In 1916, a writer for an American Ladino serial expressed his wishful thinking about the future of the Ottoman state, writing that it “still exists and will exist for … a long time to come” (137). The same serial contained other similar statements that displayed the affinities of Ottoman Sephardic Jews in America. Coming from writers living away from the theater of war and enjoying freedom of expression, such statements should be regarded as genuine sentiments of Ottoman patriotism, as expressed in an Ottoman diasporic community. In this engaging book, Julia Philips Cohen reconstructs the process by which Ottoman Sephardic Jews learned the language of patriotism in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of a broader process of the emergence of a discourse of Ottoman imperial citizenship that affected Ottoman society in its entirety. The author's argument that the loyalty of the Sephardic Jews to the Ottoman Empire was a modern development entails a critical view of the common wisdom of a special centuries-old Ottoman-Jewish relationship, often viewed as a model of tolerance and coexistence. Expressions of this idea, abundant in Ottoman Jewish sources as well as in modern historiography, cultivate the image of the Ottoman domains as a safe haven for Jews, to be contrasted with experiences of religious persecutions elsewhere, especially in Christian Europe. Cohen is not the first historian to question this conception, which she defines as a myth (4). But rather than trying to prove otherwise, she reconstructs the paradoxes and tensions that came with Jewish responses to official Ottoman nationalism. Cohen's study adds to the scholarship on the history of Ottoman Jewry, but no less important is its contribution to the growing literature on the concept of citizenship in imperial contexts.

By utilizing an impressively varied corpus of sources, consisting of multilingual archival and printed materials, Cohen shows that Ottoman Jews played an active role in forming their own version of patriotism “from below,” evident in various communal sites, such as newspapers, social clubs, synagogues, and schools, as well as in sites of intercommunal sociability, such as libraries and coffeehouses. Cohen brings out the contingent, context-dependent nature of Jews' responses to the powerful discourse of Ottoman citizenship by analyzing four “historical moments” of great significance, each of which introduced new political situations and new courses of action to choose from. This is a clever choice, as it promotes a nuanced discussion that presents tensions and paradoxes as natural components of past realities, rather than treating them as a “problem.”

The first chapter, “Lessons in Imperial Citizenship,” addresses Jewish responses to major developments in the late 1870s, namely the proclamation of the constitution (1876) and the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878). For the first time, Jewish leaders urged their communities to put their citizenship into action by contributing to the war effort not only through prayers and donations, but by sending their young men to join the army. At this early stage in the process of adopting patriotic talk, Jewish leaders advanced the myth of ideal Ottoman-Jewish relations. This effort at inventing the tradition of Ottoman safe haven reached a high point in 1892 and 1893, when Jews participated in two different commemorations of the 1492 Spanish expulsion, which is the subject of the second chapter, titled “On the Streets and in the Synagogues: Celebrating 1892 as Ottomans.” This chapter addresses celebrations by Jews of their Ottoman patriotism in Ottoman lands and abroad while invoking the four-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion from Spain. In this chapter, the author reconstructs Jews' experimentation with unofficial patriotism, that is, a sort of patriotism that did not receive the blessing of the government. The process was charged with tensions, debates and political struggles within the community.

The third chapter, “Battling Neighbors: Imperial Allegiance and Politicized Violence,” explores Jewish responses to the massacre of Armenians in Istanbul (1896) and to the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897. These events marked the deteriorating relationships between the Ottoman government and its Armenian and Greek Orthodox citizens, but at the same time provided Jewish leaders and authors with an opportunity to reinforce the image of Judeo-Muslim affinity and the image of the Ottoman Jews as a model millet. Siding with the Muslim-Ottoman position had its price, however, creating new rifts between Ottoman Jews and their Christian neighbors.

The Young Turk Revolution (1908) unleashed political energies that had been repressed during the earlier decades of authoritarian rule under Sultan Abdülhamid II. The final chapter, “Contest and Conflict: Jewish Ottomanism in a Constitutional Regime,” explores Jewish positions following the reenactment of the constitution, by studying responses to the visit of Sultan Mehmed V to Salonica as part of the latter's visit to Macedonia. As the author shows, the dramatic expansion and liberalization of the political field in this period led to the development of new and conflicting options for practicing Jewish Ottoman patriotism, so that the “patriotic project” of the Ottoman Jews became ever more fractured. The author also examines the diverse Jewish reactions to the local version of Zionism, which gained traction to become a significant factor in the political field.

While Becoming Ottomans should be commended for its original and sophisticated treatment of the “special relationship” narrative on the basis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiences, the absence of a meaningful discussion of the position of the small Jewish minority in the multiethnic, Islamic Ottoman Empire before the nineteenth century is somewhat frustrating. As much as the historical narrative of relatively peaceful Ottoman-Jewish relations involved the invention of a tradition, it was informed by the particularities of a centuries-old Ottoman concept of toleration. As Karen Barkey argues in her Empire of Difference (which is not mentioned in the book under review), from a very early stage, the Ottomans, like the Romans before them, understood that difference had to be tolerated, contained, and even regulated, not only because diversity was a fact of life in a multiethnic and multi-cultural empire, but because it was an asset that contributed to imperial welfare. Pax Ottomana, not very different from Pax Romana in terms of its defining political and economic interests, was the default situation in the centuries that preceded the passage to modernity, a state of affairs acknowledged by most Ottomanists. This phenomenon is striking given the constant potential for explosive situations emanating from the geographic proximity of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, often interacting with each other on a daily basis.

When Ottoman Sephardic Jews had to adapt to the emerging discourse of citizenship in the nineteenth century, they did so from the position of a minority that had lived for centuries in a multi-ethnic empire. Hence, it is hardly a surprise that alongside the changes brought about with the transition from subjecthood to citizenship, many patterns of continuity were evident. The siding of Jews with Muslims in the late 1890s was a natural continuation of the preference Ottoman Jews had showed for living in Muslim rather than Christian neighborhoods in the preceding centuries. Similarly, the efforts invested by Jewish leaders in exhibiting Ottoman patriotism, albeit formulated to adjust to the necessities of official nationalism, was on the whole a continuation of the efforts made by their pre-modern predecessors in maintaining good relations between Jewish communities and the Ottoman dynasty. By the same token, anxieties about the reputation of these communities in the eyes of the authorities had been evident before the nineteenth century, as demonstrated in Aryeh Shmuelevitz's The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries. There are many more examples of patterns of continuity that are left untreated in the study under review.

With the caveat mentioned above, Julia Philips Cohen's Becoming Ottomans is an important book, making an original contribution to scholarly writing on the history of Ottoman Jews, to the study of imperial citizenship, and to the literature on the passage of the Ottoman Empire to modernity.