlike their Greek Orthodox, Armenian, or Bulgarian neighbors, Ottoman Jews’ contacts with foreign coreligionists who appeared in the empire as “interested outsiders” did not introduce the ideals of irredentism or separatist nationalism. Although scholars have suggested that the vast network of Franco-Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle schools established across the empire ultimately alienated their pupils from their local surroundings by instilling in them a love of France and French culture, the organization’s official aim was to create good, active, and loyal Jewish citizens wherever it found them. Later, when foreign Zionists arrived on the scene, they declared their commitment to preserving the territorial integrity of the empire, suggesting that their goal was nothing other than the creation of an autonomous Jewish center in Ottoman Palestine. For Ottoman Jews, the messages the Ottoman state and their foreign brethren sent were one and the same. Ottoman Jewry had no counternarrative to empire.”
Indeed, ever since the Porte made gestures toward emancipating its nonMuslim populations, European Jews had begun to actively involve themselves in the lives of their Ottoman coreligionists in the hopes of making them useful imperial citizens worthy of their recently gained equality. By the time the Alliance Israélite Universelle introduced its first school in the empire in 1865, Ottoman Jewry was embarking on a steady course of transformation.°*° Soon, much of the Ottoman Jewish elite identified with European bourgeois standards of behavior. Imagining that French-Jewish models of integration into the French nation-state could be applied to Jews of the empire, the directors and instructors of the new Alliance schools were convinced that it was their duty to teach their Eastern brethren how to become modern, civilized, upright members of their society. Confronting novel vocabularies and practices of patriotism and citizenship, Ottoman Jews began to propagate new discourses of belonging as they attempted to work out what a shared imperial identity might entail.
The process was not seamless. The western modes French Jews hoped would take root among imperial Jewish communities were superimposed onto very different foundations. In the end, Ottoman Jewish leaders came to shape their patriotic project according to ideas of personal obligation and belonging to a nation-state, while at the same time imbuing these notions with uniquely Ottoman characteristics: As they spoke of the new responsibilities Ottoman citizenship required of them as individuals, Ottoman Jewish leaders attempted to effect this change from within the framework of their particular religious community, or millet. Their vision—in short—was meant to bring about a radical reorientation of Jews’ loyalties to their state and fellow citizens while at the same time leaving the Jewish community intact.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman statesmen who attempted to advance much of the Tanzimat legislation met with resistance from various realms.*! The new laws were applied unevenly for some time, and plans to organize universal conscription and education did not materialize.*’ State schools ultimately attracted an overwhelmingly Muslim student body, while communal and missionary schools continued to serve principally non-Muslim pupils. Statistics from the late Ottoman period also indicate that even those non-Muslims who attended imperial schools or secured government employment were less likely than Muslims to climb the ranks of the bureaucracy.** Even more than other non-Muslim groups, Jews faced obstacles to entering state service, as few among them were proficient in Ottoman, the language of imperial ofhcialdom.** Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, Jewish observers decried the absence of Jewish individuals in state institutions, from the imperial School of Medicine to the Senate.** Despite the efforts of Jewish communal leaders, activists, teachers, and journalists to propagate the Ottoman language among their coreligionists, their efforts had limited effect.°°
Although the vast majority of Ottoman Jews in the nineteenth century encountered state patriotism in mediated form—through their newspapers, communal schools, charitable societies, and synagogues—a small but select group began to enter state-run schools during the second half of the nineteenth century, thereby preparing themselves to join the ranks of a newly emerging class of government employees.*” Among these were graduates from the Medical School, where twenty-four Jewish pupils were in attendance by 1847.°° Under the reign of Abdilmecid, the school set up a kosher kitchen and special place of prayer that would accommodate Jewish students.*’ After 1856, military schools also opened to non-Muslims, allowing their entrance into the empire’s military and naval academies for the first time.®
The movement of Jews into civil and military positions—however insignificant in number—helped Ottoman Jews forge new ties with the Porte.” Jewish civil servants attended communal events dressed in their imperial uniforms, while lists of Jews decorated by the sultan, as well as those who found government employment or graduated from state schools, appeared in the Ottoman Jewish press ona regular basis. Such demonstrations and announcements helped reinforce the myth of the Jews’ special connection to the Ottoman government. They also seem to have helped erase the unpleasant memories of a not-so-distant past when not one Jew was in the service of the state.”
