In the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman Empire fell, borders changed, countries emerged, and nationalisms grew to fill them. This new international order, upheld by the League of Nations and foreign powers such as Britain and France, worked from two premises: first, that Middle Eastern nation-states-in-the-making were likely to evince dominant ethnic, linguistic, and religious characters; and second, that groups which did not fit smoothly into the majority culture amounted to “minorities,” meaning distinctive but politically weaker communities that deserved some protection, recognition, and representation. Especially in territories that became British and French Mandates, asserting minority status and formulating policy towards minorities—a process that some now call “minoritization”Footnote ¹—became a source of concern and contention among local and foreign actors.

So much was new. But the upheavals and reconfigurations of the post–World War I period obscure continuities in attitudes, laws, cultural practices, and more, that connect the immediate Ottoman past to the postwar Middle East. In particular, late Ottoman-era practices and attitudes towards subordinate religious communities, some of which had claimed official recognition as millets, shaped the post-Ottoman formation of minorities and policies for them.

“History doesn't repeat itself,” Mark Twain supposedly quipped, “but it often rhymes.” Continuities or recurrent patterns—what we could call, in homage to Twain, “rhymes” —tie the late 19th-century Christian and Jewish millets of the Ottoman Empire to the post-Ottoman and post–World War I minorities of the Middle East. Here I consider this “millet-to-minority”Footnote ² transition to argue that the history of 20th-century Middle Eastern minorities transpired on Ottoman foundations while moving in new directions.

Recall the basic contours of what scholars, for convenience if not always accuracy, have called the Ottoman “millet system.” In its classic guise, this “system” built upon the historic principle of Islamic statecraft whereby Christians and Jews were dhimmīs, protected but subordinate people. As dhimmīs they could flourish in Islamic domains in return for accepting Muslim hegemony, paying extra tax (the jizya), and following various conventions to mark their difference in public (for example, before the mid-19th century, by wearing clothes that were distinctive in color, style, and in some cases material).Footnote ³ The Ottoman iteration of this practice entailed organizing Christian and Jewish subjects into collective religious communities or “millets”—originally Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews. These millets liaised with the Ottoman state through communal leaders, for example when submitting the jizya. They otherwise possessed internal autonomy over family and community affairs, and the collection and distribution of charity among coreligionists.

Ottoman millets bear obvious similarities to post-Ottoman Middle Eastern minorities, and vice versa. The Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states worked from the assumption that members of millets or minorities were subordinate or marginal, but should have certain rights anyway while being allowed to persist in their difference.

In fact, we know little about how millets actually functioned. Since 1982, when Benjamin Braude published his article called “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” historians have been debating when, if ever, the empire fielded a systematic program for liaising with constituent religious communities; how much authority millets had over ostensible members; and what happened as Ottoman authorities recognized extra Catholic and Protestant millets among the ecclesiastically fractious Christian communities.Footnote ⁴ Scholars wonder, too, how the millet concept related—if at all—to Muslims, not least because Ottoman authorities performed their ideological commitment to Islamic unity by refusing to recognize Muslims as communities, plural, in the way that they recognized multiple Christians. Dominant in theory, argued Niyazi Berkes in 1964, Muslims in practice were so heterogeneous that they were an “amorphous entity politically, religiously, and culturally” outside their association with the Ottoman state.Footnote ⁵ Even the cohesion of just Sunni Muslims was open to doubt.

The situation in the 19th century is even more confusing because dhimmīs officially disappeared while millets remained and, among Christians, divided—with the division occurring as new Catholic and later Protestant churches spun off from older churches under the influence of foreign missionaries. In 1831, for example, the Ottoman state recognized an Armenian Catholic millet, while in 1848 a Melkite Catholic millet formed among Arabic-speaking, formerly Greek Orthodox Christians.Footnote ⁶ The official disappearance of dhimmī status occurred in the wake of the famous Tanzimat edict of 1856, when Sultan Abdulmajid I affirmed equal rights and duties for the empire's Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. These provisions marked the discursive end of classifying Christians and Jews as dhimmī subordinates. They marked the end, too, of the jizya tax, even though, in practice, Christians and Jews signaled the continuation of their peripheral status by paying a new tax that exempted them from the military service that dhimmīs had been forbidden from performing.Footnote ⁷