Becoming Imperial Citizens
While Ottoman Jews had few public venues or media of their own during the mid-nineteenth century, there is evidence that they learned to speak the language of the new Tanzimat regime from its earliest moments. In 1840, just a year after Abdiilmecid announced his first reform decree, Jews from Rhodes invoked the reforms when they called for justice for members of their community who remained under siege after accusations of ritual murder had turned violent on the island. Proclaiming their innocence in patriotic language, they protested: “We would be unworthy of being God’s children if now, after the Hatt-1 Serif of Gilhane .. . bestowed its benefits upon us, we would cause the government the smallest unpleasantness by our behavior.”*? Within a few years, the first Ladino newspaper of the empire appeared bearing a similar message. Writing from Izmir in 1846, its editor, Rafael Uziel, urged readers to understand their relationship to their state and society anew as a result of the recent reforms. Going forward, religious difference pertained only to matters of conscience, he explained, and would not interfere with their “rights as citizens.”*° Mixing concepts familiar and new, Uziel referred to his compatriots both as “subjects of the same sovereign” and “sons of the same fatherland,” explaining that the sultan hoped members of all the different religious communities within his empire would learn to love one another and to consider each other brothers.°° Even the Sephardi rabbi Yehudah Alkalai of Belgrade— who in 1840 issued a call for the resettlement of Jews to the Land of Israel in anticipation of the coming of the messiah—found reason to praise Abdiilmecid’s latest reforms. To Alkalai they represented a “renewal of the kingdom” that offered proof of the dawning of a new age.”
Ottoman Jews also engaged in subaltern readings of the new reforms. When a group defining itself as the “Jewish poor” came together in Izmir in 1847 to oppose Jewish communal elites in their city, its members invoked the political changes the reforming Ottoman regime had set in motion.®* Writing that they once abided being “dishonored and abused” by local Jewish notables upon whom they depended for financial support, the anonymous signatories of the 1847 pamphlet explained that they would do so no longer. They had “realized that as a result of the Tanzimat-1 Hayriye [Beneficial Reforms], which our merciful king has applied to all of his reign, there are no longer any additional taxes or fines apart from the poll tax, and the profit tax which each person must pay individually.”® The latest reforms had set them free, in other words, both from the burdensome taxes they had once considered their lot and—no less important—from the arbitrary abuses of their own communal leaders. Like peasants and commoners across the empire at the mid-century, Izmir’s rebellious Jewish poor clearly “viewed the Tanzimat as a mandate for social . . . as well as religious liberation.””°
Using the language of the Tanzimat regime to assert their new freedoms was one thing, but taking on the new duties citizenship entailed was another. According to Ludwig August Frankl, an Austrian Jewish traveler who passed through the Ottoman capital shortly after Abdiilmecid announced his Reform Decree in 1856, his coreligionists in the empire saw in the new edict not only the promise of equality but also an unprecedented burden. “We are no longer the oppressed and despised ones of the earth,” the Ottoman chief rabbi reportedly informed his guest, since it was the sultan’s “desire that we should be civilized. He has ordered schools to be established, and we will prove our gratitude by obedience.” Yet, as he continued his ambivalence about the new laws became increasingly clear:
I have learned that you, in the West, understand better what is meant by exemption from slavery, and the equality of all men, without distinction of religion. The Jews of the East must first learn this, and then begin to extend their knowledge. When the great law was passed, believers rejoiced that the stigma was removed from the servants of the true and only God; and unbelievers rejoiced, because all restraint was withdrawn, and they were left to the freedom of their own wills. But there are many who believe that the holy ordinances of religion are endangered by it, and fear that it may sink into decay, and lose its force, as among the Franks [Europeans]. But the chief ground of their apprehension arises from the Jews being now obliged to serve in the army. The descendants of the heroes of God, and of the Maccabees, are not afraid to meet death on the battlefield; but they know that, as soldiers, they must violate many of the precepts of our holy faith.”"
The decree, it would seem, promised to benefit the faithful as well as those who hoped to cast off religion entirely. Worse still, it threatened to challenge Jewish observance by requiring that Jews break their Sabbath and dietary laws for the good of their country. Ifthe Ottoman chief rabbi put it mildly, others expressed their concern in bolder terms. During his visit to Istanbul, Frankl encountered a group of indigent Jews who had taken refuge in an abandoned building—a Jewish squatter’s colony in the heart of the Ottoman capital. Having entered the residence of a family of musicians, he asked the father of seven to sing to him. What the man chose to perform for his foreign guest reveals a great deal about the hidden transcripts of Ottoman Jews at this moment, as it offers a rare glimpse into the words they spoke when the state was not listening. The song the man sang was “the production of some unknown poet,” Frankl explained, and had been inspired by the latest reform decree. It told of how the Jews of the empire had “violated all that is old and highly-prized .. . cast aside their piety and their reverence for the Supreme Being, and been rendered apostate and Godless by the Tanzimat and Hatt-1 Hiimayun.”” Even as the author of these words went unnamed, the Jewish musician who performed them sent a defiant message of his own about the dangers the reforms posed to the faithful.
Jews’ resistance to the new measures also appeared in other guises. During the Crimean War, European Jewish observers complained that their Ottoman coreligionists remained indifferent to pleas that they volunteer for military service.’”? Others suggested that Ottoman Jewish religious leaders were doing everything in their power to ensure that members of their community avoid conscription.” Although certain local Jewish notables supported plans to form a Jewish legion in the Ottoman army, they remained skeptical about the prospect that their coreligionists would enlist if they were not obliged to do so.” Indeed, while scores of foreign Jews came to the empire to aid the Ottomans in their war against Russia, Ottoman Jews apparently preferred to support their empire by offering donations to the imperial cause.”° They were not alone. Although the state officially signaled its readiness to allow non-Muslims into the imperial army, various Christian representatives also resisted the new measure, preferring to pay a military exemption tax—the bedel-i askeri—rather than serve.””
While most Ottoman Jews did not experience the conflict from the battlefields, the period of the Crimean War pushed their patriotic project forward in other ways. A short-lived Ladino newspaper entitled Or Israel, which appeared in Istanbul between 1853 and 1855S, offered its readers instructions in appropriate conduct during wartime. Foremost among them was its advice not to spread rumors about the course the war was taking.’* Later issues of the paper spoke of the justness of the Ottoman cause and the depravity of its enemy, Russian “Tsar Nicholas, who strove to deceive the entire world and, above all, the Greeks,” with talk of a Byzantine restoration slated to begin in the Ottoman capital. There was no more bitter a deception than the Greeks’ when they found that the tsar would not be restoring them to their erstwhile glory, the paper continued. “God willing, they will learn from this bitter lesson.””” Or Israel’s readers no doubt found lessons of their own in its pages, which spoke of the value of circumspection and steadfast allegiance to their empire.
The subsequent chapters follow Ottoman Jews’ patriotic project forward from this moment, over the course of the final half century of Ottoman rule in Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, and beyond. The book proceeds chronologically, with each chapter also introducing the new political options that appeared to Ottoman Jews during the late imperial era. Chapter 1 discusses the emergence of civic models of Ottoman citizenship; chapter 2 introduces the option of “Easternism’; chapter 3 treats Jews’ engagement with politicized forms of Islam in the empire; and chapter 4 introduces both Zionism and socialism (as well as anti-Zionism) as new forms of Jewish attachment to the empire after 1908. Exposing the different options Jews debated over the course of many decades helps challenge the assumption still prevalent in the scholarship that Ottoman Sephardi elites “were consistently and unfailingly committed to a civic model of Ottoman political identity predicated on an idealized vision of Westernization.”®” It also demonstrates that patriotism was never simply a fact on the ground—the proverbial unstinting gratitude passed down through the generations—but rather an ongoing, contested, and evolving project.
In its earliest stages, Ottoman Jewish elites attempted to further this project by teaching their coreligionists how to become proper Ottomans and by seeking to gain visibility for their community in the eyes of their state. For various Ottoman Jewish leaders, this meant finding a way to make Jews count in imperial politics and to allow them to “catch up” with other Ottoman millets—namely, the Armenian and Greek Orthodox communities they considered to be more advanced than their own. Chapter 1, “Lessons in Imperial Citizenship,” examines these developments as they culminated in a moment of radical political and territorial reconfiguration in the empire. The chapter opens with the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution of 1876 and concludes with the Ottomans’ dramatic defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878. The empire’s successive wars with Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia during these years brought Ottoman non-Muslims one of the first opportunities to put their newfound citizenship into practice. In contrast to the positions they had taken during the Crimean War, Jewish leaders now did everything in their power to have their flock contribute to the empire’s war effort—not solely by the traditional means of prayers and donations—butalso by encouraging young, able-bodied Jewish men to sign up for the army and telling men and women alike to subordinate their personal needs to those of the state.*' Putting both the interests and the laws of their country above all else, Jewish community leaders initiated a process that—taken to an extreme—had the potential to diminish their hold on the audience they addressed and attempted to lead.*”
Chapter 2, “On the Streets and in the Synagogue: Celebrating 1892 as Ottomans,” analyzes the participation of Ottoman Jews in two different commemorations of the year 1492. In the first case, Jews decided to treat the fourhundredth anniversary of their ancestors’ expulsion from Spain as a cause for patriotic celebration, transforming it into a holiday marking their arrival in Ottoman lands. The chapter explores the genesis of this invented holiday in the political context of its time, noting that it emerged just as the Ottoman government was deciding whether to allow large numbers of Jews fleeing Russia, Romania, and Corfu to settle within its borders. The celebration thus served a dual purpose. Its architects hoped to persuade the sultan to offer safe haven to Jews fleeing persecution and to encourage Ottoman Jews to honor their state in new ways. The second commemorative event featured in this chapter honored a journey to different shores in 1492. This was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which offered Ottoman Jews a number of opportunities to assert their Ottomanness in a foreign land. As Jewish merchants crossed the Atlantic to represent their state in Chicago, Ottoman Jewish journalists sought to instill in their readers a sense of pride in their coreligionists’ activities abroad and to reflect on what it meant to call their empire home.