The Ottoman state insisted on maintaining the public fiction that anyone who was neither Christian nor Jewish was Muslim. In fact, in a study of “heterodox groups” of the late Ottoman Empire, Ilber Ortayli observed that Ottoman authorities had a much better grasp of what Christians and Jews did and practiced, as opposed to Yezidis, Alawites, Alevis, Druze, and Dönme, because they had monitored and worked closely with dhimmīs for centuries. I would add that it may have helped that so many members of the Ottoman ruling elite in Istanbul were descended from Christians and Jews; the latter two groups were not just familiar, but often familial as well. By contrast, even in the fin-de-siècle Abdulhamid II era, Ottoman authorities did not know much about the beliefs of the aforementioned “heterodox” populations, whose members typically avoided the state if they could.Footnote ⁸

The bottom line here is that in Ottoman times, diverse groups along the Muslim spectrum were not recognized as constituting millets. Matters were different in the post–World War I era, when—to give one example—French authorities in Syria did recognize the Alawites as a minority. The “minority” category was able to account for a wider range of distinctions—religious, ethno-linguistic, customary, and so on—than the millet had done, in newly developing national settings monitored by foreign powers and international organizations like the League of Nations and later United Nations. Consequently, groups such as the Druze in Lebanon could “work” as minorities, as they had never done as millets. In other words, the minority category was potentially more elastic and capacious in parts of the postwar Middle East precisely because emergent international approaches to minority rights encompassed ethnic and linguistic—and not only religious—diversity.Footnote ⁹

In this regard, note that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had not mentioned minorities in its 1911 edition. But its edition of 1929 contained a dozen pages on the topic, signaling how, in the international landscape of the interwar era, minorities had come to seem like both a social fact and a problem worth studying.Footnote ¹⁰

In 1947, Albert Hourani published a slim book called Minorities in the Arab World, in which he signaled an understanding of “minorities” that exceeded religion. He defined “minority” at this juncture as “a community that was either non-Sunni Muslim or non-Arabic-speaking or both, existing within a Sunni Arab majority, and with a long-standing presence in the region.”Footnote ¹¹ By including groups like the Kurds, who were non-Arab but yet often Sunni in Iraq and Syria, Hourani's roster went beyond the standard repertoire of Ottoman millets to include Muslims, as well as other non-Christians and non-Jews, whose cultural distinctions limited their access to power on national stages.

In 2016, Laura Robson edited a collection of essays which borrowed Hourani's title, Minorities in the Arab World, and reconsidered its assumptions in a set of case studies. Contributors to this volume—among them Alda Benjamen,Footnote ¹² who organized this IJMES forum—rejected Hourani's claim to the stable antiquity of Middle Eastern minorities. Far from being fixtures in the landscape, they argued, populations moved and morphed over time. In the period of flux around World War I, minorities changed, too, as foreign, local, and transnational (meaning, in practice, diasporic or émigré) actors discussed, treated, and imagined them.Footnote ¹³

Indeed, post–World War I minorities of the Middle East were not primordial entities, cut and pasted into new nation-states from ancient cloth. But they certainly contained threads from old millet patterns. Consider, along these lines, the French in Syria. As Benjamin White has convincingly shown, the French held a “tenacious misconception about the Middle East”: they were convinced that religious identities trumped everything else. This thinking prompted them to “concretize” religious distinctions, and to give groups incentives for asserting them, by linking membership in officially sanctioned religious communities to seats on councils and, as with the millets of yore, to internal legal autonomy. The French did not eliminate the Ottoman millet system, White continued; on the contrary, they extended it, by recognizing the corporate status of religious groups such as the Alawites and the Druze, who, unlike Jews and Christians, had never had a clear (or should we say, systematic?) position as Ottoman millets.Footnote ¹⁴ Motivating French policy was the desire to safeguard France's client Christian communities, and above all, Eastern-rite Catholics such as Maronites and Melkites.