With time, communal elites moved from trying to teach their coreligionists how to become modern Ottomans to realizing the potentially unsettling consequences patriotism could entail. Chapter 3, “Battling Neighbors: Imperial Allegiance and Politicized Violence,” examines this process by exploring Ottoman Jews’ responses to two moments of heightened tension and politicized violence in the empire—massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1896 and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897. The strategies of self-representation that Jewish elites employed during these moments attest to their willingness to work within a framework of politicized Islam in response to the changing political climate in the empire. Their claims of Jews’ special affinity with Muslims during this period helped solidify Jews’ image as a model millet precisely as the relationship between the Sublime Porte and its Armenian and Greek Orthodox citizens became increasingly strained. Yet Jewish elites’ choice to publicly “side” with their Muslims neighbors, and thus with the state, during both moments also resulted in a number of more troubling developments. Across the empire, Jews participated in violent and spontaneous manifestations of patriotism that their communal leaders considered beyond the pale of acceptable identification with their country’s cause. The increasing polarization of the period also prompted newrifts between Ottoman Jews and their Christian neighbors, some of which would prove long-lasting.
The final chapter, “Contest and Conflict: Jewish Ottomanism in a Constitutional Regime,” analyzes Jews’ responses to the visit of the newly instated Sultan Mehmed V to Salonica during his tour of Ottoman Macedonia in the summer of 1911. By this time, the empire had witnessed an explosion of new political parties and ideologies following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In this context, Zionist, “assimilationist,” and socialist Jewish groups competed for the attentions of their sovereign and state as well as the support of various constituencies. Although they continued to speak of their community’s special relationship to the state, under the new government, Ottoman Jewish leaders found it increasingly difficult to speak in one voice. Indeed, while under the reign of Abdiilhamid II (1876-1909) Jewish elites had often attempted to distance themselves and their communities from groups imperial authorities had deemed “suspect,” various Jewish activists and authors now sought to distance themselves from members of their own community whose politics they rejected. Despite the fierce competition among different Jewish parties during the sultan’s visit, no clear victor emerged. New and divergent definitions of Jewish Ottomanism coexisted on an expanded political stage.
The analysis offered in these chapters relies on printed and archival materials—ranging from newspapers to letters, consular reports, photographs, and postcards—to explore the developments Jewish elites sought to highlight and those they hoped would remain hidden from view as they told polished stories of Ottoman Jewish loyalty to themselves and the world. The pages that follow illuminate the opportunities, frictions, and negotiations the process of becoming imperial citizens involved. Conflicts, plans rejected, and those silenced in the process may not have made the headlines but are part of the larger story of Ottoman Jewish citizenship. They speak to the struggles of different Jewish individuals and groups to define the public face of their communities, and thus help shape their future. Unlike the routine acts of everyday life, the public events featured in this book constituted clear signposts in the lives of Jewish individuals and communities. Placing them under the public scrutiny of all eyes—both Ottoman and foreign, Jewish and non-Jewish— such moments of heightened visibility forced them to continually reconsider their place in imperial, as well as local, political configurations.
Exploring the opportunities and limitations Ottoman Jewish leaders encountered as they tried to mold Jews into imperial citizens during this period often presents a paradoxical picture. During the course of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, they seem, on the one hand, to have been performing a tenuous tightrope act and, on the other, to have succeeded, sometimes well beyond their own expectations, in reinforcing and propagating the myth of their special connection to the Ottoman Empire. Both perspectives are important parts of the story of Ottoman Jewish patriotism in this period. Taken together, they reveal the ways that leaders of a particular group attempted to make Ottoman patriotism merge with their own values and visions for their cities and communities. They did so while facing a considerable array of constraints and—despite their constant claims of undisturbed allegiance and links with the state—with an unmistakable anxiety they attempted to keep far from the public eye. More broadly, Becoming Ottomans highlights the paradoxes and tensions embedded in the project of grafting models of patriotism and new forms of belonging onto expansive and diverse imperial landscapes, what Benedict Anderson has called “stretching the short tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.”® In doing so, this book explores how Ottoman Jewish leaders both confronted and embodied many of the contradictions their project involved.
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