Syria offers just one example. We could also look at Egypt, the Palestine Mandate and then Israel, and more, to see how millet-to-minority transitions occurred. In many places, I would argue, minoritization in the 20^th-century Middle East amounted to the creation of a neo-millet system that took religious hierarchies into account while additionally recognizing other kinds of distinctions. Elsewhere, minoritization remained the domain of non-Muslims. In this regard, Aron Rodrigue argued that in Turkey “minority” became a new code-word for Jews and Christians, signaling their continued non-Turkishness on the one hand, and their peripheral status vis-à-vis Turkish citizenry on the other. At the same time, Turkey's leaders avoided using the term “minority” for non-Turkish Muslims, such as Kurds or Circassians, reflecting the state's ideological commitment to assimilating all the country's Muslim citizens to Turkish culture and collective identity.Footnote ¹⁵

Once more, as used by the League of Nations in the Middle East, the term “minority” meant to signal that certain groups, while peripheral, warranted protection. But in practice, assignations of minority status failed to protect small or nondominant groups, perhaps because minority members, in the Middle East as elsewhere in the world, often proved vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and foreignness in the era of the nation-state.Footnote ¹⁶ Of course, millet members had been occasionally vulnerable to such accusations as well. Consider, for example, the Armenians, once considered the “loyal millet,” who attracted growing suspicion and animosity from many Muslims in Anatolia—including segments of the military classes and ruling elites—in the 1890s and again from 1915. In the closing decades of the Ottoman era, it did not help the Armenians that, while they had remained subordinate in a religious sense, they had become increasingly powerful in economic and educational terms.Footnote ¹⁷ They thereby disrupted entrenched social hierarchies and assumptions of Muslim dominance that went with them.

Likewise, it did not help members of millets, and, later, members of minority groups, when Europeans postured to protect them as a means of justifying and perpetuating their political involvement in the Middle East. As Bernard Heyberger recently argued, “protection” backfired for Middle Eastern Christians especially. It exposed them in the early 20th century as in the early 21st to greater resentment and hostility from elements within Sunni Muslim majorities.Footnote ¹⁸

The Ottoman concept of the millet privileged religious communities because religion—and not what we would now call ethnicity—established hierarchies in an empire that depended on Islam for its raison d’être. Post-Ottoman formulations of minorities often but not always drew from religion, too, even in Middle Eastern states that developed reputations for so-called secular nationalism in the 20th century. In countries like Egypt, Syria, and Israel, the religion of the dominant group shaped laws (especially in family affairs like marriage), policies (for example, about who could serve in militaries and what roles they could play), and access to privileges. What resulted were what Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled described, in their case with reference to Israel, as complicated “dynamics of multiple citizenship,” meaning tiered levels of belonging despite official claims to inclusivity and egalitarianism.Footnote ¹⁹

Continuities between late Ottoman millets and post–World War I minorities reflected the salience of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish identities in shaping Ottoman societies and their successor nation-states. But the obsessive interest of non-Muslim foreign powers in religion, and in how the Islamic world handled it, also informed the transition from millets to minorities. In interwar Syria, for example, the carryover of millet-like policies occurred because French authorities—and not, or not only, Syrians—valorized religion as a mode of organizing society. The assumptions that shaped “minoritization” thus came from both within and abroad.Footnote ²⁰

Late Ottoman millets still intrigue historians, who try to make sense of what they did, who belonged to them, and how they related to the state. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a century after the end of World War I, historians are similarly struggling to make sense of Middle Eastern minorities in an array of post-Ottoman countries, and to understand how they departed from, and continued with, all that came before. One thing, at least, is clear: to say that foreign organizations like the League of Nations, along with powers such as Britain and France, effected or contrived “minoritization” in the postwar Middle East would give them too much credit. Minoritization occurred through the interplay of local conditions and foreign intervention. The local included Ottoman administrative legacies in the form of millets together with persistent attitudes about the social standing of religious communities relative to each other and to the state. These legacies help to explain the historical resemblances—or what Mark Twain called the rhymes—that link Ottoman millets and post-Ottoman Middle Eastern minorities.